Dragon Age 3: Inquisition feat. Original Origins Devs

Was just announced by Bioware, has apparently been in development for two years on the Frostbite 2 (also used in Battlefield 3) engine of all things.

Nothing useful has been said apart from it being set in France Orlais. Will keep an eye on this but my expectations aren't exactly high. At least it couldn't possibly be worse than DA2, right?

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/09/17/everybody-expected-it-dragon-age-iii-inquisitor/
http://eu.dragonage.com/dragonageii/extra/?id=16010

So what is Dragon Age like exactly? I've been interested in playing these, but never really understood what makes it different from the normal RPG.

Origins is a so-called spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate if you ever played that, it's a fantasy tactical RPG with 3 main classes and a decently fleshed out tactics system that lets you dictate how your party members behave, though you can take control of them at any time if you like.
The story is fairly typical Bioware "gather your army" fare but it works well enough and some of the characters are good. It also has a good dialogue system (no wheel) with a decent number of options in most cases. It's no Planescape: Torment but, then again, nothing is.
The combat is the most interesting part of the game, it can be quite challenging and using your party properly to tank, deal and heal damage is rewarding. You can pause the game to issue orders or play it like an action-rpg, although if you do that it can feel a little clunky at times as the animations aren't very smooth and make you feel locked in. Generally a combination of pausing and real-time gameplay is the best way to go. The only major flaw is that mages are objectively better than rogues and warriors at doing everything in the game but I give it a pass simply because the customisation system is varied enough to let you make your mage a heavily armored sword & board tank in the first place.

There's no PC demo but there might be one on PS3, I'm not sure. From what I've heard the console interface and controls aren't great though so if you ever play it you might want to wait for a Steam sale or something. There's also a lot of mods that change things up a fair bit if that's your thing.

Don't play Dragon Age 2, it's worse in just about every way when compared to the first game and does things that are completely unacceptable like reusing the same 5 areas throughout the game with different doorways blocked off to make them 'different'. I had to take month+ long breaks between playing chunks of it because of how stale it got, only finished it because I wanted some sort of closure.

Origins is a flawed gem. It's rough around the edges, looking dated even when it was released; the graphics are poor, the combat is a little clunky, but the characters are typically likeable and the story is cliched but still a lot of fun. DA2 is inferior. it's a more arcadey style of combat, but the characters and story were pretty awful wth none of the scale of Origins, and as neo says the re-used environments get terribly dull very quickly. It was rushed and it shows.

Thanks to Microsoft allowing EA their own subscriber service in the shape of EA Access, I've spent a few hours playing Inquisition today. It feels much like Origins to be honest, in that the general feel of the game is a little off-balance and clunky, if that makes sense, whilst using the tactical map during combat is a refreshing change of pace to DA2s smash-attack-button strategy against everything.

Even on Xbox One, I still wouldn't call it a particularly good looking game though. Granted, the game hasn't been released yet and I daresay there'll be an optimisation patch of some description, but while the world looks very pretty the frame rate seems to drop noticeably during cut scenes and the characters all have this weird 'sheen' to them that makes them look like they are made of wax. Again, to my eyes it looks like a cross-gen game with some slightly nicer textures for XO/PS4.

Much like Origins though, I can forgive it almost all of its flaws for mostly being exactly what I wanted in a third Dragon Age game. As much as I didn't hate DA2, it was a crushing disappointment, Inquisition looks like it might just have made up for that.

So Inquisition is the apology letter for making DA2?

Seems to be.

Incidentally, since I allowed the fully to install fully, the general experience is markedly better than my earlier comment may lead you to believe; it's much smoother now, and I may have been a little harsh when I said it looked very cross-gen as some of the character models are excellent. The NPCs all look a little generic, but there's an absolute tone of them, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

I'm still unsure about whether or not the extras for the "deluxe edition" are worth the extra outlay. Only GAME stock the deluxe edition in the UK, but it's £60. The regular game is £40, even on PS4 and Xbox One. Which brings me to my next quandry; do I get it on PS4 or XO? I can't imagine there'll be much difference. PS4 allegedly does output slightly higher native resolution, but XO is getting DLC sooner, and I can use the data from my current early access test to continue my playthrough.

