so...this just doesn't feel like a dragon age game?

the lore is dragon age and the story is not BAD but there are some choices (mostly in gameplay design but some in story design) that just make this feel like it doesn't fit in the dragon age series

the UI makes it feel, to me, like a sci-fi action-rpg most of the time

you've pretty much lost the ability to chat with companions whenever you feel like it, they just say one line at you if they don't actively have a conversation queued (and most of the time you can lose these conversations if you don't have them immediately)

it took several hours of play for the game to start actually feeling like an open world, rather than on rails

and even then each region had what, like a handful of side quests each?

one of the biggest things for me is that an open world rpg should let you keep playing and finishing side quests after you finish the story

in this game once you finish the story that's it, you're done, you cannot play anymore, which is lowkey fine because it's not like there's any content left anyway lol

i'm also extremely irritated about the lack of depth to the romances

like FOR ONE THING dragon age always has a horny romance scene so i don't feel like i'm being a horny weirdo for expecting what the game has always given us, but also, the fact that apparently for most of them you don't even kiss until the night before the final battle? which is AFTER you've clicked on the quest that says "there's nothing else after this,

this is the endgame" meaning you've probably given up on it completely already

i don't know i'm voicing a lot of negative thoughts but like. did i enjoy it? yes, definitely

is it a good game? i think so

am i just left unfulfilled, and like it wasn't worth staying up an extra hour to finish it? yeah

the feeling I got was very 'it's already been ten years, I would have waited a bit longer for just a liiiiitle bit more depth'

i'm still holding out hope for elder scrolls 6 after nearly 14 years, I Can Be Patient

/clasps ur arm in solidarity

i remember a few days after inquisition released the devs were on twitter like "we are begging y'all to leave the hinterlands, it will still be there when you go back"

BECAUSE THERE WAS SO MUCH TO DO IN THE HINTERLANDS

I will say in terms of game structure/design I liked it more than Inquisition? But then I'm one of the weirdos who preferred the design of DA2.

there were too many hinterlands for me. too much hinterland.

lmao that's reasonable! i have a friend who gets lost in games very easily so they appreciated da2 because they only had one layout to learn and they could always find their way lol

i also can't decide how i feel about the big plot twist.

in general i'm inclined to think "he was dead all along"/"they were talking to themselves or you" is a plot point that's been done absolutely iconically enough times that it should just be left alone? like your story should keep me in it, not make me think about the sixth sense and fight club

like it was probably executed about as well as it could be i just don't like it regardless, basically

Honestly someone on plurk flagged up that they had their suspicions when I was like 1/4 of the way through, I started watching their interactions from that perspective and it suddenly became......not a plot twist

yeah like in hindsight i was like "ohhhh shit, varric only ever spoke to me, even in groups"

'real interesting how rook and varric only have a real conversation when they're alone together' etc

yeah i spent most of the game like "is varric waiting for the most dramatic moment to join the party"

what I still don't know is whether that was genuinely varric's ghost (?) or an illusion created by solas, and if the latter, that could have been made more impactful by having solas use him as a mouthpiece to push rook into making the choices solas needed them to make

yeah i think i took it as "that's actually varric's soul, held back from moving on and pushed on rook" but i don't actually know if that's possible with a dwarf and ALSO i desperately wish they had rewritten more lines for dwarf rook to acknowledge that DWARVES DON'T DREAM

it's not like they forgot since a huge chunk of the plot hangs on that fact

but my eye twitched every time my rook said "it's like i'm dreaming"

HOW THE FUCK WOULD YOU KNOW, HOME SLICE

yeeah they do have them say like 'it's weird it's like it's real but I know it isn't??' at the start but that is....not enough

it honestly feels like a reskin of Mass Effect 2

which like

I enjoyed mass effect 2

so I'm enjoying DA:TV

but yeah

feels weird

yeah, i kept thinking a lot of it felt like mass effect though i couldn't necessarily put my finger on why

or whether that was real or just "that's the sci-fi game by the same company"

a lot of the weirdness i just kind of chalked up to having an almost entirely different writing team

personally i enjoyed it more than inquisition - there were a lot fewer quests and characters, but what was there felt more focused to me? inquisition had a lot of filler content

but da2 is my favorite so clearly i dont have the best taste lmao

vic

respectfully

what the Fuck do you think an open world is for???

lmao no i mean yeah i get your opinion but like, the whole point of an open world rpg is to have lots of little corners to explore and not be on rails and this leaned heavily toward being on rails imo

idk like i think i need to play through again to say more coherent things but i stand by my thesis statement which is this is a good game, it's a pretty enjoyable game, but it really doesn't feel like a dragon age game

it doesn't help that so few of the og writers were involved

yeah, i get that

i mean yeah i do wish it had been less railroady, i get that, but I'd personally rather have that than the overwhelming amount of busywork they had us doing in the last game. origins struck that balance really well but they haven't ever really recaptured that games feel unfortunately

Yeah it was definitely necessary sometimes to level grind but it made sense to me since your deal in inquisition is you're trying to basically invent this whole new organization and you need to do some PR work and check in with your people on the ground