I've been taking in the scenery and finding every side quest, chest, and harvestable item there is. Therefore, this game is obviously going to take me eons to finish, and this blog would be dead for quite some time if I waited until I finished it to write anything, like I usually do. Therefore, I'll be treating Dragon Age a smidge differently, posting playthrough updates as I deem appropriate.
I'm already 20 hours in, but I've barely scratched the surface of this game. 20 hours is enough time to form some opinions though.
The Awesome
- This game is huge. I've only really puttered around the first area, The Hinterlands, and I still have a lot more of it to explore and a lot more quests left to do. 20 hours. First area. Awesome. I'm sure I'll sink more than 100 hours into this game at this rate.
- The game world is so pretty! The first area that I'm in is chock full of mountains and trees and streams. All the textures look really nice, the water is all shiny, and I keep stopping to take screenshots where the sun is streaming in through the trees. It's just really really really pretty.
- The controls seem fairly intuitive once I got used to the new controller. The Options button and motion pad were very foreign to me at first, but now I'm kind of digging it
- Tactical Mode is my favorite thing ever. Tactical Mode is kind of like a combo of the pause button of Baldur's Gate and VATS in Fallout 3. You press a button, and the world is paused. You can look around the battlefield and micromanage your party, directing them where to go, who to attack, what attack to attack with, etc. Once you give your party directions, you can either turn off Tactical Mode and let them follow your orders in realtime while controlling your selected character, or you can inch forward through time, course correcting as needed and micromanaging moment by moment. I'm not quite sure why Tactical Mode is so enjoyable to me, but I rarely enter a battle without using it. In Baldur's Gate, I would pause constantly, repositioning people and dictating exactly what each party member should do, and this is very much in the spirit of that style of play.
- I encountered a dragon, and it was enormous and terrifying and it ripped my face off immediately. I'm excited for when I'll be a big enough badass to take on such a creature, but it was not this day. Today, I shat myself and ran.
The Could Be Better
- Whenever I use the radial menu Hold Your Position command, the party listens all of zero seconds and immediately follows my character like a stray animal you just fed. No. Stay. Staaaaaay.
- Talking to people feels kinda weird. The camera goes into a weird two-shot where you can see both characters' whole bodies. You can rotate the camera around, but not to where you can focus on their face while they're talking, which is what I actually want.
- When you're talking to someone, seeing their whole body makes you painfully aware that their arms just hang there like a dead fish while they're talking. A tighter camera angle when speaking OR a more human-like use of hands animation would be nice.
- In Tactical Mode, I would like the option to keep characters I'm not actively controlling from blowing their Mana wad on abilities I don't want them using. If I need an ice ability, but fire comes available first, away the fireball will fly. And with my warriors, they'll taunt or war cry whenever it's available, but if I have my person tanking that's supposed to be tanking, it's not helping to have your less armored buddy screaming for attention. I don't want them to look at you. I want you to keep wailing on them in obscurity. Shhh...
- Sometimes in Tactical Mode, a party member will just forget that a battle is happening, and they'll just stand there no matter how many times you tell them to go there, do that thing, stab that thing in the face. The way to remedy it is to leave tactical mode and use an ability. This'll unfreeze the moron, and you can use them again.
The Unknown
- I have yet to have a ton of interaction with my party. Those conversations and their catty little side banter with each other is something I really enjoyed in the previous games, and I haven't seen a lot of that yet. We'll see if that picks up as I get further.
- I'm curious to see how my imported world data is going to affect things. I've had a couple conversations with Varric that were informed by previous choices, but I imagine there'll be more effects of previous playthroughs than a casual comment here and there. There better be, at least...
- I hope there's no timed events looming that I'm not aware about. I'm doing a lot of dicking around. Don't screw me over, Dragon Age. Allow me to tarry.
Overall, I'm really enjoying Inquisition thus far. There's been a couple buggy things I wish weren't an issue, but they're not so frustrating that they ruin my experience. In short, whenever I'm not playing it, I'm wishing I were playing it. See ya in another 20 hours or so.
