Yeah I figured that much, Can't wait to get my hands on this. DA: Origins was one of my favorite game last gen and this seems to be a lot like it instead of that god awful DA2.
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DRAGON AGE: INQUISITION Gameplay Series -- Part Two: Redcliffe Castle
- Thread starter Coolade
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Yeah I figured that much, Can't wait to get my hands on this. DA: Origins was one of my favorite game last gen and this seems to be a lot like it instead of that god awful DA2.
Uncle Rupee
Banned
I'm not saying its confusing, I'm saying it looks ridiculous for the type of game they're making. It covers too much of the screen and uses bright neon colors in a medieval fantasy game... yuck.
In other words it's a tacked on afterthought and the game is designed from the ground up around a controller.
That was just a guess by me, I have no idea if they are tweaking it. But I highly doubt the PC interface was added as an afterthought.
AdventureMike
Member
It's a very similar interface to what was used in both DA:O and DA2 on the console versions. Looks terrific considering the controller worked great in both games.
The main story of each game is self-contained, but there's a lot of throwbacks to the previous games that will enrich your experience here. For example, within the "core" 12 character cast, 4 are returning characters.
BioWare is always great at briefing new players, though, so anything you need to know about the world or characters that happened previously will be explained in-game.
This game will also have the Dragon Age Keep, which is a cloud-based save-state editor that will allow you to input all significant choices from the first two games to create a world state for Inquisition (or you could just use BioWare's default world state).
Here are summaries for each game if you want some context before you make your Keep save:
http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Storyline_for_Dragon_Age:_Origins
http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Storyline_for_Dragon_Age_II
Honey Bunny
Member
Not one minute in and I'm cringing at the dialogue. Urrgh.
Dr. Kitty Muffins
Member
I plan on using tactical mode 90 percent of the time.
JeffG
Member
I loved it when Sera was talking "Don't look up...don't look. Shit. I looked"
But...truth is not as good as "I used to be an adventurer like you,Then I took a arrow in the knee"
The Leliana-torturer scene had some spotty lines, but the companion lines later on are good stuff.
Yeah, the dialogue is going to be a problem.
Like, the voice acting itself is fine, but in every preview build I have seen for the game so far, the script is just awful.
shinobi602
Member
Jeez, talk about hyperbole. I didn't see anything wrong with the script personally...
JeffG
Member
I wonder which character got killed off. Sera or Leliana. (You see Sera being dragged in near the end)
Word is everyone in the BioWare offices is also playing in tactical mode zoomed out. So that makes me feel better despite them barely showing it.
DOWN
Banned
This is not just awful for this game, but awful to be seen in 2014. How can they do this in a world where the HUDs of Skyrim, Halo, and Assassin's Creed all exist?
Are we talking about the HUD from the OP's screenshot?
Gameplay and graphics already sold me on this game so i wasn't expecting much from story/dialogues, but ugh at some of those lines...
Also isn't the ending quite spoiler?
Do we know if dragons are the only big creatures with with different body parts to aim at?
I hope it's not like Skyrim where dragons where the only big ones.
Also isn't the ending quite spoiler?
we see dead(?) blonde chick, and together with Iron Bull and Badass Lady it looks like they're about to die
Do we know if dragons are the only big creatures with with different body parts to aim at?
I hope it's not like Skyrim where dragons where the only big ones.
AdventureMike
Member
Not sure how it can be a spoiler when we have little to no context for the situation. Any number of things could come before or after that.
anexanhume
Member
It's in keeping with other bioware games. Are people commenting like this coming from no previous Bioware game exposure? I don't see how it makes sense otherwise.
I'll probably shoot from the hip unless encounters get tough. Then I'll slow things down, issue individual orders, etc. Feels like a waste to me if I tactical view and pause an encounter that we were going to mow through anyway.
