I would agree that DAO might have less nuance than DA I, but I would argue that DAO had a much stronger supporting cast than DAI.

The characters and their interactions give DAO the edge imo.

 

Wait what?! What did they do to Ciri?!?!?! No, don't tell me, I don't want her ruined...

No seriously, tell me.

I'm surprised no one else has made the obvious observation regarding this announcement.

Anthem is in fucking trouble. This reeks of a company trying to get ahead of a bad game by letting their fans know what they 'love' is on the horizon. I'm being reminded of Bethesda announcing Starfield and TES6 before Fallout 76...

Mind, I'm the rare breed of DA fan that thought the games got better with each one, so it's not like a I have a hate boner for everything EA touches like many in this thread do. It's just a feeling.

Having said all that, calling it now. The protag will be a gender-queer, non-binary, marxist, pansexual Qunari. You'll not be able to create a character. You'll play as zem and you'll love it.

 

There's not a chance in hell this would be good, assuming Bioware even survives after Anthem. I couldn't even make myself finish Inquisition.

 

It's been a while, I am not sure what it would look if I read it now, but:

Spoiler: Ciri

Ciri supplanted Geralt after first few books as main hero. The tone of the books changed a lot from stories about somewhat cynical witcher to Ciri's coming of age and they got progressively less well written (imo). Firstly there was entirely too much going on with Ciri. She was a princes of two kingdoms, almost witcheress, sorceress, the elder blood, there is a prophesy about her child, her magic unicorn friend and some very convenient last minute saves. I think she was supposed to represent evil and uncontrollable power, but it didn't really work out that way (for me at least), I think she mostly ended up resembling Mary Sue.

 

I disagree on DA:O having correct choices. It has optimal, easy choices, but the capacity to customize the story (and the following reactions to your decisions) was fully integrated and very well done. Hence, me calling it DnD inspired. It's cleared inspired by the excellent Baldur's Gate series that Bioware did and launched them into the mainstream.

 

I am not sure what you mean. It's been a while since I played Origins, but I think all DA games had reactions to your decisions. In DAI you can make everyone hate you and almost everyone leave you.

I just felt like the optimal decision in DAO took away most of the choice. Why would you pick dalish or werevolves if you can just save both? (unless you rp-ing really hard). The only hard one for me was the Morrigan's baby, in DAI there were quite a few.

 

I'd argue that this is a meta choice, not a rp choice. Of course, you can never quite divorce the game from the story in your mind, but a big part of RPGs imo is the rp aspect. If you only care about min-maxing your character, then sure, you're gonna save dalish and werewolves, save mages so you can use them to help Connor without anyone dying, get coercion at character creation and bring Zevran or Leliana with pickpocketing the first time you to go Denerim so Slim Couldry is there, regardless of whether becoming a thief makes sense for the character you want to play.

But I didn't play every playthrough like "I need to do certain things in a certain order, with certain dialogue options, because otherwise I won't have the gold 30 hours from now to buy the +100 stamina warhammer for my berserker Warden."

 

I am not a min maxer either, I just think main quest was rather heavy handed in DAO. I maybe wrong here, but as far as I remember, if you don't kill anyone right away and just keep going till the end in all the main quests you gonna end up at the meta-choice. Kill the innocents or wait a bit more sort of thing.

And two other choices are so much more unpleasant, it's kinda punishing. I appreciate that they exist and well written, but I want to rp with more grey choices, like picking mage/templar in DAI or picking who is going to rule Orlais. And it's probably due to my weak rp skills I realize that and DAO is still a great game, I just enjoy others more.

 

I'm not holding out hope for this game. While Dragon Age 2 had its few bright spots (Qunari and the Arishok to be specific, minus the bit with handing over Isabela to them and her escaping through ridiculous author/dev fiat), overall it was a mess. It didn't help at all the way you got to fight the end-game boss, how forced it felt, or the fact that the lore as to why there were so many blood mages in Kirkwall was so obscurely placed in locations you could easily miss seeing unless you kept highlighting everything interactable. Also, the setting itself, Kirkwall, was downright hideous. I heard from some people online praising DA2's locations and visuals, while bashing DAO's, but I genuinely don't understand how the two could even begin to compare, given the vast diverse places you could visit in the latter.

Inquisition was a poor experience. I had to force myself to finish this shitpile and to avoid the tedious grind and what not, I just cheated. Collectathon bullshit was used to such a ridiculous extent to pad out the game it took me several tries before I just said fuck it and used aforementioned cheating.

That aside, the companions here and the Inquisitor themselves were disappointing as well. There were more than a few times in the game's narrative where the Inquisitor was downplayed, almost de-powered I would say, so that others could be propped up. I think the most notable example of this would be if you undertook romancing Josephine and had a fight with her fiance. It required her jumping in to save the Inquisitor during the fencing match, which is something entirely preposterous given how much you should have progressed through the game at that point and could probably obliterate your enemies with ease.

I think what I really miss about the PC in Inquisition is the lack of choices. You didn't really get to be nearly as your own character in Inquisition as you were in Origins. Consider the Grey Warden and the Inquisitor, the choices available to them, the way they could interact with their companions and the world around them. In Origins, you could outright kill them (even if dev pets like Lelliana got brought back in the second/third game, despite a successful decapitation) if things got to that point, whereas in Inquisition the best you can do is have them leave or never join your party in the first place.

