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The biggest problem with Inquisition's multiplayer for me was always down to the boss fights. Even when you can beat them, they're just unfun slogs. And when you can't, they rip right through you with no real sense of learning from the experience or being able to pinpoint what you did wrong. Especially that goddamn demon commander. 
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Jan 22, 2018 00:44
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Inquisition's concept was really cool- I loved the idea of actually progressing through a map instead of just hunkering down in some corner against endless waves. But the gameplay ruined it. Mostly though, I blame the bosses. They are awful, because they are basically ALL Platinum difficulty Banshees, except you can't reliably avoid their grab by running away. Even on the easiest difficulty, it's just a boring slog to see if you can deal enough damage fast enough before it wears through your healing supplies.
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Apr 18, 2018 08:47
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Did Tali ever act particularly naive or childish in the first game? Aside from the "rite of passage" being so commonly coded as an allegory for coming of age in media, I never got that sense from her. If anything, Liara and Garrus seemed like the youngest ones on the crew. I always interpreted the Pilgrimage less as a "now you are legally an adult" than something more akin to... like, buying your own house for the first time or getting married (moving to a new ship and getting your new name, respectively), where you "become an adult" by establishing a more permanent identity for yourself. e: of course, she does have some anxiety in 2, but given that it only ever comes up when flirting (at least from what I remember), I chalk that up more to a clumsy/lazy attempt at them writing her as a stereotype of the shy nerdy girl. 
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Nov 22, 2018 09:48
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exquisite tea posted:The first Witcher is sincerely one of the worst games I've ever played. The visuals are horrible, the combat is horrible, the writing is awful, the voice acting is eeesh, everything about it is incredibly bad. And I try hard to mostly see the good in stuff. Which also hurts the second game quite a bit, despite being a vast improvement in almost every way. As someone who had to skip the first game, I bounced off of The Witcher II like six different times before I managed to latch on, because it felt like it never actually explained anything about Geralt's personal story beyond "is friends with Triss, wants to find someone named Yennifer(???), and is a freaky mutant monster hunter." As amazing as Wild Hunt is in most regards, I still think its biggest success was figuring out how to present Geralt as a character.
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Nov 26, 2018 10:52
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I honestly never got why people were so fixated on that gigglesquee quote as some massive symptom of why Bioware has issues with its writing. So... one writer thinks that a character that someone else on the team wrote is endearing, and goes overboard with trying to use cutesy internet-speak while describing a friendly conversation?
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Nov 26, 2018 14:24
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God help them if that isn't something for an actual game. I can't believe that they'd preempt Anthem with a full announcement like that, but it would be the most Bioware thing ever to have them sit back, witness the past month, and then just happily walk face-first into the Diablo: Immortal meatgrinder . 
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Nov 29, 2018 21:01
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I think Inquisition's open world would've been a lot more tolerable if they had just cut like... four or five of the zones out, and put that work into buffing up the best ones. Did they really need THREE different desert wastelands? Get rid of those, and use that time to make interesting quests. Also, finally seeing Val Royeaux and just having it be a single hallway was a bigger disappointment than the entirety of Dragon Age II. 
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Dec 7, 2018 12:46
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Oh dear me posted:I agree that DA:I was one of the best RPGS ever made (which is easy, as there aren't too many that are even good), and that the side areas have really interesting stuff in, at least if you're willing to read codexes. (I don't think they replay terribly well though, as rereading codexes is less fun.) But the collection quests are terrible - bottles and mosaics and worst of all the shards. I think that last is responsible for a lot of the criticism because it's very long, it's made to seem important, it involves the sort of tedious precise jumping action I thought would have died after Ultima VIII, and after all that the reward is you get to go to a yet another desert and have your resistances slightly buffed. And that's to say nothing of the sidequests that aren't blatant collect-a-thons, but still basically amount to the same thing. Like 80% of the refugee stuff in the Hinterlands, which amount to "the refugees are cold/hungry!", followed by clicking on random supply caches and killing a few goats, and then turning them in with no real fanfare or story significance beyond being told that the supplies will surely help. Inquisition has a very weird disconnect from its open world, where it seems terrified of having you actually stop running around to interact with something for more than two or three minutes at a time. It doesn't let you stop and experience a story about the mage/templar conflict and how it is affecting the people who are caught in the middle of it, because it just assumes that the player is already sprinting towards the next quest icon. Or even with the dragons, which might be entertaining fights, but with how the game presents them? Most of them are treated with less significance than any random monster contract you can pick up in The Witcher 3, because you're literally just stumbling into the dragon's little arena for a boss fight. e: ^ Curse my slow typing!
