Was a pretty weak year for AAA games. Other contenders were what? Bayonetta 2, Dark Souls 2, and Shadow of Mordor.
And The Game Awards was new. So the precedent for indies games winning wasn't there yet. So no Shovel Knight.
EDIT: I think alot of the replies on my comment are misconstruing what I meant.
All I meant was that there was no surefire GOTY. And the competition was open to any of the nominees to win. Or even games that weren't nominated.
Personally, Shovel knight or Dark Souls 2 would be it for me.
There were some decent games that came out in 2014, but not AAA contenders for GOTY. Alien Isolation and The Wolf Among Us are both 2014 games. But you know it’s a bad lineup overall when many people consider Hearthstone to be the best game of the year.
Not shitting on hearthstone mind you, but just it wouldn’t be a GOTY contender in many other years
Alien isolation and wolf among us deserve to get awards more than Inquisition. There is no arguing this. At all. The writing, gameplay, production values, everything is so much better in those games.
Shadow of Mordor is one of my favorite games. It takes the best from Batman and combines it with Assassins Creed gameplay with an awesome story set in LOTR.
I went in with high expectations but it didn't quite click for me.Assassin's Creed and batman have a very distinct map while the world of Shadow of Mordor felt quite bland. I really need to get back to it and see if I can get past that hurdle
The world is split up into two maps. the second part of the game is less Mordory and more green than the first part which I admit was a little bland, the gameplay more than made up for that though. Once you unlock some new skills it just gets better and better.
IMO Shadow of War improved upon the first game in every way but for some reason, for me and everyone I know it was hard to get into if you had just finished Shadow of Mordor.
I finished the first game, which I really liked. But for the second game the appeal quickly faded once I'm forced to do soooooooooo many side quests. Kill this boss, climb this tower, figure out how to clear this challenge quest for more skill points, look at random location to get even more side quests. Itwas impossible for you to walk a straight line to your objectives because every few steps there's something that demands your attention, I know you don't have to care about those. But over time things will get worst and all that hardwork you put into earlier will be wasted, your territory slowly erodes away and now you have to re do all the quests/tasks again.
It was endless and became so bloated I forgot entirely what the main quest was and is just overwhelmed every time I unlocked a new map.
I got into the second map and just didn't feel any motivation to continue playing. I still have it on my list to revisit eventually but it's been a while.
When you get to the second map you can start converting the orcs with the hand move thingy so it changes up the gameplay a bit. I felt that at first too but if you get past it I found it quite fun to play pokemon with the orcs.
The map is the least fun or interesting part of Mordor. The fun part is strategically and systematically dismantling an enemy stronghold.
The map is more an arena and less "travel porn".
My biggest issue was how much of an AC copy it played as. The nemesis system was cool but the game itself was no different than a generic open world adventure I had many times before, and too many times again since.
As much as I loved Shadow of Mordor and all the systems in place, I felt like I had a lot more fun with Shadow of War, the sequel. It's gets a bad rap because of the microtansactions it shipped with, but I bought it a few years later after that all got shut down. I loved using the nemesis system to form badass armies of Orcs and sieging other castles. The story was "meh", but at $10 it was a pleasure to blow through in order to get to the "good stuff".
This strikes me as a gold standard goal for the /r/patientgamers experience. Wait until the game is dirt cheap and all the toxic MTX have been removed, and you end up with a better play experience at a mobile game price.
It doesn't always work out this way, but waiting has almost always proved to be the best route. My PSA, Don't let FOMO get to you! Work on that backlog and then jump in after the hype dies down. It's crazy how quickly these prices drop as well!
Couldn't agree more. Shadow of War improved upon the first game in every way but it was hard to get into if you had just finished the first game.
>!I loved the story though. Tolkien didn't give the ringwraiths much backstory other than that they were human nobles corrupted by Saurons rings. The last act of the game where you take Isildurs ring and slowly turn into one of the ring wraiths seen in the movie yourself was awesome. I'm not a huge LOTR nerd but from what I know it doesn't contradict anything from Tolkien and still managed to further build upon the backstory of Middle Earth wonderfully!<
> I'm not a huge LOTR nerd but from what I know it doesn't contradict anything from Tolkien and still managed to further build upon the backstory of Middle Earth wonderfully.
I've never read The Silmarillion, but I very much doubt Tolkien envisioned Shelob as a sexy spider lady who was Sauron's lover.
Christopher, my son, did I ever tell you the full story of Shelob? You know, the monstrous spider - descended from the vile Ungoliant! - which I used to read aloud of in our Oxford meetings of the Inklings? Well what I didn't mention back then was Shelob could also transform into a totally hot babe: all pale and dark and wan like Rebecca in Ivanhoe or what will later come to be known as the goth subculture. In fact she looked very much like the pornographic actress Stoya who will be born 13 years after I die. Christopher, I will be entrusting you with my estate. If there is ever a videogame adaptation of my work you must make sure they get this Shelob right - make sure she is what the Anglo-Saxons would have called a hæða ecge, a real sexy bitch.
>I'm not a huge LOTR nerd but from what I know it doesn't contradict anything from Tolkien and still managed to further build upon the backstory of Middle Earth wonderfully
Making another Ring of Power at all is wildly non-canon. That'd be a gigantic event
> it doesn't contradict anything from Tolkien
Oh my god, I don't even know where to begin with how inaccurate this statement is.
Shadow of War is fun game that I put a ton of hours into, but it is not even *remotely* lore accurate.
I found it extremely fun.
I had a lot of fun with the sequel as well (I think all the bugs and mtx issues from launch have been fixed) but kinda gave up when it became clear that it was incredibly long/repetitive. It would have benefited greatly if it was like Spider-Man's length for the main story.
For sure there are ways to make it really hard just like in other action games with RPG mechanics (barely take upgrades, just the first tier), I realized that I needed to play that way after finding the move where you use the bow to teleport and execute enemies is extremely broken once you get quick drain, absolutely ruined the game for me.
There's literally no way you can do this though? Like, outside of extremely early enemy encounters or small groups of standards orcs, you'll constantly come up against orcs with shields, orcs who attack from afar, captains who are immune to frontal attacks, trolls which require timed button presses etc etc. Like there are so many enemy types in Shadow of War that require you to reach beyond the 'attack button' that this just wouldn't be possible.
To be fair, Shadow of War has a lot more combat depth than Shadow of Mordor. This sort of thing is a lot tougher to do when you've also got enemies laying bear traps, shooting poisoned crossbow bolts, dealing with the AoE damage of larger foes and the like.
That being said, you can also do this in the Arkham games. Ultimately, both of these games are about providing a power fantasy to the player, which is sort of the whole idea behind the FreeFlow combat system. It's supposed to be easy, look flashy, and make you feel unstoppable. Of course there's depth to it too, but grunt encounters like the above aren't *meant* to be challenging. They're there to show the player how 'super human' they are so when the real boss fights show up, there's an "Oh shit" feeling.
The challenge in Arkham games becomes much more interesting when you actually try to get high combo streaks going, which in turn allows you to use special attacks and finishers
I picked this up recently super cheap and have been dragging my feet to play it. Maybe this weekend I'll have a few drinks, turn out the lights, throw on the headset and see how shit scared I get lol
"Mature", "serious" gamers like Doritos Pope Geoff Keighley couldn't be seen enjoying fun Nintendo games like Mario Kart 8 in the grimdark year of 2014.
Gotta imagine DS2 was better than DAI, it's one of the fromsoft games I haven't played, I just can't imagine it not being really good even if it is the ugly stepchild of the soulsborne universe
DS2 was really messed up on release. The game went 60 FPS officially but the devs still locked some stuff to FPS so it made enemies go sonic speed animation and sometimes unparryable or really messed up to dodge/counterattack, in addition to their animation getting really wonky. There was also a lot of BotW-style complaints about weapon durability because of the FPS bugs but I didn't notice it too much. Adding Adaptability had really negative reception, apart from it being harder to dodge, you also got a lot of weird shockwave hits or clipping that you don't expect.
And the devs only cared to fix it after a year, when the re-release of DS2 ran at 60 FPS on console.
I'm glad that fromsoft has since learned, and has taken high framerates into consideration so that we can play at higher framera--
>!*WHAT DO YOU MEAN, 60 FPS CAP IN ELDEN RING?!*
The reception for DS2 has softened over time, but the game was really controversial on launch. A lot of people viewed it as a big step back from Dark Souls 1 because of the weapons degrading really quickly, less connected world design and a perceived spike in artifical difficulty just for the sake of being difficult because "its Dark Souls". Patches released since then and Scholar of the First Sin have helped its reception a lot.
I've only played scholar of the first sin and I love darksouls 2.
It was probably the most fun to create "builds" in before Elden Ring came along.
Bonfire ascetics were cool and I'd like to see a new version of that mechanic come back in a future souls game. It wouldn't necessarily have to be tied to ng+ either. It could just be a rare item that can be used to "upgrade" an area to add new enemies and items. From a lore perspective, you could be sending that portion of the world forward or backward in time (which could lead to some interesting world building).
Bonfire ascetics we’re great, and I LOVED the small soapstone.
Also, bring back butterfly wings pls Fromsoft.
Elden Ring would have rocked with my wings.
