Dragon Age 3: Inquisition

[Sasuke Uchiha]

Whatever word you want to use, the fact is you used to be able set up extremely detailed guidelines for your characters to follow for whatever strategy/encounter you had in mind and Bioware completely ripped that out of game. And it's not as if the AI is so good that it doesn't need direction anymore. Archers pull themselves into melee range, mages are too stupid to put distance between themselves and whatever's hitting them in the face, tanks stand there and stare off into the distance. Having to constantly hold your party member's hands is tiring, especially on harder difficulties.

I've noticed people saying this but i don't think they realize a lot of that is spread out over multiple things not just the behavior setting. Certain skills can be toggled from enable to disable to prefered, and those options greatly effect whether a character will use that skill or not, and some skills require the character to be within a certain range. example while you as a archer might drop caltrops if you see an opponent approaching you, the AI sees it as you want him to use caltrops so it has to get close to a enemy to do that.. so if you dont want your archer using caltrops up close turn it off that skill. That's how the new tactics work.

[Xero Kaiser]

I've noticed people saying this but i don't think they realize a lot of that is spread out over multiple things not just the behavior setting. Certain skills can be toggled from enable to disable to prefered, and those options greatly effect whether a character will use that skill or not, and some skills require the character to be within a certain range. example while you as a archer might drop caltrops if you see an opponent approaching you, the AI sees it as you want him to use caltrops so it has to get close to a enemy to do that.. so if you dont want your archer using caltrops up close turn it off that skill. That's how the new tactics work.

I'm well aware of all that.

You can't do anything on the other page aside from enabling/disabling skills.

In the first game I could tell a ranged character to use a certain skill IF an enemy got into melee range without them actually being stupid enough to deliberately walk into melee range to cast it. Yes, you can set a "preferred" status on certain abilities, but that doesn't actually address the problem. I don't just want them brainlessly throwing out spell "X" just because it's available, I want them to cast spell "x" in situation "Y" if they're at "Z" distance. This game simply does not give you that kind of control that you had in past Dragon Age games and no amount of fiddling with the handful of options left to you will change that. As it stands you end up having to disable a lot of abilities because the AI is just flat-out too goddamn stupid to use them even remotely effectively. Hell, entire classes/trees aren't worth leaving in the hands of the AI (Reaver, especially)

It's like they wanted to turn Dragon Age into an action game but instead of actually building it from the ground-up as an action game they just took a hammer to the combat system of the past games. They want it to be an action game but there's no way to effectively control your party in real-time. There's no way to effectively view enough of the field to make tactical cam useful anymore. There's no way to queue up multiple actions for party members anymore. There's no way to select/move multiple party members anymore. You can't have more than 8 abilities anymore. I don't want to come off like a, "PC Master Race" guy, but this franchise has been so obviously dumbed down to work on consoles that it's ridiculous. Anything that would've been too hard to do on a controller has been watered down or outright removed.

[simbob4000]

They did want to turn Dragon Age into an action game, that's what the whole last game was about. Now it seems they want to keep it that way while paying lip service to the people that wanted it to go back to what they did in the first game. It's just too bad that BioWare is horrible at action games.

[Sasuke Uchiha]

this game is utterly fan freaking tastic! I don't care what people say about combat, This is what a RPG should be, MY FREAKING EPIC STORY OF CHOICE AND CONSEQUENCE!

[cactusmaac]

Massive improvement over DA2. Immensely huge game. This is the first since Witcher 2 that I've had a game which compelled me to get up, play 17 hours, pass out and then get up and repeat.

Party members are good (with the exception of Vivienne and Varric - I'd have preferred Sigrun from DA: Awakenings) although I haven't felt I've developed a really deep relationship with them.

Iron Bull and Sera are easily the highlights.

Currently playing as a Qunari male warrior which is fine but I'd rather have him be a full Sten-like Qun warrior than a blase Tal-Vashoth.

Top marks for world construction, will wait until I finish before weighing in on the story.

[Expletive Deleted]

It's definitely the most immersive game I've played since the first Dragon Age. When you're a hundred hours in, still not entirely finished, and you're already thinking about the choices you want to make on your next play-through . . . damn.

[cactusmaac]

It was pretty good in the end but not what I'd call an elite game, the main story kind of petered out.

I would have preferred if they got rid of a few of the open world areas like the Oasis, Hissing Wastes and Fallow Mire and instead put more attention on player choice and customising keeps.

Earlier builds of the game suggested you would have to choose between maintaining your own defences vs protecting villagers etc. and that seemed to have been dumped so they could make ship date.

Second play-through will be as an elf. Romanced Cassandra first time, will be targeting Josephine next.

[BeastieRunner]

I'm approaching 95 hours in and I just finished the Blackwall/Stoud/Warden quest line. I was trying to finish up all the little quests and stuff before advancing the story again because the first time I accidentally sided with the Templars (I disbanded, absorbed, and made them my first round of foot soldiers) and then lost a bunch of quests after Haven fell. So I didn't want that to happen again. I'm getting ready to do the big Orlais story next.

[BeastieRunner]

If you want to laugh the whole game, run with Dorian, Sera, and Iron Bull. Team Comedy for the win!

[Vic Vega]

Great game, nearly 100 hours in and im not even halfway finished with this.

[Zero Hunter]

I have one really annoying bug that is driving me crazy. When ever I send anyone out in the war room now it takes double the time for them to complete the task. It did not start doing it until I was about 65 hours in.

My main team so far seems to always fall back to Blackwall/Dorian/Sera so far. Once in a while if I am going for brute force I will swap out Iron Bull or Cassandra for Sera.

[Bee_Maya]

I honestly didn't like DA2 that much, but Inquisition is seriously amazing. Too bad it doesn't run very well on my machine. Oh well.

[Vic Vega]

Patch 5 was released today.

Woohoo, storage!

[Hiromi]

Trailer for the first real DLC is out



Edit: Completely misread the article, the DLC is out now

caught me by surprise as I hadn't seen anything about it on PCgamer, Bioware's youtube channel, or Bioware's blog until today

[Michael P]

Yeah, they didn't muck about with a preamble on this one.