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Dec 7, 2018 17:49
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I have to admit, part of me does miss having the Grey Wardens up front and center. It would've gotten boring if every sequel was just "you're a Warden again, and there's a new Blight to stop!", but I still like it as a protagonist hook more than Hawke or the Inquisitor. I think it would've been interesting to still play another Warden, but without the simplicity of an archdemon to kill.
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Feb 22, 2019 14:49
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Cythereal posted:Maligned as it is, I think Andromeda is the best Bioware game to date for letting you guide your protagonist's personality and giving her a lot of potential for characterization. I played Andromeda three times, twice as Sarah, and without ever touching the saint/rear end in a top hat split I came away feeling in both games that Sarah was a very different person in each due to the dialogue options I'd chosen. It also had a weirdly charming little detail in that both Sara and Scott have slightly distinct personalities from one another, despite the fact that you can technically play them however you want. Sara's a huge nerd, and Scott has webbed toes.
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Feb 26, 2019 18:50
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Also, wasn't the entire reason that things looked remotely dire on the field because of the Darkspawn attacking the signal tower? It takes longer for the Warden and Alistair to even light the signal for Loghain's army to attack, which he then ignores.
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Mar 3, 2019 18:05
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Ginette Reno posted:Yes but it's implied in Return to Ostagar that Loghain knew about the Darkspawn tunneling under the Tower of Ishal and let it happen iirc. Oh, I do remember that. My point was more that things looking bad on the field for Cailan and Duncan weren't necessarily because it was a stupid plan and they charged straight into a meatgrinder, but that they were forced to hold out for longer than they ever planned to, because we only see them again after the signal is finally lit well behind schedule.
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Mar 4, 2019 03:31
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I always got the sense that the ritual wasn't exactly top secret at all costs, but more something that the Chantry might be willing to turn a blind eye to or just not ask too many questions about. Where the real threat wouldn't be someone randomly spilling the beans (which could easily be covered up with "we recruit criminals and liars", "this person was bitten by a Darkspawn and is already dying from the Blight", etc.), but the truth becoming widespread enough for popular support to force the Chantry into taking action against the Wardens. e: ugh, beaten.
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Mar 5, 2019 00:53
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I think it was more the fact that you were there to try and win their support, so leading your pitch of "hey, can I please borrow your armies to stop the literal apocalypse?" with "what if we took away your all of your privileges and riches?" would've been... counterproductive. Though with that being said, my Dalish Elf absolutely would've burned the whole place to the ground. 
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Mar 5, 2019 04:17
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I don't think that the problem with Geralt is that he specifically should be gay or bisexual, but that if he is the mold of protagonists going forward, the vast majority of them would also be equally straight white action men. It's so much better for telling a story, but is absolute poison for mainstream diversity because most of the industry is still terrified of making controversial choices on what to do with their protagonists. For better or worse, the Bioware formula (both Shepard-style protagonists and romance options) are seen as the safest way to explore unconventional characters, because the content can be hidden behind the walls of player choice. It makes things slightly blander, but if the choice was between making a hypothetical Geralt explicitly gay or removing the very option of choosing for him to be gay, I would be worried that most companies would choose the latter.