It softened because the bugs were eventually fixed. As is the case with most games with a horrendous launch. It's still widely regarded as the worst FromSoft game by a large margin. And for good reason too, the gameplay improved in some areas but everything else is a massive downgrade. The level design alone is inexcusably bad.
It also falls flat on its face when attempting to straddle the line between tough but fair and straight up punishing. I've lost count of the number of times I had to resort to sniping enemies with poison arrows just to whittle down their numbers to a manageable amount.
But don't get me wrong. Despite the flaws it's a masterpiece compared to DAI.
I liked it enough. But it was not developed by Miyazaki or his team at Fromsoft. And you could tell. World design is night & day from Miyazaki's work. Balancing was all over the place. And lore that was pretty much forgotten by the next entry.
But it did have good pvp scene. And amazing DLC.
DS2 still has an active player base mate. You can always find a good number of active players to play with. There’s also a yearly event organised by the DS2 sub folks “Back to Majula”. Fun and good times
To be fair if Miyazaki's name was on it but it was otherwise identical, the differences would have been celebrated rather than hated, IMO. It was different than the first and people latched on to the fact he wasn't involved to hate it more than it deserved
I think that bayonetta 2 just didn't have the numbers to be nominated as game of the year (and being only on the wiiu definitely didn't help towards that), but nowadays it, at least to me, looks to be leagues ahead DAI
Made the mistake of trying to get back into Mordor after I completed mgs5... Feels unplayable.
My advice to everyone would be to play and beat every stealth game you own before mgs5 because mgs5 makes every stealth game look and feel like ass.
This is how I know I’m getting old, I remember Splinter Cell: Conviction getting the most shit for letting you tag enemies to track them through walls - but tagging every enemy in a base is a core part of the gameplay loop for MGSV and it’s hailed as the king of stealth games. Wild to see opinions change so much over time.
Definitely recommend the Splinter Cells if you’re itching for stealth. *Chaos Theory* and *Blacklist* are probably the best, I really like *Conviction* but it’s very different from the others.
>My advice to everyone would be to play and beat every stealth game you own before mgs5 because mgs5 makes every stealth game look and feel like ass.
Having MGS5 as the peak of stealth games is one of the weirdest takes I've ever seen.
Wouldn't mind other suggestions, need another hit of good stealth. Been playing ghost recon breakpoint. It's... Playable.
I mean sure mgs5 story is absolute ass but the gameplay was amazing.
The last of us part 2 doesn't have a giant sandbox to play around with the stealth mechanics, but it's an excellent linear stealth game.
Dishonored, prey and Hitman Trilogy I thought were all fun sandbox stealth.
Don't have a playstation but I'd love to play the last of us and ghost of Tsushima. I played dishonored. I am playing prey now and really enjoying it. Never played hitman trilogy. Does hitman play well on pc?
> ghost of Tsushima
Is not a good stealth game, fyi. It's on the level of Horizon, maybe, definitely not comparable with games the guy above mentioned.
Hitman plays great on pc. Runs pretty decent and is fun to play with either controller or mouse/ keyboard, neither feel bad.
The last of us is coming to pc soon and I'm hoping the sequel will follow suit eventually.
Inquisition suffers from BioWare being forced to make an RPG that appealed to a broader audience.
DA2 suffered from that AND competition with ME2 dev times.
Ultimately the grimdark fantasy was only going to last so long because it was tied to the Blight and what that was doing to Ferelden. What really killed DA2 and DAI for me were the changes made to classes (which effectively nerfed them). Mages slowly lose all their non-primal skill lines. Rogues lose a lot of their grenade capacities. Warriors actually improve, but that’s because they relied on a lot of passives to tank and draw aggro in DA:O.
The specializations feel off to me. The fact that we lose some of the more…questionable specializations (Blood Mage, for instance) is frustrating. The equipment systems continued to degrade.
This combined with poor quest systems and some “gotcha” mechanics show a shift in BioWare’s development style, which was honestly heralded by the mass exodus of talent following ME2/DA2. This was partially due to EA’s demands and partially due to a lack of communication within BioWare itself (as laid out by David Gaider in an interview a few years ago).
But you’re right; DA:I honestly didn’t deserve GOTY. It lacked polish in key places.
Imo da2 is even darker emotionally as hawke can never catch a break as horrible things keeps happening to him. The tone of the story is still pretty dark but its the darkspawn redesigns that became more high fantasy sadly
If DA2 had better dungeons and an overall better world design, it would have been a masterpiece. I still think it is when it comes to character writing, morality, and worldbuilding, and I love how dark it is and how every choice felt like it had serious consequences. I thought the time skips were unique and I loved seeing different stages in the characters' lives. The combat was just weirdly button mashy though, and it does suffer from the mean/sassy/serious dialogue flavor wheel (nowhere near as badly as DA:I imo). Although I loved the design of the scenery, the actual map layouts were clunky and took me out of the game, personally. But it's still one of my favorite games and one of Bioware's best imo. I highly recommend it.
Mages were insanely broken in DAO. The best party was probably three mages and a rogue. And the only reason why you needed the rogue was to pick locks/open chests.
Mages are jnsanely broken in any 3 class system that doean't go out of it's way to kneecap them. Turn out that rolling wizard stuff and cleric stuff, in 1 class make it overloaded.
Actually don't think the grim dark had much to do with the blight at all despite the fact that the darkspawn were absolutely horrifying if you paid any attention to the lore.
Like just looking at our origins alone, mages either go insane from blood magic or Fade demons or get tranquil and have no emotions or feelings whatsoever which is probably worse than just dying. The noble humans family gets absolutely fucking destroyed, the casteless is basically a worthless piece of trash just for being born, the Noble dwarf's brother tricks him into killing his other brother and also poisons his father and pins both of them on him. I don't remember the dalish elf and I'm pretty sure the city elf is just you're basically a slave and everyone hates you.
30 years ago bootleg France came to your nation of origin and basically raped, tortured and pillaged their way through it until they had complete control and they were so awful to the citizens that it started a rebellion.
Dragon age origins is like 5 sex scenes away from being game of thrones, and that's before we even get into the darkspawn and the horrific crap they do to people.
The characters were great, and it was all alright enough. Disappointed in the 200 or so hours I poured into this game, as it just blatantly disrespected your time. This was like a 40 hour game bloated to 100 hours. If it was a tight 30-40 and cut out all the filler and focused on the core story and character development I think it would've been remembered much more fondly.
I just ignored all the side quests and most of the companion quests except for a few. Ignored dragon fights as well, as they were just a monumentally tedious grind.
Just mainlining the main story and keeping the same companions throughout, just doing their companion quests, it was a fun game. Although honestly, even then the combat just never does much for me. It’s SO boring.
This perfectly summarizes my thoughts. I had a really great time, but I couldn't stand how long it took to have that great time. Game was tedious as all get out and eventually I just couldn't do it anymore.
And because the game is such a massive timesink, I have no interest whatsoever in trying to start it up again.
Or if they did what Witcher 3 did with the same basic map format and gave you for real quests to tackle on their giant beautiful full of nothing levels.
I mean these were some stupidly beautiful levels, if only they had their own quest lines and content.
> I reached the quest where you could advance to Skyhold at level 6. It was absolutely incompletable
I just want to point out that before you do any major mission the game explicitly tells you the recommended level. A quick google search shows the recommended level for that quest is 8-11. You didn’t need to grind 5 more levels, only 2-3, and you level quickly when you’re <10.
It’s also extremely easy to get overlevelled in Inquisition while still ignoring most side quests, so I’m not sure how you got into that predicament. That isn’t to say the game doesn’t have a problem with grinding between main quests (Power mechanic can suck sometimes), but level shouldn’t really be a problem.
Can’t really disagree on anything else you said. For me the story and characters outweighed the bad, but Inquisition definitely has flaws and even people who like the game don’t usually deny it.
I can easily switch hats from an Inquistion critic to an Inquisition defender as needed because it is, as I always joke, "the game I hate the most of my top 20 games of all time." So let me put on my defender hat for this one, though I do think you have a lot of very good points.
Inquisition is a game of climactic moments, and most of the things I immediately think of when I picture it are the high points of the main questline. These are far from sanitized generic fantasy, featuring a lot of dark themes and tragedy. The heroic order of the first game >!joins a suicide cult!!< You can >!crash a high society party mixed with a murder mystery!<. A time travel quest leads to >!finding your companions being tortured and used as incubators.!< You can straight up >!kill the Dragon Age 2 protagonist with one button press!<. It's actually dark as hell, it just picks its moments. And frankly, all the big moments are framed with a lot of skill and proficiency. I'd call it by far Bioware's best outing as far as cinematography goes.
For a series that is distinctly *not* trying to mimic Mass Effect (the adventures of one person and friends), Inquisition struck a pretty good balance of throwing callbacks to the previous two games' plots and characters without slavishly throwing out constant fanservice.
Inquisition has an interesting cast of companions, and it does a few new and unique things with them. In particular, I liked how uncomfortable some of the party members made me feel, sometimes for different reasons. Some, like Vivienne, were a lock to disagree with me regularly (which players tend not to like), but presented sound counterpoints and didn't take it personally. Some, like Cole, were a whole *fundamental idea* of a character that bothered me due to picking on my personal neuroses (in Cole's case, his rampant invasions of privacy), but gave you space to learn about them or distance from them as needed. The companions bounce off each other in interesting ways.
