Dragon Age 2̶ Inquisition.
If you haven’t seen anything of DAI and you have an imagination, imagine Mass Effect melded with Skyrim but set in the Dragon Age universe and built in the Battlefield Engine then you will get DAI.
I played on the PC, on Hard difficulty as a Duel Dagger wielding Qunari Rogue, I have near enough a 100% play though minus a few bugged missions and unfound codex entries (possibly due to game choices) but otherwise I pretty much ran out of things to do and one or two achievements for making different choices & picking herbs from my garden. (didn’t need to and completely forgot I could do that)
Overall I give this a 9 out of 10, and it is easily the game of the year for me, it was a TRUELY fantastic game and pleasure to play along with being HUGE! and I’m very much looking forward to another play through! Unfortunately it had a few too many annoyances which is why I didn’t give it a 10 and i’ll go through these first.
It crashes, a lot, I mean seriously, in 98 hours I probably crashed at least 30 times and blue screened 5 times, and thats not an over exaggeration, I crashed at minimum 2 times a play through on an evening and, multiple times over a full day of gaming, So 7 full days plus 3 evenings is easily 30, MINIMUM.
The graphics driver crashed numerous times, I updated to a BETA driver which addressed a few DAI issues and this cut the crashes in half. However the game still closed to desktop with no error on several occasions, the mouse stopped working on several occasions requiring you to minimise/maximise/minimise/maximise until it started again. The cut scenes were capped at 30FPS, which needed me to add a command line instruction to the games .exe to get rid of the horrid stuttery frame rate and my gaming rig couldn’t handle extreme… I mean seriously, the game runs using 6gb of ram on high settings. Throw in the occasional memory leak if you were playing for longer then 4 hours and you would see the system eat all 16gbs of RAM…… My system can play the ULTRA HD Skyrim mod, but DAI, Nope. Thankfully, the Medium/High settings look really good and it wasn’t much better looking in Ultra so I didn’t sulk too much here. Smoother framerate trumped a few extra shiny pixels.
Now, if you put all of that ^^ aside, you have a pretty awesome game, its not perfect and it’s certainly not as in depth as the people over at Bioware would have you believe from the trailers, pre launch demos and even the playable PAX demo (which isn’t in the game) which showed dynamic events and choices. These weren’t even representative of the game and that is another annoyence. It seems they just simply removed them. I’m not sure why but it saddens me to know that they are not in the game. (Google ‘Burn red Templar Boats & save village demo for a prime example) I was looking forward to arriving in a war zone where I’d have to make some choices that massively impacted the world to be left… a little lack luster. Unfortunately it had an Elder Scrolls Oblivion effect on me, the over arching story, although not sold as ‘impending doom’ could be left on the back boiler whilst you went off and explored every nook and cranny and as for dynamic events, they didn’t seem to happen. I never came across a town where I had to make a choice as to wether to save the tower or push on to a fort etc.. I either did the mission assigned to me or I carried along on my merry way. It didn’t seem to make a difference.
I was also sold an idea that if I hunt every bear then it will die out - when in essence, if you stood in the right places you could kill one and it’s identical clone would respawn and if you did manage to kill several of them and came back later it would all reload, heck even fast travelling back to camp to get more potions would cause EVERYTHING to respawn. I certainly didn’t notice a species dying out due to over farming. Which leads me to my next gripe about the game, which is actually an awesome feature in the game in its own right.
Crafting, Crafting is awesome, and powerful, I kept most of my guys using crafting weapons and armour, because the Unique, purple drops, those awesome magical items that are hard to come by, are relatively common, and pretty naff…. which is sad. This meant to get the most out of the character the problem was, you needed to pretty much farm everything you came across, and at times it felt like you were sending you party members off to attack a nearby enemy whilst you ignored he fight to pick up Elfroot, cos on Hard difficulty, even though its still a relatively easy experience, you’ll use a lot of Elfroot in your healing potions and little else of anything else.
In the end I was running around in my ‘Armour of 1000 poos’ with my daggers ‘Stabby Stabber’ and ‘ooooh shiny for the master!’ where as my tank had an awesomely named weapon ‘Pointy Stick’. Which is awesome! IMHO.
Another area of annoyances and one quite high up in my list, Dragons, the fabled legend that is the return of the dragons and the first Dragons to properly be seen in a game with ‘Dragon’ in the title. Sadly I think this is a bug, I’m not sure, I’ve asked DAI via Twitter, Facebook and the EA Help forums but I’ve had no response. I was under the impression that Dragons and Giants should be hard and considering I’m playing on HARD I would expect them to be really tough, they’re just not. They also have multiple limbs which you can damage to apparently cause them to fall over, lose the ability to attack with one set of limbs etc… but they all share the same pool of HP making it STUPIDLY easy, don’t fall over or stop using a limb. Since AOE attacks hit 4 limbs, doing 4 lots of damage but as the limbs all share the same HP pool your 1 attack is basically hitting 4 times over. Meaning the fights simply become a rinse repeat fight of - dodge, heal, kill. Easy. Which is sad. Very very sad that the hardest fight in the game, the one you should prepare for the one you should have to swap out you frost mage for a fire mage etc.. and fight a tough fight. Instead your left with a - so long as my health potions last an the AI doesn’t **** up too much you can kill this no problem.