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Mar 31, 2019 14:24
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It's also more of a broad cultural thing than just bowing down to perceived pressure from online assholes. I mean, just take a look at Rockstar: they're downright addicted to sticking their dicks directly into the beehive, and despite also being more than big enough to say "gently caress you" to the people who would freak out online, they've still yet to do a single female protagonist in one of their games. And it's been over 10 years since the last time they had a non-white lead for one of their games with GTA: San Andreas, unless you count a spin-off DLC or GTAV buffering Franklin between two white guys (both of which I think are just as cheap as Bioware's approach, and particular favorites of Ubisoft from Assassin's Creed prior to Odyssey). And yet, they don't seem really interested. I constantly think of how fascinating a Red Dead game would be from the perspective of a woman who struggles to be taken seriously during that era and has to fight for every scrap of respect, or someone of color that would contradict the John Wayne myth.
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Apr 2, 2019 07:25
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Mass Effect was always going to be a very weird franchise to handle, since the trilogy basically self-immolated the whole setting at the last possible second. Even if the ending itself had been *good*, that would've made for a very challenging way to continue forward. You see a lot of people argue about whether prequels can work when you already know what happens in the end, but I think it's a whole different issue when the "what happens" is "like 90% of the galaxy is wiped out by the Reapers."
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Apr 9, 2019 18:59
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I honestly don't know if I could get interested in a new Mass Effect game that followed up on the Synthesis ending. That would just be... completely unrecognizable, and you would need a crazy good writer to pull that off as the start of a new chapter. At that point, I feel like it being a Mass Effect game at all would be a metric ton of unnecessary baggage. Even Destroy, as the cleanest possible breaking off point for the trilogy, made it hard to bring back anything really recognizable. Hell, the centerpiece of the entire galactic society was turned into a mass grave for a bunch of half-melted corpses, so the only place we could really revisit would be... what, Omega?
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Apr 9, 2019 19:24
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exquisite tea posted:That would be the most exciting thing about a post-trilogy Mass Effect. You get to experience some familiar locations and civilizations, but the entire balance of power in the galaxy has been totally upended and you have to choose how to rebuild, who gets to control each star system now that the Council is gone, etc. There are so many stories you could tell in a post-Reaper War universe that you'd have to be sorely lacking in imagination to not come up with something good. Alas, instead we got Andromeda. This was really my biggest problem with the trilogy. Bioware has almost never been good at telling those stories, so even as someone who still wants to like Bioware, I can't picture a post-Reaper rebuilding of the universe that wouldn't have turned out looking like how Andromeda handwaved the only interesting things about exploring a new galaxy. That we wouldn't get any of those big ideas playing out, because they would get the same general treatment as the Nexus or Kadara, just with a thin layer of polish. So them tearing down every pillar of the setting doesn't seem like a promising new opportunity to me; it seems more like they just set another pointless hurdle for themselves to fumble over.
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Apr 9, 2019 19:46
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Skippy McPants posted:Male Ryder answers the same question with "I dunno bro" because he's a dumb-poo poo rent-a-cop. Minor correction, because I also loved that difference in dialog: his answer is actually "I HAVE WEBBED TOES AND MY SISTER HAS WISDOM TEETH". Ryder really deserved a better game than Andromeda, because I love what they tried to do.
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May 8, 2019 17:33
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I genuinely can't fathom the idea of someone thinking that DA2's combat is worthy of praise, but then again, I had to play it on console at first where you had to hit the button every single time just to do your basic attack until they eventually patched in an option for auto-attacking... so I might be pretty biased against it.