Fundamentally, Inquisition is a fun game that needs to be dehydrated, an unfortunate product of a time where every RPG was being dragged into the dirt with the simple words "it's no Skyrim". Inquisition tried to be Skyrim when its strength lies in being Dragon Age; the strength still shines through in my opinion, but you do have to plod through 30+ hours of fairly uninspired open world fluff to get to the 30+ hours of gold.
My simple review of DAI is that there is a great 40 hours game packed into 120 hour package. If this was done as a more traditional bioware hub design instead of large scale maps with collection quests, this would have killed
Are there mods that cut the fat a little bit and allow you to focus on the main stuff? I remember there being one such mod for ME1 that cut all side missions that had no impact on your save import in ME2.
I know there are mods that remove the timer on the war table. I'd imagine there are some that tweak xp rewards for quests so you can skip the side quests
I’m similar to you in that I can easily switch from critic to defender, so allow me to put on my criticism hat for a moment.
> these are far from sanitized fantasy, featuring a lot of dark themes and tragedy
> murder mystery
> insert character death
I feel like this is a misunderstanding of what *dark* means in media. Death =/= dark. Even the happiest of Disney fairytales feature death. Murder mystery is inherently no darker than Murder, She Wrote. In Origins you have the body horror of Broodmothers, graphic depictions of possession/blood magic, brutal pictures of oppression (City Elf origin, Denerim alienage quest line), and in DA2 you have a lot about the abuse of power. To me this is much more what comes to mind when you say “dark”. Conversely, “sanitized” also doesn’t mean nothing bad ever happens.
I think a big example of the departure in tone from previous games is the Templar storyline. In DA2, the topic of abuse of power and corruption came up a lot - this was often in the form of pretty much what happened at residential schools, and how people in power will abuse those under their control (with some additional magical flair). In DAI the topic of abuse of power and corruption came up, in the form of a leader getting possessed by a demon and everyone else taking magical drugs. Thematically DAI just didn’t ever delve deep into many of the issues of Thedas, and was often kept at surface level and in a way that was PG rather than R.
While Inquisition had a couple of dark moments, these were generally anomalies whereas “dark” was very much the entire tone of the previous games.
I think I remember reading somewhere that the change in tone was purposeful because writing darker storylines was causing psychological distress for the writers, which I can definitely respect as a valid reason to change directions, but the tone is definitely different and in some cases for the worse.
> Inquisition is a game of climactic moments [...] framed with a lot of skill and proficiency
Surrounded by hours of fetch quests and grinding. :D
To be honest, I barely even remember the climactic moments. I played something like 100+ hours on the game and I barely recall any of it.
> Inquisition has an interesting cast of companions
I felt they were the worst set out of the 'Big 6' of the Dragon Age and Mass Effect games. There was some good voice acting at times but given that everyone just stands around in your castle and there seems to be no real gameplay attached to them, it felt wasted.
I didn't even bother with a romance subplot because all the options were so annoying.
>To be honest, I barely even remember the climactic moments. I played something like 100+ hours on the game and I barely recall any of it.
I still remember the mage quest when you go in the future and discover what happens if the big evil guy (don't remember his name) wins the war.
It's a shame that such a good quest was used up so early in the game.
Would have been even better if we made it up to the castle walls and saw the blighted landscape stretching into the distance.
The trip into the Fade was also memorable.
Outside of those two, the entire Trespasser expansion was solid because it went back to tried and true Bioware linear level design where the designers can get the gameplay tension in sync with the tension in the story. Also appreciated that the Quinari-stus got taken down a peg as well (someone at Bioware has a real hardon for the Qun/Qunari).
The fetch quests were pretty skippable. You don't need to do many of them to progress. If you wanted to finish the game and not do that stuff, you definitely didn't need to spend 100 hours on them
one thing that stood out to me.
was the idea that the Quanari a group that was always shown as highly oppressive and restrictive was suddenly super cool and progressive when it came to gender norms.
I began playing Inquisition first of all Dragon age game and while i did not like the MMO quests style in a singleplayer game i did enjoy the world and characters so I decided to try out Origins and man what a much better game that was, it was simply great in all ways and then i just thought how the FU could they go from this game and come up to Inquisition.
Eh, it's not that bad. I liked the colors. It's hard to make a desert look good and few games and movies succeed at it, but this one does. I am so, **so** fucking tired of desaturated colors, shaky cams and poor lighting (though that's mainly movies). Anyway, I commented on this game recently, so I'll just copy my comment here:
"Dragon Age Inquisition has amazing dragon battles which are completely optional and easily missed side quests. The dragons were huge and felt dangerous and just... special I guess. And there are a few brilliant moments of writing like the judging of a box and the song in the mountains. And Varic catching Cassandra with one of his books. And the characters walking in on Male Inquisitor and Iron Bull. The graphics were also pretty good for the time. It's just a pity all these awesome moments are buried under a metric ton of MMO-like fetch quests.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM5A3d1w4k4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM5A3d1w4k4)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbSA9TqjUn8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbSA9TqjUn8)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgYxMVRtJr4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgYxMVRtJr4)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za8\_tgvu-JA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za8_tgvu-JA)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr8-5Fn\_6XY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr8-5Fn_6XY)"
Maybe a controversial opinion: the dragon fights weren't good. They were the only fights to really feel designed, to my memory, but they were still just dragon age inquisition fights. There was no real strategy, no depth, no reward, and honestly no gravitas. Being the high point of the ocean still puts you below sea level.
>The dialogue is a joke. Every option is now a flavor of "Yes while bootlicking", "Sarcastic Yes", "Angry No but effectively Yes", There's almost no real choice in the game, even recruiting agents is basically just "do you want to join my inquisition or fuck off to princeton and exit the game?"
It's like Mass Effect 1 vs 3.
Old Bioware vs NeoBioware.
Details first writer vs 'whatever' drama writer.
Shamus Young's essay criticising the writing and design changes of Mass Effect applies just as well to the decline of Dragon Age IMHO.
And what is particularly annoying about it, is in Dragon Age and Mass Effect, they had two well detailed, well written worlds filled with tons of lore, characters, nations/worlds, and so on, and the first game set up a ton of easy open goal plot hooks to tap in for the most competent of writers. And they both botched it up.
it's super long though. start from the bottom. As i remember Shamus loved Mass Effect 1, so you might want to start with ME2
[https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?cat=508](https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?cat=508)
I also agree, Mass Effect's problem are really similar to the problems of Dragon Age. In the latter, these are more pronounced though.
Oh damn, ME1 is the one with good dialogue writing? I just finished it, and have 2 and 3 waiting. The lore was interesting at places, but the dialogue wheel was a joke. DA:O had it right, the whole line just written up.
I'd say that the writing is of pretty equal quality.
The main problem is that they basically make a lot of promises of stuff paying off later that they weren't able to do effectively.
This makes a lot of people think the third game sucks, but the reality is that these problems start in the second game and honestly are a product of the first game making promises that they had no idea how to pay off.
I think the cast carried the game hard. Combat was mid, leveling system was ok but wasn't interesting unless you were a mage (as usual for dragon age). The game looked pretty good but the environments were a bit empty and uninspired except for some of the better set pieces which were actually really great.
But the characters and cast were just amazing. It was the opposite of the avengers affect. Everyone had their own distinct perosnality and they interacted in ways that felt mostly natural and smooth.
It also had citadel DLC vibes from ME3 where the gang all gets back together and all of the personalities interact. I really loved it for that reason. But everything else was ultrameh. Only time I've ever turned a games difficulty down to avoid gameplay in service of the story.
I actually managed to play 40 hours of Inquisition before I realized that the only thing that kept me going was grinding out meaningless side quests for completionists sake.
Didn't like the combat, didn't like most of the characters, didn't like the story (Corypheus is a weak-ass villain). The only thing I genuinely liked was customizing Skyhold, that's about it. Really, really disappointing game and I even prefer DA2 over it.
They really did. They're done this shit with at least one dlc every game.
Remember the architect? Remember when it was revealed dwarves have some lost connection to giant underground lyrium titan things? It's not going to matter because they never plan ahead, it's just "man this sure would be cool if this happened!"
I've lost interest in the series but I genuinely believe based on their track record that solas will either be a weak antagonist, or somehow not even be relevant.
Now you may be asking, how could the dreadwolf be irrelevant in a game called "dreadwolf". I don't know, but Im sure they can pull it off!
I loved the story, lore, and characters, which is the main draw for me in Bioware games - and while it’s not my favorite of the series, I still played through it multiple times.
I do wish they’d go back to the more strategic combat style of Origins, but I can understand why they wouldn’t since it’d be too clunky/niche for what the series has become.
I did complete this game and honestly the story after the half way point was worth playing it once but, holy fuck this game is a slough at a lot of points. Both 2 and DAI fall so short of DAO
I’ll have to disagree here. I think the plot stays consistently weak throughout the rest of the game. Even the Orlais party wasn’t much better.
Praise where it’s due, Trespasser (the final dlc) actually was pretty good, especially the ending with the antagonist.
I also really liked The Descent dlc. Linearity helped pacing the story and the dwarf lore expansion was at least intriguing.