Overall there is no sense of urgency, no massive push to follow a certain quest line and no sense of a challenge on hard, if your going for a completionist play through I would suggest nightmare mode, because your going to over level everything but some of the content. Oh, I also never had to use the Tactical camera, mainly because its shit. In DAO you could zoom out quite high and issue commands. In DAI you get a slightly higher then 3rd person view, where you can zoom around and issue commands, however the AI will then ignore those commands and revert back to - attack whoever your attacking and run OUT of fire, but not out of targeting circles. Fiddling with the commands can result in them standing around doing nothing at all…. despite the hints and tips of the game advising you on this course of action.
SO I just left them do what they want and focus on killing the Archers>Mages>Assassains and then killing the tanks.
HOWEVER.
I’ve said the game is awesome right, but I’ve just given you a massive list of gripes & bugs and annoying things…. I played for 98 hours… one ONE play through, and I want to play again, despite ALL of the annoyances and I gave it a 9 out of 10.
98 hours, £40, thats 50p per hour. Compare that to the £10 per hour gameplay you got in Advanced Warfare (single player, cos i’m not playing vs 12 year olds) you have one of the best value for money games outside of Skyrim.
A few main reasons why I love this game.
It took me 98 hours to do everything in one play through, now there were a few areas where I feel like I could of done a lot of things differently which would of impacted what I was doing in the game and none of it felt like fluff. None of it felt like I was just grinding to get stuff done, except farming for crafting but in the end I just ran everywhere and picked up stuff as I went, rather then Mount up and run, I explored the map, I found the landmarks and in the process I came across a few journals which didn’t trigger maps which had a few nice hidden gems.
I came across a Mass Effect and Plants vs Zombies easter eggs.
I played through some very different environments and not a single issue that I had with Dragon Age 2 reared its head.
The story wasn’t linear, the areas weren’t copy past maps/walls/caves and overall the story is really good, the banter between your characters is really well wrote, and funny on occasion, interesting on other occasions and although I swapped them up a little bit I ended up playing with the same 3 people for 70% of the game, because I found a combination that worked really well, they didn’t seem to repeat themselves, which was awesome.
The game had a few twists which I kind of saw coming but enjoyed and the best thing, at one point, I was finishing up the the first or second part of the main story line after several hours and it felt like I was finishing a game…. but in essence it was just beginning and in some regards I had just finished the bloody intro! I was so happy.
I felt compelled to carry on, I was weaving my rather nice and friendly way through the world, trying to brush off the belief that I was the chosen one, but trying to do my best to better the world through my actions and it felt like the world evolved with me, I watched - SPOILERS - my home base be burnt to the ground and my character struggle to get to safety to see my world reborn at my Stronghold, I had the ability to alter its appearance a little and grow as I explored the world. It didn’t really seem to do much in terms of effecting the gameplay but it felt nice to do. As the story line progressed and I did the companion related missions I came across new areas and in turn found out some things about people in the world which I then had the ability to impact. These were merely theatrical story lines that didn’t really do anything again for the gameplay but were none the less good to take part in for the overall story.
Through it all, I hacked and slashed my way through the game, in joyful bliss that my crafted heavy armour protected my warrior so much that she never died, ever. Even when I wanted her to so I could reload because the rest of my party (inc my Rouge) died and I couldn’t be arsed to make her run away so they would respawn (I save frequently BEFORE I start a fight).
One thing that made me giggle to myself and it did so the entire way through the game was playing as a rouge, I built for a bit of stealth and mostly duels dagger damage, flanking damage, guaranteed crit from behind damage, armour sunder and armour penetration. Put that all together and when you start a fight, you send your warrior in, your Archer opens up, your mage sticks down his barrier and you, you make a B-Line straight for the Archers and Mages because these guys WILL kill any of your part (except your tank) in 2 hits once the barrier is depleted. Get behind, Duel Fangs, instantly on half HP thanks to a 2k crit, follow up with a Deathblow and any none elite is dead, use my dash/stab move and I’ll end up behind (if close enough) an enemy and in stealth, at which point I’m giggling to myself that someone just died and in essence NO ONE saw me do it. Get behind the next and repeat, by this time were down to the heavy hitters, the high HP behemoths etc.. to which my Assassain spec and Masterwork daggers come into all their glory, a full combo of moves and I’ve just laid down 20ks worth of damage over a few seconds and even the boss elites that were my level were struggling to stay standing.
In essence, I took a few days of work as I needed to use up the Holidays and I had nothing planned so I pretty much played the first 50 hours over 5 days, and even with a bit of gamer lag, being tired from gaming, I wanted to log back in and play. To drive on the story but at the same time to finish each area.
All in all I’ve loved Dragon Age. Especially for my first play through, my interest may wayne in future play through because of the lack of diversity in the mission line but I’m sure that playing a different role and taking a different party along without aiming to get all the nooks and crannys will still be just as much fun the 2nd time around!.
Bring it on!
9/10
TL;DR
The game is huge, has a lot of story to it an impressive combat system and lots of choice and is everything Dragon Age 2 should of been.
However it has a lot of bugs, a lot of annoyances and is far too easy.