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May 12, 2019 23:09
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prometheusbound2 posted:Alistair (who had been a perfectly good character in Awakenings) Oh, I hold no love for DA2, but Anders is right up there with the Arishok for me with things that the game did right. People complain a lot about how different he is from his original appearance and how much of a mopey loser he is, but that always made perfect sense to me. Anders in Awakening was a complete and total waste of a character: as you unintentionally said, he was basically just Mage Alistair 1.5 with some extra lolrandom humor scooped on top. Easily the worst character in the whole story outside of Oghren's non-stop fanservice. But one thing that was always clear about his character was that he was a selfish coward (in a perfectly reasonable sense) who looked at the Templar oppression and said "gently caress that noise". He never fought back against it, but instead wanted to run away to have his own life untouched by it, even though it meant abandoning everyone he knew to that continued abuse. And then, after being forced to accept some level of responsibility by becoming a Grey Warden... he fights alongside and befriends Justice. There's a bit of a skip here that would've been pretty important to actually show, since I never got the impression that they were particularly close. But whatever the case, he decides to let Justice possess him when the Grey Warden corpse that he's residing in can't hold him any longer. So you have Anders, who has spent a lifetime being mistreated by and witnessing all sorts of horrible behavior by Templars against mages that he deals with by keeping his head down and looking out for himself at any cost... and Justice, a supernatural spirit who exists solely by his own nature of needing to right every single one of those wrongs. Anders spent years suppressing the widespread abuse, and that all comes screaming to the surface when he merges with Justice, which fundamentally breaks both of them to the very core. Anders can no longer turn a blind eye to anything that he knows about what Templars do or just run away, and Justice suddenly finds himself facing one of the most pervasive injustices in the world that he is incapable of personally solving. He's a spirit driven by a need to make the guilty pay for their trespasses against some moral code, and someone essentially just told him the equivalent "hey, go fix racism" Generic American fucked around with this message at 18:44 on May 13, 2019 |
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May 13, 2019 18:42
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I actually did like Oghren at first in Origins, because it at least seemed like the game was presenting him as the drunken rear end in a top hat that he was and playing him up as the classic stereotype of a fantasy dwarf while making everyone in Orzammar absolutely despise him for it because he's a belligerent drunk. But then in Awakenings, it felt like he was written in reaction to people laughing about him online. Like the walking incarnation of that moment in Dragon Age 2 where Alistair turns directly to the camera during his little cameo and says "that's right, SWOOPING IS BAD". Generic American fucked around with this message at 19:33 on May 13, 2019 |
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May 13, 2019 19:29
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ilitarist posted:I stopped believing in any fandom view of their objects of worship when cringe-inducing badly written Citadel DLC (the one where alien invasion is put on hold so that everyone who knows Shepard can visit and have lots of party banter during a party. Also evil Cerberus Shepard clone.) was praised as the best content in the series redeeming the ending. Hint: it's because the alien invasion sucked.
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Sep 9, 2019 15:50
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The most jarring part of Andromeda was how they wrote themselves so far into the corner that Ryder's typical video game bodycount had to be like... at least a few percentage points off the Initiative's total population. 
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Mar 10, 2020 23:08
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I don't think DAO's sluggish animations could ever top the burning hatred in my heart for DA2's combat on the console version before they finally patched in a setting for auto-attack. 
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Mar 13, 2020 20:58
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pentyne posted:He's a literal terrorist in every worst way. He doesn't attack the Templars themselves or any hard target he plants a bomb to wipe out the people who try their best to do nice things in a broken system because it's easier. Not to defend Anders (since it is just about as morally questionable either way), but I got the sense that he didn't do it because it was "easier" as much as he was specifically aiming to remove any possibility for détente between mages and templars. He thought that any peace would be a quiet death for any hope of the mages getting more freedom, so he blew up the Chantry along with the Grand Cleric, who was a lot more reasonable than Meredith and probably would've been able to preserve the status quo, to force a conflict where mages would have no choice but to fight.
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May 23, 2020 19:03
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Kobal2 posted:I mean... "Haha he's a self-obsessed abuser who leers at anything in a skirt, get it ?! No but it's funny cause he's a drunk gently caress-up you see ?" is a joke that hasn't aged particularly well. Or was very funny to begin with. In defense of Oghren, I think his "joke" worked well enough in Origins that he was a walking stereotype of what you usually expect to see from dwarves in a lot of generic fantasy settings, but only to stand in sharp contrast to an entire dwarven society that loving hates him because he's just a belligerent drunk. Bringing him back for the DLC, however, was a catastrophic mistake.