Pompadour Paragon
Neo Member
Eh, I'm not getting a particularly good feeling about the game from this video. I haven't kept up with anything Dragon Age related and I didn't want to muck around with my speakers to hear the dialogue due to the terrible mixing (honestly, who plays these games - or any game with lots of talking - without subtitles?) so I won't comment on the story or dialogue or whatever, but what I'm seeing with the other aspects of the game doesn't fill me with confidence.
Combat looks pretty drab. The enemies don't seem reactive when getting pelted with lightning bolts and earth-shattering blows (outside of the attacks with properties like stun, knockback and stuff) and tend to just shuffle around and attack whomever. The encounters aren't interesting, since they consist of dumb melee enemies with no particular abilities of note sometimes backed up by slightly tougher ranged foes. The boss encounter was particularly disappointing, as it was of a long, uneventful, bog-standard fight against a single enemy with lots of health, neatly segmented by fighting groups of bland monsters while the boss is temporarily invulnerable.
Granted, this is probably fairly early in the game and may not be indicative of later encounters. But what I find worrying is the overuse of the term "Tactical" to describe the combat. I'm not that knowledgeable or enthusiastic about tactics-based games, but having a time-freeze option with queued-up actions tied to pathfinding doesn't make a tactical game on its own. The enemy AI seems simple and undeveloped, with groups of enemies being easily corralled into chokepoints with very little interaction between enemies or unique behavior for individual types of enemies. At most you need to adjust to an enemy's specific elemental strengths and weaknesses, but that's a pretty thin layer of strategy.
What the game ends up with is combat that's too simple and straightforward to be considered tactical, but too slow and restrictive to be action either. It's just a bland, automated slugfest with some pretty effects. I don't particularly care about how easy or hard a game is, but I would like some kind of vision for the gameplay to keep things fresh and interesting. Especially for a several-dozen hour mammoth like this.
Combat looks pretty drab. The enemies don't seem reactive when getting pelted with lightning bolts and earth-shattering blows (outside of the attacks with properties like stun, knockback and stuff) and tend to just shuffle around and attack whomever. The encounters aren't interesting, since they consist of dumb melee enemies with no particular abilities of note sometimes backed up by slightly tougher ranged foes. The boss encounter was particularly disappointing, as it was of a long, uneventful, bog-standard fight against a single enemy with lots of health, neatly segmented by fighting groups of bland monsters while the boss is temporarily invulnerable.
Granted, this is probably fairly early in the game and may not be indicative of later encounters. But what I find worrying is the overuse of the term "Tactical" to describe the combat. I'm not that knowledgeable or enthusiastic about tactics-based games, but having a time-freeze option with queued-up actions tied to pathfinding doesn't make a tactical game on its own. The enemy AI seems simple and undeveloped, with groups of enemies being easily corralled into chokepoints with very little interaction between enemies or unique behavior for individual types of enemies. At most you need to adjust to an enemy's specific elemental strengths and weaknesses, but that's a pretty thin layer of strategy.
What the game ends up with is combat that's too simple and straightforward to be considered tactical, but too slow and restrictive to be action either. It's just a bland, automated slugfest with some pretty effects. I don't particularly care about how easy or hard a game is, but I would like some kind of vision for the gameplay to keep things fresh and interesting. Especially for a several-dozen hour mammoth like this.
toastyToast
Member
I don't like the look of it in 'action' mode. It just looks messy with crazy colours all over the place. The encounter where directions were set looks promising though. Need to zoom out further.
anexanhume
Member
Since no party member went down, I'm guessing it was easy difficulty. Enemies didn't have resistances and low health didn't allow them to get into flanking positions or other things that would change player strategy. We're also just seeing a thin vertical slice with few ranged or mage characters.
We do know from what they've said that enemies will deploy magical barricades/obstacles similar to what the PCs can do that will certainly affect strategy. You have to remember that these demos are played live and likely selected for repeatability so the guy running the demo can show the same elements on each playthrough and not die.