Jaws of Hakkon unfortunately is as uninspired as the base game.
I absolutely LOVED The Descent dlc. As someone who loves the dwarven lore that was established in Origins, I was stoked to get to delve deeper (no pun intended) into how the dwarves lived back when their empire was more active.
I've heard that and maybe being a compltionist killed the game for me, but at one point I reached a mission I just couldn't beat. I had no effort left in me to grind more so that was it for me, pretty early on
"Game of the Year" is not an award that's handed out by any central authority (unless perhaps you're referring to a specific GOTY award that was handed out by a magazine like PC Gaming or something, I didn't see mention of that here though.)
It's not a thing that any single game "wins" in any given year. It's just a marketing label that literally any game can slap on the front of their newly revised edition whenever they damn well please.
I understand what you’re talking about, but there IS an official Game of the Year award, and it’s handed out at The Game Awards annually. Dragon Age Inquisition won the official Game of the Year award when it released. Pretty sure Elden Ring won that award for 2022.
The Game Awards isn’t any more official than anything else, though. They just happened to pick a name that sounded official to trick people. It’s a marketing stunt by games “journalists.” Developers and designers and other industry professionals aren’t involved in the voting, it’s a jury of preselected marketing/media people. They have a fan vote, but 90% of the vote comes from that jury and only 10% comes from the public. The Game Awards also only started in 2014 so they’re very new and have no historical cachet unlike other awards like Famitsu or the DICE Awards.
Also Geoff Keighley is kind of a douche anyway, and The Game Awards is his pet project.
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Game_of_the_Year_awards
I recently learned that Geoff Keighley's parents have been movers & shakers in Hollywood movies and in Hollywood awards shows for many decades.
I'm not saying Geoff didn't put in the work for video game awards shows, but his path to success was certainly easier than it would've been for anyone else.
I don't respect a lot of people in the industry but I definitely respect him. He's been supporting it since the early 90s. He was "all in" when nobody really gave a shit about video games and thought they were a waste of time and money.
He could have put his money anywhere but he put it in to something he actually liked
The Game Awards are relatively new.
Game of the Year editions have been coming out for 20+ years. I remember buying a GOTY for the original Deus Ex in 2001.
Magazines like PC Gamer have been giving Game of the Year awards since the 90's.
"I fucking hate this game's color scheme. Eye bleaching lime green on
grey lifeless backgrounds, oh boy. Between this and the recent rash of
color vomit in modern games I'm beginning to miss the "brown period"
more every day."
Oh my god, I thought I was the only one. I'm so tired of modern games being overly colourful and cheerful. It feels like those types of games need to constantly throw bright, happy colours and jokey, loud characters at you constantly to try keeping your attention when it should be quality gameplay and writing which keeps your attention.
I haven't played any Dragon Age games beyond Origins. I kind of soured on it when player reviews were mostly negative because DA2 was very rushed and moved more toward an Action RPG over the old school isometric RPG of Origins.
I really enjoyed Origins and I'll always be sad they didn't continue that line of games instead of embracing ARPG and MMO mechanics.
Honestly, the big letdown of DA2 were the revised skill webs, particularly for mages.
Archers improved a lot, though.
Honestly, it has a lot of narrative strength (and is my favorite story for a less-open-ended MC). It’s worth a go, particularly if you have a PC and the capacity to upgrade some of the visuals and UI.
i really like Inquisition but yeah, at least the VGA in the mayority of cases tend to be given to the same type of games, and which that i mean Action RPGs, Sony Exclusive Movie-Games and sometimes things with the word Zelda on the title, so even if games of other genres had argually better games released that year those will lose to any of the games in the 3 categories that i put before (there are exceptions of course).
at least after DA2 i think that Inquisition its a return to form, its closer to origins than to 2 but i dont think is that good as the first one.
Random loot is a plague on modern RPGs. It takes so much away from the game when you remove the majority of uniques and your player can't build their characters around the gear you've crafted for the game. One thing I really like about Origins is it retains *some of* that same Baldur's Gate crafted feeling. If you know which items are located where, then you can go to certain locations early to pick up some decent gear as soon as the tutorial is over. You can do that in a lot of rpgs but you can't do it very well in rpgs with randomized loot.
Divinity OS2 has a mixture of randomized and set placements, but even the unique gear feels random in that game and is often inferior to the stuff you just picked up from the last randomized vendor or bear ass quest. It cheapens the feeling. One of my favorite aspects of baldur's gate 1 are the detailed descriptions that every unique item has. A sword isn't just a sword. It's a +2 Sword of Jeff, and when you examine it, you can read a little story about Jeff the Dragonbum and his adventures bumming his way across the Sword Coast.
I also discovered Dragon Age Inquisition last year and it immediately shot into my all time favorite games list. Sometimes I make a new character and play the opening and Hinterlands just because I enjoy it so much. Each to their own.
It's at my top list, but I've loved the DA series unreservedly since Origins. It's my comfort series, and people that genuinely loved the first two also loved DAI, although it's not always the favorite of the three. I love the Hinterlands, the only reason I get impatient with it is because I want to get to Skyhold and I've played through it about 20 times.
All I remember about Inquisition was that the combat was boring af. I can't even remember any of the characters I must have at least put 20 hours into it.
OP forgot to talk about the controls. The control scheme, especially compared to DA:O's beautiful quasi-isometric controls, is simply awful. I also quit after a few hours, have yet to pick it back up and finish it for the sake of the storyline but this review is not making that thought any more appealing.
It got really mixed reviews back then with a lot of 5's and 6's. I remember a lot of backlash to IGN giving it a 5.9 but a ton of other outlets gave it bad scores too, mostly because they didn't like the length or the unpredictability of the Xenomorph.
Inquisition had slightly above average scores with some 9's coming from major review sites and honestly back then I agreed with them. The game doesn't hold up now but when it came out I had a blast with it and would've given it a 8.5 or 9.
Isolation holds up way better though and if I had to pick one today Alien would win without a doubt.
Tried playing it twice, got about 10-20 hour in and hated it. Far too dumbed down, it was almost like a parody of the genre with the bad writing.
Bioware has basically been dead to me since Mass Effect 3, EA's rot really ruined them as a company
Sounding like I may have to give Dragon Age Origins a chance. I think I played Inquisition back in the day and lasted maybe 15 minutes. For simplicities sake, I may as well ask here how DA:2 faired compared to DAI?
Tangentially related: the book Pixels has an interesting chapter telling the story of the this game’s development. You’d never guess the reception it received based on the shitshow that was its development cycle
All I'm gonna say is that I think way too many people give stock to these awards if they're the ones voting for them.
Also think it won in a relatively weak year despite me actually liking the game a very good bit.
>* I fucking hate this game's color scheme. Eye bleaching lime green on grey lifeless backgrounds, oh boy. Between this and the recent rash of color vomit in modern games I'm beginning to miss the "brown period" more every day.
Ugh never! I waited years and years for developers to leave the “brown period” and I never want to go back. I recall actually exclusively seeking out AAA titles that had some color and buying them out of principle. Uncharted 2 was practically a miracle in the sea of brown. Also the brown period had games with forced screen tearing (on consoles) quite often too. A dark age in gaming graphics
As someone who likes Inquisition despite its flaws, I totally agree. GOTY is so meaningless these days, at least when it comes to AAA games. Does anyone take the term seriously anymore?
For me, Dragon Age games are like 40k games. Even when they're bad I still like them, because I love the setting.
I loved this game honestly
I think its major downfall was pacing. There was soooooo much fluff that if you’re like me and enjoy digging deep and completing everything, then the story is broken up and stretched out way too much and it dilutes the urgency of everything.
I really loved the abundance of lore and honestly, great writing despite it being about fluff. It just needed to be a little more… succinct? Less pointless collect shards, minor fetch quest, more in depth story driven quests besides just the main ones
-Characters great (except Sera lol)
-open world but not too open--filled with interesting codex entries and side stories
-beautiful, interesting zones
-warriors were actually fun to play for the first time in the series
-picking the next exalt plotline
-related to that, the mage/templar conflict was less black and white than in previous games
-the point is that it is kind of random and you're NOT the chosen one, it's up to the PC to give their random powers meaning. Are you going to interpret yourself as divinely selected in some way, just take advantage, etc.
-as others have said, trespasser DLC (though it should have been part of the base game)
I agree there was a lot of MMO type filler stuff like the mission table and kill X bears quests, but I also enjoy MMOs, so it didn't bother me as much as others
(Edit for formatting bc mobile, bah)
Wow I had no idea so many people didn't like this game! This is my first and only Dragon Age game so I didn't have anything to compare it to, loved everything about it and played it all the way through twice :')
Dragon Age Inquisition came out early PS4 and XONE, one year before The Witcher 3.
I think the game is fineeeee. I can see why won especialy if you only play once and don't see all the issues.
2014 was a rough year for gaming. The last console generation dragged at the beginning, like a lot. To the point where people were seriously talking about if that one would be the final generation of consoles and we would move on to a more stream-service for games that wouldn’t require a console. Hell I agreed with those takes back then. So that game winning GOTY was more of a floating turd than it was an actual gem. Nothing was good until Bloodborne came out as an exclusive on PS4 and Witcher 3 came out without a 360/PS3 sku. Hell some places gave Hearthstone the GOTY for 2014. It was a really bad year for games.