Didn't think Bioware still had it. Thought it was gone after DA2.............still got it.

Though we shall all ignore DA2 existence. If you think as I do that ME3 is a fetal abomination.......playing DA2 makes ME3 look like the 2nd coming of Jesus fucking Christ

Damn.  My six hours is gone already, felt like half that.

I did manage to spend some time on the Dragon Age Keep website prior to playing, which allows you to alter major (and minor) decisions from DAO and DA2 to import in Inquisition, and I'm pleased to say it was almost effortless.  Load up DAI, the game finds you Keep data and imports it, lock, stock and barrel.

Okay, this is going to be a long post, but before I spend a bit of time and point out a few things for those of us that are hyped for this; yes, you can get excited.  It's great.

Firstly, it's huge.  The trial basically lets you get as far as the Hinterlands, the first open area, which includes Redcliffe, the town where you recruit Arl Eamon in DAO and may or may not have sacrificed his demon-possessed son in the process.  Good times.  Anyway, the Hinterlands cover a sizeable area (allegedly bigger than all of DAO!) and there's absolutely loads to do; thanks to recent story events, rogue Templars and apostate mages are everywhere, and bandits are getting fat off all the refugees.  Said refugees also require food, shelter, warmth and the Inquisition itself, still in a fledgling state, needs people behind it.  All of which involve myriad side quests, ranging from gathering materials (hunting rams for their coats and meat to provide food and clothing for instance) to plain old killing (putting down mercenary and apostate camps to keep the roads safer) all of which keeps the Inquisition in good favour with the locals and ensures the area is easily held.  Simply, six hours wasn't enough to do much more than scratch the surface of what's on offer here but it provides a good idea what the rest of the game will have to offer and the variety within.  One hundred hours plus?  Easily, if you so wished to do it all.

Graphically, like I said before, it initially disappointed, but I was playing it as the game installed and clearly it hadn't loaded all assets at that juncture, as once the install had finished it stopped being an issue.  Frame rate is pretty smooth, the character models (barring some generic looking NPCs) are excellent and the Hinterlands are very reminiscent of certain areas of Skyrim, rocky bluffs, cliffs, rivers, lakes and assorted caves to pillage.  There's plenty of variety and detail, and I'd imagine it would look glorious on a well-specced PC.

Spoiler:

It's also pretty difficult.  I started on hard mode, and basic fights are easy enough but to take on bosses you will need to use the tactical camera, which, as in DAO, switches the camera to a full overhead view and pauses the action allowing you to issue commands individually to your party to ensure they're working in unison.  Squishy mage in trouble?  Get your warrior (DA2s Cassandra in this case) to use a taunt, drawing aggro then use the mage to use AoE to nuke several bad guys at once.    Is your warrior doing her best to tank, but being overwhelmed?  Order her to retreat or lead your enemies to a more defensible position.  Even closing basic rifts, which is something it appears you'll be doing a lot of, is a strategists delight.  Do you try and beat the mobs down individually, or do you try and use the Inquisitior player-character to manipulate the rift and stun all the baddies in one go?  The latter is effective but requires lengthy preparation during which time the character is defenceless and a single hit will end that attempt.  It takes planning to make it work against tougher mobs.  It's all possible, and it works.  Hell, on the higher difficulties, I'd say it was absolutely necessary, and that is a tremendous relief.