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Jun 16, 2020 23:51
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Unless you play a female City Elf. Only guilty blood. 
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Jun 17, 2020 16:34
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exquisite tea posted:Loghain is a cool dude & class hero I know that goons love to be contrarians about everything, but maybe this isn't the most accurate way to describe him when he was explicitly funding his war effort by selling elves into slavery.
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Jul 18, 2020 22:57
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Wolfsheim posted:Can you actually become king/queen? I thought you were delegated to being prince/princess-consort even if Alistair or Anora are out of the picture. I believe it is exclusive to female human noble characters- if you are a mage, elf, or dwarf, becoming queen would be too controversial (and so you keep your personal romance with Alistair a secret), but having the Cousland name gives you enough political clout to make it official. I think the same goes for male human nobles with Anora, but I can't say for certain.
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Jul 22, 2020 07:56
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KittyEmpress posted:All wardens are infertile, it is mentioned multiple times. Morrigan uses dark magic to counter act it in this particular case. Who knows how hard that dark magic is. There are exceptions to this, actually; like in the case of Alistair's mother Fiona, who was already a Grey Warden by the time she met his father.
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Jul 22, 2020 20:30
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I don't think it has been posted on YouTube yet, but some pretty mixed news from Gamescom: that the new Dragon Age game is still being worked on, but they pulled the exact same poo poo that they did with Andromeda where they showed up to E3 one year with nothing but a trailer where they vaguely talked about how cool the whole series is over a bunch of concept art. Not really a great sign for an already troubled development.  e: oh, there it is
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Aug 27, 2020 19:44
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chaosapiant posted:1. The female Ryder has fantastic voice acting. As big of a disappointment as Andromeda was, the one thing that I 100% unironically love is that they actually bothered to differentiate Sara from Scott in a few subtle ways, like how both can ask Jaal the same question of how his electromagnetic physiology works, and when he points out how dumb that question is by asking "how do your eyes work", Scott (who served as a Systems Alliance station security guard) doesn't have an answer. But if you're playing as Sara (who spent her whole time in the military hanging around Prothean researchers), she geeks the gently caress out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8fDOmXzgeE It's so drat charming that it makes me wish it wasn't wasted on such a lackluster game.
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Nov 14, 2020 13:17
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VostokProgram posted:What's US? Pretty sure it stands for the Ultimate Sacrifice ending in Origins. When you import any save with that ending into Awakening, the game just awkwardly pretends it didn't happen.
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Nov 24, 2020 13:54
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Skippy McPants posted:There is a US option for Awakening that lets you play as a newly arrived Orlesian Warden with the DA:O Warden being canonically dead. It has some fun dialogue, since you arrive after the Blight is already over, you slacker, and all the Fereldens kinda hate your guts. As far as I remember, though, you only get to use the Orlesian Warden-Commander as a fresh game with no imported save.
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Nov 24, 2020 20:27
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I still remember the days when Benezia was the most dangerous boss in the whole game because there was at least a 10% chance that one of her Asari commandos would bumrush you in the first five seconds of the fight and fling you right over the railing of the arena like a ragdoll.
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Nov 28, 2020 00:00
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Rookersh posted:Please tell me which group handles magic well. I'm not sure we've met this culture yet. The Avvar from Jaws of Hakkon have a fascinating approach to handling their mages, where they invite possession early on from friendly spirits in order to build up a resistance to it, and those who are deemed too weak just remain connected to their "guides."
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Dec 10, 2020 15:19
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Dawgstar posted:I also appreciated the attempts they made to make Scott and Sara different. Like, okay, I didn't play Scott but I liked that Sara while she was military she was also an archaeology nerd that I don't think Scott was. A perfect example of this is the Jaal conversation where they each get a unique line. https://youtu.be/DwrJs7Z-12k
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Sep 30, 2021 20:17
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Plucky Brit posted:Any memorable characters in Andromeda? I've never played it. Vetra and Drack deserved to be squadmates in a much better game.
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Nov 28, 2021 21:25
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