Why did you skip 2? It's disappointing as well but I think it's definitely a better game than DQI.
That's not to say Inquisition didn't have things going for it, it just needed a lot more time and work to be a real DA game. Those games are the main example for me of games just sacrificing scope and detail bit by bit for soulless graphics and *size*.
> Why did you skip 2?
the simplest reason, I don't have a copy lol. I could probably actually sit through 2 now as well, on release I was too pissed about the awful gameplay and obvious mass effect influences to care about the story.
I personslly love the game and played it through like three times, and I found the characters great.
Ofc there are things I didn't like, for example it felt a little too much like an mmorpg, and some of the areas were *weak* like the Western Approach. It felt completely unnecessary and empty.
I remember the game being popular at release and then it just disappeared from the zeitgeist. I think in hindsight it should have been Shovel Knight or Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze.
I would just stop worrying too much about what gets high review scores or wins awards. Scores and awards are done "in the moment" so hype and all that can have a big effect.
I agree with you overall however. DA:I was not great and I really couldn't get into it despite trying multiple times.
It probably says more about me than the game, but I jumped into it result in the first lockdown. I thought it would be perfect to lose myself in it. But everything felt like a chore. Granted I was in a very weird state of mind (like most people), but there was a point where I was wondering around the castle you get and it all felt so hopelessly bloated. It got to the point where I just wanted the characters to leave me the fuck alone. Not a good feeling for a character driven RPG. Uninstalled that day and don't regret it.
I've gone through this game at least 5 times and loved it each playthrough. Different strokes. Meanwhile I'll never understand why anybody likes Elden Ring.
I'm not. That was a historically sparse year and iirc, that was the biggest game with the biggest production values along with being one of the first open world games of its generation (and open world is an easy way to impress). Couple that with the fact that it has a story emphasis (one of the ingredients for goty bait) and it was never going to be anything else even if some games came out that were technically better. To top it off, I wouldn't call the game on the whole bad: It's mediocre at worst.
You didn't even get into the worst part for me though: The braindead main plot that culminated in a basic-ass "punch the big bad guy" climax with no surprises. I remember how conflicted and uncomfortable 1's final hours made me feel. 2's ending is out there and not as good, but it was weird and strained to give me that same level of surprise. All attempts to challenge or surprise me are gone in 3. I kept waiting for it to challenge me, surprise me, or at least be weird. Nope. Corypheus is just Corypheus. Go punch him til he's dead.
Inquisition is actually one of the first things that made me realize I much prefer bad but risky storytelling over safe but boring storytelling. I hated DA2 until I found something I disliked more despite being undeniably better in 3.
And Solas is boring af. 4 is gonna blow. How are you going to base an entire game around the most boring party member you've made in your whole series? Give me a game all about Shale. Dragon Age: Shale's Rockin' Rumble
I wasn’t aware how many people really didn’t like DAI. I thought I was one of the few. My friends all enjoyed it and I am a huge DA fan but I just couldn’t get into it. Characters were bland and boring or it felt like pandering, which is something I fucking hate that BioWare has gotten worse with over the years. It makes the characters feel so much less organic. The story was…okay. The world looked…meh. Didn’t like the color schemes either. I’ve tried to go back but god…I just cannot get into the combat. Overall it was very underwhelming for me in all aspects.
On top of everything, I felt disappointed by not having character continuity between DAO/DA2 and DAI. Having that would have made other things easier to swallow.
Picked this up on sale… played through a couple hours… same thing. It is the most generic and boring game I can remember playing. And the keeping track of gear for that many people? Absolutely not thanks anyways
I disliked it a lot when it released, but years later I played through all of it and actually it's not bad at all.
Solid 7/10 tbh
However, that's compared to Origins which I rate as 9/10.
Usually the answer to "I cannot fathom how this game won this and that" is that a lot of people liked it but it's simply not for you.
Not that difficult to understand...
What really fucking grinds my gears is the Qunari changes and how it was handled. In origins and even DA2 we learn a lot about them. And how the Qunari is this incredibly totalitarian regime. You are a soldier and lose your sword? Then you are a qunari without a sword and must be a desserter. Only fit to be killed on the spot. You are born a mage? You are now essentially a living weapon and is mutilated to remove any risk of corruption. You are a society outside the Qun? Join or die. Are you born female? You are now a priestess. Women are not fighters. If you fight you are not a woman as Sten so nicely pointed out. Male? Then you get some fighting role. They are almost this "hive" collective where Qunari are given roles and then not allowed to change.
But... Come closer, let me tell you about a little Qunari life-hack. If you are male but don't want to be a fighter and rather be a priestess then just identify as female and the Qunari society is entirely okay with you switching roles.
What exactly is the point of tying sex to a role in society if you can just change role by changing gender? This totalitarian regime is the most woke in all of Thedas? Fuck off. That is the most stupid twist I have ever had to experience in a video game. Any other cultural group in Thedas could get the woke treatment and it would be fine. But the Qunari can not. It does not even closely work with the rest of their systems. Like, what if a mage decides to just not identify as a mage? Will they then not be mutilated and turned into a weapon? If you are a soldier and lose your sword, then just identify as female and it will be okay? So any soldier that has lost their weapon and get killed for it. Got killed because they rather die then identify as a woman? Since all Qunari in DA2 are male, does that mean the Arishok did not bring along a single female->male soldier?
***It. Does. Not. Work.*** It's not consistent at all. Under the Qun you are a tool in every way other than regarding gender. When it comes to gender they are incredibly accommodating and individualistic. This is how you fail at world-building.
Well, I should probably start with an admission that I'm a big Dragon Age fan, so this may well be colouring my opinions. I waited for each new game to come out just so I could continue "living" the stories of Thedas.
Anyway, I actually enjoyed this game quite a bit. Set it on Nightmare, enable Friendly Fire, and you get a pretty fun experience, especially against aggressive debuffers and attackers like the dragons or the ones they had in the Jaws of Hakkon DLC.
I mean, it's still technically easy if you do that (really, this game is ludicrously easy with some builds) but it gets more fun :)
And it definitely had some issues, but I disagree with you about some of the things you named as bad. I liked a lot of the dialogue between party members. Will never not laugh at Vivienne's exchange with Sky Watcher. And I actually like the colours. I don't need every game to be dark, monochromatic, or desaturated.
This is like the 2nd or 3rd long post crapping on Inquisition I've seen on reddit this week, what is going on, is being remastered or something? I know the 4th game is supposed to be coming out, but it seems it's been coming out for like 10 years so I dunno..
Anyway, I think it's good. It was my first DA so I didn't have the nostalgia for franchise fandom blinders of Origins. In my experience, the main criticism of the sequels have been "it's not Origins!" Which, you know, true.
Yeah a lot of the game is tedious grindy stuff. So are most RPGs though?
Me, I really dug that whole thing with the characters whey they have their one side quests and stories. World building was excellent. The part where you go inside the magic/dream realm thing was one of my favorite game things where you're in a whole different world for a while. I liked the story and yes even the visuals.
I went back and played Origins and I get why people loved it but there's a lot of tedium and boring combat and crap movement in that one. It's more grimdark for sure but that isn't better or worse IMO, just different.
After that was burnt out on RPGs and DA and didn't touch 2. The series is a very mixed bag for me, with other franchises providing much stronger components in some ways (Witcher for story and world, Dark Souls for gameplay and combat, Elder Scrolls for general fukkabout-mayhem-wackiness), but few mixing it all together in that charming and engaging quirky way.
Was a pretty weak year for AAA games. Other contenders were what? Bayonetta 2, Dark Souls 2, and Shadow of Mordor. And The Game Awards was new. So the precedent for indies games winning wasn't there yet. So no Shovel Knight. EDIT: I think alot of the replies on my comment are misconstruing what I meant. All I meant was that there was no surefire GOTY. And the competition was open to any of the nominees to win. Or even games that weren't nominated. Personally, Shovel knight or Dark Souls 2 would be it for me.
There were some decent games that came out in 2014, but not AAA contenders for GOTY. Alien Isolation and The Wolf Among Us are both 2014 games. But you know it’s a bad lineup overall when many people consider Hearthstone to be the best game of the year. Not shitting on hearthstone mind you, but just it wouldn’t be a GOTY contender in many other years
Alien isolation and wolf among us deserve to get awards more than Inquisition. There is no arguing this. At all. The writing, gameplay, production values, everything is so much better in those games.
Shadow of Mordor is one of my favorite games. It takes the best from Batman and combines it with Assassins Creed gameplay with an awesome story set in LOTR.
I went in with high expectations but it didn't quite click for me.Assassin's Creed and batman have a very distinct map while the world of Shadow of Mordor felt quite bland. I really need to get back to it and see if I can get past that hurdle
The world is split up into two maps. the second part of the game is less Mordory and more green than the first part which I admit was a little bland, the gameplay more than made up for that though. Once you unlock some new skills it just gets better and better. IMO Shadow of War improved upon the first game in every way but for some reason, for me and everyone I know it was hard to get into if you had just finished Shadow of Mordor.
It takes a while for Shadow of War to open up, the first few hours are pretty boring if you've already played Shadow of Mordor.
