Man, I love the characters! I’ve run through DA:I at least twice, but always as an OCD (colloquial meaning, not clinical meaning) goody-goody, and always as a human mage.
This time, I’m playing as a dwarf female rogue archer/artificer.
A few things have struck me:
Man, they were really trying to accomplish a lot of things in this game! Most succeeded, but I do wish combat was more elegant. It’s better than Skyrim or an Xbox 360 gen game, but it’s still firmly inspired by that gen. I kinda feel they could have left some things out and the game wouldn’t have been worse for it.
The Xbox version of this game suffers. Prior to this, I’d played on PS4. I truly wish EA would have enhanced this game. The world is so vibrant and colorful! I’m playing it on a Samsung S95B, and the graphical fidelity feels like “enhanced 360 gen.” That said, boy am I excited for Dragon Age 4!
Voice acting. It’s great! Varrick and Cassandra are amazing, and the (subtle spoiler) book geek/story geek aspect of Cass made me smile (I’m an author).
Feel free to chime in with your thoughts about the game if you’d like!
On the one hand I love it, the story and characters are fantastic, some of BioWare’s best writing. The stuff about this game that works, really really works.
On the other hand, it’s hard to revisit because there is just so much tedium in it. BioWare tried to reach for an open world design (and it’s not even truly “open world,” it’s many connected maps just like the previous DA games, only the maps are huge and filled with boring checklist content) and it doesn’t work. So much of the game feels like a chore to play, particularly on subsequent playthroughs. Even the menus are super unwieldy.
Barely any of the story content even takes place on the “open world” maps. They feel like something bolted on to make it take longer for you to get to the good parts. But those good parts are so, so good.
In a lot of open world games I would feel like, you don’t like the side content? Cool, skip it, spend time on the parts you do like and ignore what you don’t. No harm no foul. But Inquisition actively makes it hard to do that. It always feels like there’s more open world slog between you and what you really want to do.
So those are my feelings after 163 hours and 100%'ing the game. I both love it and hate it.
I don’t believe so, but there are also issues with animation and basic graphical settings. It wasn’t as obvious at the time, and I can still enjoy the game, but there’s more jank than I’d remembered.
Really like the class system. You can put out some amazing combination.
Companions are good, but my boy Varric was a little bit distant to the inquisitor. On one side it’s understandble because he’s close to Hawke. On the other side I miss him as my buddy.
The biggest problem with this game are the side quest, which are mostly fetch quest, and the big empty open world. The first zone is horrible and it’s not getting better.
Story is good, but some decisions are not that important. You can choose one side but it has almost zero influence.
DLCs: First one is mid, second horrible and the last one is the best especially if you romance Solace. Feels canon (it’s not official canon, but Idc).
I like it, but it’s miles behind DA:O and a little bit better than DA2.
I haven’t revisited the game for the reasons you state. It’s a shame but it felt as a slog the first time, and there’s no way I’m going through all that again to get to the good parts. And that’s me, who enjoy open world games… but this was not done right.
Agree with everything.
Dragon Age: Origins is so much better than its sequels it’s not even close.