I won't lie to you, I really miss the Warden's murder knife (I like to think of it as being the same one that killed Jory). I miss the chance to actually make pacts with demons, sacrifice elf slaves for a pittance, have the Dalish be slaughtered by the werewolves and all the other morally poor choices that were available. I never actually went down that path more than once, but the point is that I had a choice. Inquisition feels like a game that's less about choices because ultimately the journey feels like it doesn't matter all that much.

This next Dragon Age they're making is something I'm probably not going to play. It can only get worse. But at least it'll be good for a laugh.

 

I really dislike the current era of gaming that has seemingly all big games require a decade of game development before release. From 2007-2012, Bioware released the entire Mass Effect trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Awakenings, & DA 2. That's 5.5 games, plug a ton of DLC.

In the last 6 years, we got Inquisition & Andromeda, the second of which didn't even have any DLC.

That tangent aside, I would love to be excited for this, even though I doubt it will be out before 2021. Origins is one of my favorite games. I even really enjoyed DA2, despite how obviously it was rushed, because I still really enjoyed the characters.

But Inquisition really disappointed me. The characters mostly sucked, Dorian being the only new addition that stood out. The story was okay, but the actual plot missions were only about 10% of the game, and the blandness of the MMO like fetch quests sucked, despite the often beautiful areas they existed in.

And I thoroughly agree about there not being nearly enough choice/influence for the main character. Sure, you could side with the Mages or Templars, but it didn't really matter, as the civil war was effectively nuked by the main villain. You could be mean or nice to some of the characters, but it almost never mattered. I was mean as hell to Cassandra every chance I got the first time I played, and even though she was one of the leaders of the Inquisition, it didn't matter at all.

It was even worse with Vivienne-- you could insult her and tell her she was full of shit over & over, and not only could you never murder knife her, she wouldn't even take the hint & fucking leave.

They badly need to bring back the murder knife.

The bigger issue is how badly Bioware had bled off talent over the last several years, not surprisingly especially since they were bought by EA. Changing the studio logo after 20 years is a sign-- this isn't the old company we loved that made Baldur's Gate 2 or Kotor. This is the company that is making MP-only games because EA thinks it will make them more money. I wouldn't play Anthem if you paid me.

 

Dragon Age began and ended with Origins, and everything after is just shadow and mimicry.

 

*laughs in DA3's half-dozen GOTY awards*

Did Inquisition have flaws? Yes. Was it better than Origins, one of the greatest RPGs ever made? Perhaps not.

Was it still an amazing game and fun as shit? Absofuckinglutely.

 

I couldn’t tell you if the actual game was fun or not, since I spent most of my time waiting for cooldowns on the fucking war table or doing MMO fetch quests for 7 dragon cloacas.

 

Well, I'm sad for you, I guess. Most of the gaming community spent two minutes googling the wartable system time exploit, and then finished it in less than 10 minutes.

As for the frequent fetch quests, mostly everyone agrees those sucked, but that's pretty damn standard for padding up large RPGs. Games like Witcher 3 are the exception, not the rule. Having replayed Origins right before DA3, I can tell you it had fetch quests aplenty as well. Not quite as many as DA2 and DA3, but still about 3 or 4 hours worth.

So again, did DA3 have some flaws? You betcha. Still a great game on the whole though. Fun story, fantastic combat, great graphics, truly awesome zone exploration, a passable romance system, and a handful of above average characters with interesting stories of their own.

If DA4 can be even 3/4ths as good as DA3, I will call that a huge success for Bioware.

 

I'm praying, brother. I'm praying.

 

I did that too, after that bug was found. Having to break the game to make it playable is not a point in its favor, however.

Having frequent fetch quests are quite common in RPGs, you're right. DAI goes beyond having frequent fetch quests, to the point that it makes up a significant part of the gameplay loop. You know what advice is given by pretty much anybody recommending this game? Skip the Hinterlands. Having to skip pretty much the entire first zone because of the sheer amount of shitty fetch quests says something about the level of game design we're dealing with. The first time I played DAI was at launch, before people knew about things like the war table exploit and to skip entire zones, and I bounced off the game after about 15 hours of fetch quests in the Hinterlands, so 3 or 4 hours would have been a godsend.

A lot of these are subjective, so I'll take your word that you enjoyed them, but I'm baffled that you can say great graphics with a straight face. The character models in this game look completely awful, like greasy, fish-lipped monstrosities straight out of Innsmouth. That Sera was put into the game looking like she does almost makes me suspect industrial sabotage, or some kind of office dare among the animators that went too far, since I can't believe anyone would do that on purpose.

Every game has flaws, and its up to each player to decide at what point they think the flaws outweigh the positives. I would love nothing more than for Bioware to make a great Dragon Age 4, but having seen how Anthem is going, and considering the last game they put out that wasn't "flawed" (some would say "shit") was Mass Effect 2 back in 2010, I won't hold my breath.

 

Hey now, Mass Effect 3 was great. The last about ten minutes of it made no fucking sense and completely flipped the thematic underpinnings of the narrative on its head, but the gameplay was great and the story up to that point was above average at worse.

Also, Anthem's pretty decent. I can't call it great until I get to the endgame, but the core gameplay loop is pretty good.

 

Keep up that attitude, mate, I admire your spirit.

 

Rannoch and Tuchanka were great, the rest was eh to bleurgh. And any game that allows the existence of Kai Leng loses 6 points right off the bat.

 

That's fair. Kai Leng, Cerberus in general really, was some real idiocy.