Do I have any concerns?  Well, yes, a few.  On normal or lower difficulties, you can easily ignore the tactical approach entirely and simply hold the trigger to use your normal attack over and over.  I can see this getting very tedious and may cause some players to declare the combat boring, which would be missing the point.  Speaking of using the tactical camera, it's not perfect in itself, sometimes getting 'stuck' for want of a better word on bits of terrain and making it needlessly difficult to orchestrate the battle in precisely the manner you wish.  There were also a couple of bugs I experienced, nothing game-breaking, but it did freeze during cut scenes on a couple of separate occasions, though both were while the game was installing so that may have been due to that.  It throws a lot at you very early on;  my quest log had thirty or more entries in it when my timer expired.  While that's not necessarily a problem, for those like myself who like to see and do as much as possible it is going to be difficult to tell which quests are potentially important and which are not.  Extra content is great, I just hope it is quality content and not DA2s mindless fetch quests, though based on what I saw during the trial period, there's plenty of variety so hopefully that shouldn't be an issue.

I actually found a dragon too, though the encounter was short lived.  It flew up and away as soon as it saw my party.  Then it flew back over us, and immolated us all in a single pass.  Oh goodie.

In short, it has addressed every criticism thrown at DA2 and then some.  It also reunites us with Leliana, who was my preferred LI in DAO for a male Warden.  Suffice it to say, she looks amazing.

Spoiler:

For those who are using Dragon Age Keep to import an existing world state, here's a very exhaustive guide to how Keep works. It runs to almost two and a half hours, but it's well worth putting a bit of time into if you're serious about your Dragon Age lore. Me? I'm a huge DA nerd, so I spent a hell of a lot of time playing with it.

It's disappointing that EA want to lock people into their crappy Steam clone by disallowing regular save imports.

Neo wrote:

It's disappointing that EA want to lock people into their crappy Steam clone by disallowing regular save imports.

I despise Origin so much.

I am open to people to compete against Steam, but Origin isn't really competition. Only nice thing I can say that you can get a refund 24 hours after purchase on Origin (Steam has no refund at all)

I'm going to create a new topic devoted to my current play through, but suffice it to say that fifteen hours in, Inquisition is bloody great.

My first play through can be found here;

https://razielsdomain.forumotion.net/t15526-simian-plays-dragon-age-inquisition#341040

would origins give me a good idea what this is like? i played 2 and got bored of it fast

Have you played Baldurs Gate? Origins is like a modern version of that in the most generic fantasy setting ever, it's not bad but because of the way the battle system works the PC version is significantly better than the console one.
2 is worse than Origins in pretty much every possible way, there are some who prefer the combat because it's flashier but from any other perspective it's extremely dumbed down.
From what I've seen of 3 being played it's still not as deep as Origins but seems much better than 2, not that that's particularly difficult.

i've barely played any games made by bioware

Have you played any Infinity Engine games? They all play similarly at a basic level.

doesn't look like i have

awesome game, played through it twice, once with a mage (knight enchanter) when specialization became available as a lot of people said it was an OP class, this is true BUT there is a completely broken class if you want to do it on nightmare difficulty (required for a trophy) and that is rogue dual wielding (tempest) when specializing. I will get a video as soon as i sync my ps4 to my youtube account just so you can see it in action but i can 2 hit a high dragon (strongest enemy in the game) even on nightmare with this class

That's my next class sorted then!

Its well worth having a go but i would wait until you have finished playing with other characters as they just feel shit after using tempest

After putting it off for a good few weeks, I finally beat this earlier.  The ending was pretty good, bar a glitch which had the epilogue proclaim Leliana as the Divine when in-game dialogue and scenes had given the position to Cassandra, and I'm a little unsure what to make of the very final scene.

Spoiler:

TTB, what did you think of it?

i didnt much understand it tbh but i will say the first time i did the game i spent a lot of time doing the companion quests and i got a much bigger ending with better explinations for what each character did after.

Spoiler:

Did a bit of research into it. Apparently the codex does hint at such an outcome...

Spoiler:

Anyway, started my second playthrough and made a few changes in DA Keep as well. This time around, the Warden is now Queen of Ferelden, ruling alongside Alistair and Hawke was a warrior who was, by all accounts, a bit of a douche. My Inquisitor is a duel-wielding rogue female, and I'm playing on Nightmare difficulty. Only just reached the Hinterlands, and the only real difference in combat seems to be that the enemies simply have a lot more health. Either that or I've just gotten used to Knight Enchanter crushing things.