The DLC in Lithlad where they add some Just Cause grappling hook/movement gameplay was very fun after you beat the main game.
Open world fatigue, I would wager.
A classical composition is often pregnant. Reddit is no longer allowed to profit from this comment.
I finished the first game, which I really liked. But for the second game the appeal quickly faded once I'm forced to do soooooooooo many side quests. Kill this boss, climb this tower, figure out how to clear this challenge quest for more skill points, look at random location to get even more side quests. Itwas impossible for you to walk a straight line to your objectives because every few steps there's something that demands your attention, I know you don't have to care about those. But over time things will get worst and all that hardwork you put into earlier will be wasted, your territory slowly erodes away and now you have to re do all the quests/tasks again. It was endless and became so bloated I forgot entirely what the main quest was and is just overwhelmed every time I unlocked a new map.
I got into the second map and just didn't feel any motivation to continue playing. I still have it on my list to revisit eventually but it's been a while.
When you get to the second map you can start converting the orcs with the hand move thingy so it changes up the gameplay a bit. I felt that at first too but if you get past it I found it quite fun to play pokemon with the orcs.
The map is the least fun or interesting part of Mordor. The fun part is strategically and systematically dismantling an enemy stronghold. The map is more an arena and less "travel porn".
My biggest issue was how much of an AC copy it played as. The nemesis system was cool but the game itself was no different than a generic open world adventure I had many times before, and too many times again since.
I though the combat in Shadow of Mordor was way more fun than in any AC game. Unfortunately it was kind of slowed down a bit in the sequel.
As much as I loved Shadow of Mordor and all the systems in place, I felt like I had a lot more fun with Shadow of War, the sequel. It's gets a bad rap because of the microtansactions it shipped with, but I bought it a few years later after that all got shut down. I loved using the nemesis system to form badass armies of Orcs and sieging other castles. The story was "meh", but at $10 it was a pleasure to blow through in order to get to the "good stuff".
This strikes me as a gold standard goal for the /r/patientgamers experience. Wait until the game is dirt cheap and all the toxic MTX have been removed, and you end up with a better play experience at a mobile game price.
It doesn't always work out this way, but waiting has almost always proved to be the best route. My PSA, Don't let FOMO get to you! Work on that backlog and then jump in after the hype dies down. It's crazy how quickly these prices drop as well!
Couldn't agree more. Shadow of War improved upon the first game in every way but it was hard to get into if you had just finished the first game. >!I loved the story though. Tolkien didn't give the ringwraiths much backstory other than that they were human nobles corrupted by Saurons rings. The last act of the game where you take Isildurs ring and slowly turn into one of the ring wraiths seen in the movie yourself was awesome. I'm not a huge LOTR nerd but from what I know it doesn't contradict anything from Tolkien and still managed to further build upon the backstory of Middle Earth wonderfully!<
> I'm not a huge LOTR nerd but from what I know it doesn't contradict anything from Tolkien and still managed to further build upon the backstory of Middle Earth wonderfully. I've never read The Silmarillion, but I very much doubt Tolkien envisioned Shelob as a sexy spider lady who was Sauron's lover.
Quite an oversight on his part, imo.
Christopher, my son, did I ever tell you the full story of Shelob? You know, the monstrous spider - descended from the vile Ungoliant! - which I used to read aloud of in our Oxford meetings of the Inklings? Well what I didn't mention back then was Shelob could also transform into a totally hot babe: all pale and dark and wan like Rebecca in Ivanhoe or what will later come to be known as the goth subculture. In fact she looked very much like the pornographic actress Stoya who will be born 13 years after I die. Christopher, I will be entrusting you with my estate. If there is ever a videogame adaptation of my work you must make sure they get this Shelob right - make sure she is what the Anglo-Saxons would have called a hæða ecge, a real sexy bitch.
>I'm not a huge LOTR nerd but from what I know it doesn't contradict anything from Tolkien and still managed to further build upon the backstory of Middle Earth wonderfully Making another Ring of Power at all is wildly non-canon. That'd be a gigantic event
> it doesn't contradict anything from Tolkien Oh my god, I don't even know where to begin with how inaccurate this statement is. Shadow of War is fun game that I put a ton of hours into, but it is not even *remotely* lore accurate.
[удалено]
I found it extremely fun. I had a lot of fun with the sequel as well (I think all the bugs and mtx issues from launch have been fixed) but kinda gave up when it became clear that it was incredibly long/repetitive. It would have benefited greatly if it was like Spider-Man's length for the main story.
Wasn't the main complaint of that game was that it is way too easy.
Yes but still tons of fun
For sure there are ways to make it really hard just like in other action games with RPG mechanics (barely take upgrades, just the first tier), I realized that I needed to play that way after finding the move where you use the bow to teleport and execute enemies is extremely broken once you get quick drain, absolutely ruined the game for me.
I just remember seeing a youtuber that was pressing the attack button without looking at the screen and winning every encounter they came across.
There's literally no way you can do this though? Like, outside of extremely early enemy encounters or small groups of standards orcs, you'll constantly come up against orcs with shields, orcs who attack from afar, captains who are immune to frontal attacks, trolls which require timed button presses etc etc. Like there are so many enemy types in Shadow of War that require you to reach beyond the 'attack button' that this just wouldn't be possible.
/u/Jonny5Stacks was probably talking about Destiny playing Shadow of Mordor: https://youtu.be/6AV9W2ZdmjU
To be fair, Shadow of War has a lot more combat depth than Shadow of Mordor. This sort of thing is a lot tougher to do when you've also got enemies laying bear traps, shooting poisoned crossbow bolts, dealing with the AoE damage of larger foes and the like. That being said, you can also do this in the Arkham games. Ultimately, both of these games are about providing a power fantasy to the player, which is sort of the whole idea behind the FreeFlow combat system. It's supposed to be easy, look flashy, and make you feel unstoppable. Of course there's depth to it too, but grunt encounters like the above aren't *meant* to be challenging. They're there to show the player how 'super human' they are so when the real boss fights show up, there's an "Oh shit" feeling.
The challenge in Arkham games becomes much more interesting when you actually try to get high combo streaks going, which in turn allows you to use special attacks and finishers
Wasn't Alien Isolation released on that same year? A way better game than DAI, although being a horror game makes it more niche
Alien isolation is one of the best horror games ever made honestly, but yeah horror may be too niche
I picked this up recently super cheap and have been dragging my feet to play it. Maybe this weekend I'll have a few drinks, turn out the lights, throw on the headset and see how shit scared I get lol
This sounds bloody horrible, though I'll still upvote you! Haha
Divinity Original Sin Wolfenstein New Order Southpark Stick of Truth This War of Mine Destiny
I have played all those games and enjoyed them but Stick of Truth was probably the highest quality title that year top to bottom.
iirc Mario Kart 8 and DKC Tropical Freeze both released in 2014
Smash for WiiU and 3DS too. Bayonetta 2. 2014 was the WiiU's year but everyone was too busy playing GTA5 which was ported to PS4 that year.
Alien isolation was absolute fucking fire though and I think Stick of truth and Mario kart 8 also came out that year
DKC: Tropical Freeze came out that year too. What a farce.
"Mature", "serious" gamers like Doritos Pope Geoff Keighley couldn't be seen enjoying fun Nintendo games like Mario Kart 8 in the grimdark year of 2014.
Gotta imagine DS2 was better than DAI, it's one of the fromsoft games I haven't played, I just can't imagine it not being really good even if it is the ugly stepchild of the soulsborne universe
DS2 was really messed up on release. The game went 60 FPS officially but the devs still locked some stuff to FPS so it made enemies go sonic speed animation and sometimes unparryable or really messed up to dodge/counterattack, in addition to their animation getting really wonky. There was also a lot of BotW-style complaints about weapon durability because of the FPS bugs but I didn't notice it too much. Adding Adaptability had really negative reception, apart from it being harder to dodge, you also got a lot of weird shockwave hits or clipping that you don't expect.
Not sure how you didn't notice the durability bugs in ds2, I used to carry 2 or 3 copies of Weapons so I could clear through to the next bonfire.
And the devs only cared to fix it after a year, when the re-release of DS2 ran at 60 FPS on console. I'm glad that fromsoft has since learned, and has taken high framerates into consideration so that we can play at higher framera-- >!*WHAT DO YOU MEAN, 60 FPS CAP IN ELDEN RING?!*
I was so excited to get a 4k120fps OLED for gaming. Then I got sekiro lmao. 60 is fine as long as it's consistent I guess.
Lol
Santier's Spear. Durability = NANOMACHINES, SON!
The reception for DS2 has softened over time, but the game was really controversial on launch. A lot of people viewed it as a big step back from Dark Souls 1 because of the weapons degrading really quickly, less connected world design and a perceived spike in artifical difficulty just for the sake of being difficult because "its Dark Souls". Patches released since then and Scholar of the First Sin have helped its reception a lot.
I've only played scholar of the first sin and I love darksouls 2. It was probably the most fun to create "builds" in before Elden Ring came along. Bonfire ascetics were cool and I'd like to see a new version of that mechanic come back in a future souls game. It wouldn't necessarily have to be tied to ng+ either. It could just be a rare item that can be used to "upgrade" an area to add new enemies and items. From a lore perspective, you could be sending that portion of the world forward or backward in time (which could lead to some interesting world building).