The other demo (Gamescom? I don't recall) showed you can zoom out pretty far. That was in a full outdoor environment.
edit: It was DigiExpo 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8xJMWRI-cA (tactical view starts at 18:20 and you can see zooming ability)
It's rather disappointing that the best example of actual RTwP is from a leaked demo almost a year old. They really need to show some good combat demos, the action style stuff looks OK, but it's nothing impressive at all. Character animations are really awkward when trying to attack and move around under player control and combat just looks like a clusterfuck when you don't pause to line up spells and just run around trying to hack enemies.
Probably, but moreso than that all the characters are invincible in the demo. In the Part 1 gameplay video with the dragon you can see character's health drop to zero and immediately regen.
Edit: I'd also recommend looking at the DigiExpo vid for some cool tactics. At ~22 mins your mage puts up an ice wall in front that blocks LoS for enemy archers, forcing them to run around it, puts gylphs on the ground to control enemy positioning, and other cool stuff.
toastyToast
Member
Nice. I don't know why you'd ever want to engage anything freely. The battles end up being slow as shit. The real-time non-tactical gameplay doesn't really measure up actual action games either. Seems like a waste.
AdventureMike
Member
This is a gameplay preview video from an Alpha Build. The difficulty is purposefully set extremely low to show off features, graphics and effects.
To the bolded portion especially, I can't imagine how you could make these determinations based off two 15-minute preview videos and somehow have the knowledge of how the game will react across an assumed double-digit multi-hour adventure. These are not in-depth feature specific tutorial videos.
anexanhume
Member
I find that in the ME and DA games, I shift between both styles pretty much on a whim. Difficulty, party members at the time, whether I want to target a particular enemy, number of enemies and layout of the battlefield all influence how much individual control and planning effort I put into an encounter. I tend to run melee heavy characters so I find hack-n-slash to be fun enough. If I didn't, I'd likely run every encounter since I'd want to be precisely controlling my ranged mage/archer targets. These games tend to be Jack of all trades where I feel they reward each approach enough for me to find all strategies enjoyable in some way.
They've also displayed a lot of positioning tactical moves, and traps are back for rogues so that you can properly equip yourself to ambush an enemy on your own terms. Really I haven't seen a facet of party-based tactics missing in Inquisition that has been present in other RTwP tactical games.
AdventureMike
Member
I like having both as options as anexanhume mentioned.
Playing on the console, the HUD they provide works well for this to be used in both stopped tactical and real time combat.
Massive thanks for tracking those down. Appreciate it. Now to dive into some context.
George Oscar Bluth II
Banned
Wait...the Inquisitor is Traynor from ME3! Ha, I just realised.
anexanhume
Member
Yup, lots of VA re-use. Freddie Prinze, Jennifer Hale, Mark Meer, Brian Bloom, Jon Curry, Claudia Black, and Sumalee Montano all had ME roles.
http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Voice_cast_(Inquisition)
Honey Bunny
Member
One generally expects a studio doing the same thing over and over again..to get better at it.
For what it's worth, as one of you said, nothing else in the video was as bad as that initial torture dialogue.
KCroxtonJr
Member
Yeah...Idk what they were thinking when they designed the HUD. It looks like something that belongs in a cartoonish kids game. Hopefully someone will figure out a way to mod it in the PC version lol.
Game looks amazing otherwise, can't wait to play this.
George Oscar Bluth II
Banned
That's awesome. Thanks for the link!
anexanhume
Member
They did the same thing back in 2009 with the original DA before most people knew what GoT was.
wolfhowwl
Banned
This was wonderful - though I honestly do hope that they can't simply kill off your party members that easily without your control. I mean if I was playing through a sidequest or whatever and had one of my favourite characters tag along and then simply get killed off without giving me the chance to save him? Noooooooo.
I'm trying so hard to like this game, but the cutscene and dialogue was just so bad. A vengeful slitting-throat scene followed by a Not-the-Mines-of-Moria scene with an edgy rogue blurting out one-liners between arrows. I swear it feels like Bioware revels in cliche after cliche. Not sure if I have the stomach or time for this kind of mediocrity anymore.
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