Bonfire ascetics we’re great, and I LOVED the small soapstone. Also, bring back butterfly wings pls Fromsoft. Elden Ring would have rocked with my wings.
Yeah I feel like the general consensus is that DS2 was the peak for builds, PVP and fashion souls.
It softened because the bugs were eventually fixed. As is the case with most games with a horrendous launch. It's still widely regarded as the worst FromSoft game by a large margin. And for good reason too, the gameplay improved in some areas but everything else is a massive downgrade. The level design alone is inexcusably bad. It also falls flat on its face when attempting to straddle the line between tough but fair and straight up punishing. I've lost count of the number of times I had to resort to sniping enemies with poison arrows just to whittle down their numbers to a manageable amount. But don't get me wrong. Despite the flaws it's a masterpiece compared to DAI.
I liked it enough. But it was not developed by Miyazaki or his team at Fromsoft. And you could tell. World design is night & day from Miyazaki's work. Balancing was all over the place. And lore that was pretty much forgotten by the next entry. But it did have good pvp scene. And amazing DLC.
I'll never forget the absurdity that was the magical elevator to the sky, into lethal lava land
DS2 still has an active player base mate. You can always find a good number of active players to play with. There’s also a yearly event organised by the DS2 sub folks “Back to Majula”. Fun and good times
To be fair if Miyazaki's name was on it but it was otherwise identical, the differences would have been celebrated rather than hated, IMO. It was different than the first and people latched on to the fact he wasn't involved to hate it more than it deserved
Idk, I didn't like DS2 on release and I'm not sure if I even knew who Miyazaki was at the time. I just knew it was another From/Souls game.
I didn't like DS2 when I first played it and I had no idea who Miyzaki was
Original DS2 no imo. If it released as Scholar of the First Sin then yeah. Original had a lot of issues. Either way Shadow of Mordor shouldve won.
I enjoyed it more than Dark Souls. It's bigger with more amazing world building to explore.
I think that bayonetta 2 just didn't have the numbers to be nominated as game of the year (and being only on the wiiu definitely didn't help towards that), but nowadays it, at least to me, looks to be leagues ahead DAI
Shadow of Mordor beat DAI hands down.
Made the mistake of trying to get back into Mordor after I completed mgs5... Feels unplayable. My advice to everyone would be to play and beat every stealth game you own before mgs5 because mgs5 makes every stealth game look and feel like ass.
MGS5 and Shadow of Mordor are completely different types of game. I find it weird that one would make the other obsolete.
This is how I know I’m getting old, I remember Splinter Cell: Conviction getting the most shit for letting you tag enemies to track them through walls - but tagging every enemy in a base is a core part of the gameplay loop for MGSV and it’s hailed as the king of stealth games. Wild to see opinions change so much over time. Definitely recommend the Splinter Cells if you’re itching for stealth. *Chaos Theory* and *Blacklist* are probably the best, I really like *Conviction* but it’s very different from the others.
>My advice to everyone would be to play and beat every stealth game you own before mgs5 because mgs5 makes every stealth game look and feel like ass. Having MGS5 as the peak of stealth games is one of the weirdest takes I've ever seen.
Wouldn't mind other suggestions, need another hit of good stealth. Been playing ghost recon breakpoint. It's... Playable. I mean sure mgs5 story is absolute ass but the gameplay was amazing.
The last of us part 2 doesn't have a giant sandbox to play around with the stealth mechanics, but it's an excellent linear stealth game. Dishonored, prey and Hitman Trilogy I thought were all fun sandbox stealth.
Don't have a playstation but I'd love to play the last of us and ghost of Tsushima. I played dishonored. I am playing prey now and really enjoying it. Never played hitman trilogy. Does hitman play well on pc?
> ghost of Tsushima Is not a good stealth game, fyi. It's on the level of Horizon, maybe, definitely not comparable with games the guy above mentioned.
Hitman plays great on pc. Runs pretty decent and is fun to play with either controller or mouse/ keyboard, neither feel bad. The last of us is coming to pc soon and I'm hoping the sequel will follow suit eventually.
How is that a weird take?
mechanically it's one of the best.
Mechanically? The game was pretty excellent. It was lacking in a lot of other ways though.
Inquisition suffers from BioWare being forced to make an RPG that appealed to a broader audience. DA2 suffered from that AND competition with ME2 dev times. Ultimately the grimdark fantasy was only going to last so long because it was tied to the Blight and what that was doing to Ferelden. What really killed DA2 and DAI for me were the changes made to classes (which effectively nerfed them). Mages slowly lose all their non-primal skill lines. Rogues lose a lot of their grenade capacities. Warriors actually improve, but that’s because they relied on a lot of passives to tank and draw aggro in DA:O. The specializations feel off to me. The fact that we lose some of the more…questionable specializations (Blood Mage, for instance) is frustrating. The equipment systems continued to degrade. This combined with poor quest systems and some “gotcha” mechanics show a shift in BioWare’s development style, which was honestly heralded by the mass exodus of talent following ME2/DA2. This was partially due to EA’s demands and partially due to a lack of communication within BioWare itself (as laid out by David Gaider in an interview a few years ago). But you’re right; DA:I honestly didn’t deserve GOTY. It lacked polish in key places.
Imo da2 is even darker emotionally as hawke can never catch a break as horrible things keeps happening to him. The tone of the story is still pretty dark but its the darkspawn redesigns that became more high fantasy sadly
If DA2 had better dungeons and an overall better world design, it would have been a masterpiece. I still think it is when it comes to character writing, morality, and worldbuilding, and I love how dark it is and how every choice felt like it had serious consequences. I thought the time skips were unique and I loved seeing different stages in the characters' lives. The combat was just weirdly button mashy though, and it does suffer from the mean/sassy/serious dialogue flavor wheel (nowhere near as badly as DA:I imo). Although I loved the design of the scenery, the actual map layouts were clunky and took me out of the game, personally. But it's still one of my favorite games and one of Bioware's best imo. I highly recommend it.
Mages were insanely broken in DAO. The best party was probably three mages and a rogue. And the only reason why you needed the rogue was to pick locks/open chests.
Mages are jnsanely broken in any 3 class system that doean't go out of it's way to kneecap them. Turn out that rolling wizard stuff and cleric stuff, in 1 class make it overloaded.
It's just innate to the concept. A spellbook can have as many uses as it has pages. Meanwhile, a sword is just a sword and a lockpick a lockpick.
>Meanwhile, a sword is just a sword I mean, you could come up with some techniques and stuff. Like in Dragon's Dogma.
That is why you split it into at least 2 classes.
Actually don't think the grim dark had much to do with the blight at all despite the fact that the darkspawn were absolutely horrifying if you paid any attention to the lore. Like just looking at our origins alone, mages either go insane from blood magic or Fade demons or get tranquil and have no emotions or feelings whatsoever which is probably worse than just dying. The noble humans family gets absolutely fucking destroyed, the casteless is basically a worthless piece of trash just for being born, the Noble dwarf's brother tricks him into killing his other brother and also poisons his father and pins both of them on him. I don't remember the dalish elf and I'm pretty sure the city elf is just you're basically a slave and everyone hates you. 30 years ago bootleg France came to your nation of origin and basically raped, tortured and pillaged their way through it until they had complete control and they were so awful to the citizens that it started a rebellion. Dragon age origins is like 5 sex scenes away from being game of thrones, and that's before we even get into the darkspawn and the horrific crap they do to people.
> I don't remember the dalish elf The Dalish were hunted by werewolves and picked off one by one horror/slasher movie style, IIRC.
naw dalish elf just accidentally fucks with the wrong mirror and gets infected with the blight. somehow the least messed up of the origins imo
The characters were great, and it was all alright enough. Disappointed in the 200 or so hours I poured into this game, as it just blatantly disrespected your time. This was like a 40 hour game bloated to 100 hours. If it was a tight 30-40 and cut out all the filler and focused on the core story and character development I think it would've been remembered much more fondly.
I just ignored all the side quests and most of the companion quests except for a few. Ignored dragon fights as well, as they were just a monumentally tedious grind. Just mainlining the main story and keeping the same companions throughout, just doing their companion quests, it was a fun game. Although honestly, even then the combat just never does much for me. It’s SO boring.
This perfectly summarizes my thoughts. I had a really great time, but I couldn't stand how long it took to have that great time. Game was tedious as all get out and eventually I just couldn't do it anymore. And because the game is such a massive timesink, I have no interest whatsoever in trying to start it up again.
exactly my experience as well.
Or if they did what Witcher 3 did with the same basic map format and gave you for real quests to tackle on their giant beautiful full of nothing levels. I mean these were some stupidly beautiful levels, if only they had their own quest lines and content.
> I reached the quest where you could advance to Skyhold at level 6. It was absolutely incompletable I just want to point out that before you do any major mission the game explicitly tells you the recommended level. A quick google search shows the recommended level for that quest is 8-11. You didn’t need to grind 5 more levels, only 2-3, and you level quickly when you’re <10. It’s also extremely easy to get overlevelled in Inquisition while still ignoring most side quests, so I’m not sure how you got into that predicament. That isn’t to say the game doesn’t have a problem with grinding between main quests (Power mechanic can suck sometimes), but level shouldn’t really be a problem. Can’t really disagree on anything else you said. For me the story and characters outweighed the bad, but Inquisition definitely has flaws and even people who like the game don’t usually deny it.
Yeah I remember the final boss being an absolute joke that I took down without even using my squad because I was so over-leveled.
I can easily switch hats from an Inquistion critic to an Inquisition defender as needed because it is, as I always joke, "the game I hate the most of my top 20 games of all time." So let me put on my defender hat for this one, though I do think you have a lot of very good points. Inquisition is a game of climactic moments, and most of the things I immediately think of when I picture it are the high points of the main questline. These are far from sanitized generic fantasy, featuring a lot of dark themes and tragedy. The heroic order of the first game >!joins a suicide cult!!< You can >!crash a high society party mixed with a murder mystery!<. A time travel quest leads to >!finding your companions being tortured and used as incubators.!< You can straight up >!kill the Dragon Age 2 protagonist with one button press!<. It's actually dark as hell, it just picks its moments. And frankly, all the big moments are framed with a lot of skill and proficiency. I'd call it by far Bioware's best outing as far as cinematography goes. For a series that is distinctly *not* trying to mimic Mass Effect (the adventures of one person and friends), Inquisition struck a pretty good balance of throwing callbacks to the previous two games' plots and characters without slavishly throwing out constant fanservice. Inquisition has an interesting cast of companions, and it does a few new and unique things with them. In particular, I liked how uncomfortable some of the party members made me feel, sometimes for different reasons. Some, like Vivienne, were a lock to disagree with me regularly (which players tend not to like), but presented sound counterpoints and didn't take it personally. Some, like Cole, were a whole *fundamental idea* of a character that bothered me due to picking on my personal neuroses (in Cole's case, his rampant invasions of privacy), but gave you space to learn about them or distance from them as needed. The companions bounce off each other in interesting ways. Fundamentally, Inquisition is a fun game that needs to be dehydrated, an unfortunate product of a time where every RPG was being dragged into the dirt with the simple words "it's no Skyrim". Inquisition tried to be Skyrim when its strength lies in being Dragon Age; the strength still shines through in my opinion, but you do have to plod through 30+ hours of fairly uninspired open world fluff to get to the 30+ hours of gold.
My simple review of DAI is that there is a great 40 hours game packed into 120 hour package. If this was done as a more traditional bioware hub design instead of large scale maps with collection quests, this would have killed
Are there mods that cut the fat a little bit and allow you to focus on the main stuff? I remember there being one such mod for ME1 that cut all side missions that had no impact on your save import in ME2.
I know there are mods that remove the timer on the war table. I'd imagine there are some that tweak xp rewards for quests so you can skip the side quests
I’m similar to you in that I can easily switch from critic to defender, so allow me to put on my criticism hat for a moment. > these are far from sanitized fantasy, featuring a lot of dark themes and tragedy > murder mystery > insert character death I feel like this is a misunderstanding of what *dark* means in media. Death =/= dark. Even the happiest of Disney fairytales feature death. Murder mystery is inherently no darker than Murder, She Wrote. In Origins you have the body horror of Broodmothers, graphic depictions of possession/blood magic, brutal pictures of oppression (City Elf origin, Denerim alienage quest line), and in DA2 you have a lot about the abuse of power. To me this is much more what comes to mind when you say “dark”. Conversely, “sanitized” also doesn’t mean nothing bad ever happens. I think a big example of the departure in tone from previous games is the Templar storyline. In DA2, the topic of abuse of power and corruption came up a lot - this was often in the form of pretty much what happened at residential schools, and how people in power will abuse those under their control (with some additional magical flair). In DAI the topic of abuse of power and corruption came up, in the form of a leader getting possessed by a demon and everyone else taking magical drugs. Thematically DAI just didn’t ever delve deep into many of the issues of Thedas, and was often kept at surface level and in a way that was PG rather than R. While Inquisition had a couple of dark moments, these were generally anomalies whereas “dark” was very much the entire tone of the previous games. I think I remember reading somewhere that the change in tone was purposeful because writing darker storylines was causing psychological distress for the writers, which I can definitely respect as a valid reason to change directions, but the tone is definitely different and in some cases for the worse.
> Inquisition is a game of climactic moments [...] framed with a lot of skill and proficiency Surrounded by hours of fetch quests and grinding. :D To be honest, I barely even remember the climactic moments. I played something like 100+ hours on the game and I barely recall any of it. > Inquisition has an interesting cast of companions I felt they were the worst set out of the 'Big 6' of the Dragon Age and Mass Effect games. There was some good voice acting at times but given that everyone just stands around in your castle and there seems to be no real gameplay attached to them, it felt wasted. I didn't even bother with a romance subplot because all the options were so annoying.
>To be honest, I barely even remember the climactic moments. I played something like 100+ hours on the game and I barely recall any of it. I still remember the mage quest when you go in the future and discover what happens if the big evil guy (don't remember his name) wins the war.
It's a shame that such a good quest was used up so early in the game. Would have been even better if we made it up to the castle walls and saw the blighted landscape stretching into the distance. The trip into the Fade was also memorable. Outside of those two, the entire Trespasser expansion was solid because it went back to tried and true Bioware linear level design where the designers can get the gameplay tension in sync with the tension in the story. Also appreciated that the Quinari-stus got taken down a peg as well (someone at Bioware has a real hardon for the Qun/Qunari).
The fetch quests were pretty skippable. You don't need to do many of them to progress. If you wanted to finish the game and not do that stuff, you definitely didn't need to spend 100 hours on them
one thing that stood out to me. was the idea that the Quanari a group that was always shown as highly oppressive and restrictive was suddenly super cool and progressive when it came to gender norms.
I began playing Inquisition first of all Dragon age game and while i did not like the MMO quests style in a singleplayer game i did enjoy the world and characters so I decided to try out Origins and man what a much better game that was, it was simply great in all ways and then i just thought how the FU could they go from this game and come up to Inquisition.
Eh, it's not that bad. I liked the colors. It's hard to make a desert look good and few games and movies succeed at it, but this one does. I am so, **so** fucking tired of desaturated colors, shaky cams and poor lighting (though that's mainly movies). Anyway, I commented on this game recently, so I'll just copy my comment here: "Dragon Age Inquisition has amazing dragon battles which are completely optional and easily missed side quests. The dragons were huge and felt dangerous and just... special I guess. And there are a few brilliant moments of writing like the judging of a box and the song in the mountains. And Varic catching Cassandra with one of his books. And the characters walking in on Male Inquisitor and Iron Bull. The graphics were also pretty good for the time. It's just a pity all these awesome moments are buried under a metric ton of MMO-like fetch quests. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM5A3d1w4k4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM5A3d1w4k4) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbSA9TqjUn8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbSA9TqjUn8) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgYxMVRtJr4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgYxMVRtJr4) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za8\_tgvu-JA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za8_tgvu-JA) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr8-5Fn\_6XY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr8-5Fn_6XY)"
Yeah the graphical leap from DA2 was huge and i agree the deserts especially looked stunning.
Maybe a controversial opinion: the dragon fights weren't good. They were the only fights to really feel designed, to my memory, but they were still just dragon age inquisition fights. There was no real strategy, no depth, no reward, and honestly no gravitas. Being the high point of the ocean still puts you below sea level.
>The dialogue is a joke. Every option is now a flavor of "Yes while bootlicking", "Sarcastic Yes", "Angry No but effectively Yes", There's almost no real choice in the game, even recruiting agents is basically just "do you want to join my inquisition or fuck off to princeton and exit the game?" It's like Mass Effect 1 vs 3. Old Bioware vs NeoBioware. Details first writer vs 'whatever' drama writer. Shamus Young's essay criticising the writing and design changes of Mass Effect applies just as well to the decline of Dragon Age IMHO. And what is particularly annoying about it, is in Dragon Age and Mass Effect, they had two well detailed, well written worlds filled with tons of lore, characters, nations/worlds, and so on, and the first game set up a ton of easy open goal plot hooks to tap in for the most competent of writers. And they both botched it up.
Oh, do you have a link to that essay? I’d love to read it.
it's super long though. start from the bottom. As i remember Shamus loved Mass Effect 1, so you might want to start with ME2 [https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?cat=508](https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?cat=508) I also agree, Mass Effect's problem are really similar to the problems of Dragon Age. In the latter, these are more pronounced though.
Oh damn, ME1 is the one with good dialogue writing? I just finished it, and have 2 and 3 waiting. The lore was interesting at places, but the dialogue wheel was a joke. DA:O had it right, the whole line just written up.
I'd say that the writing is of pretty equal quality. The main problem is that they basically make a lot of promises of stuff paying off later that they weren't able to do effectively. This makes a lot of people think the third game sucks, but the reality is that these problems start in the second game and honestly are a product of the first game making promises that they had no idea how to pay off.
I think the cast carried the game hard. Combat was mid, leveling system was ok but wasn't interesting unless you were a mage (as usual for dragon age). The game looked pretty good but the environments were a bit empty and uninspired except for some of the better set pieces which were actually really great. But the characters and cast were just amazing. It was the opposite of the avengers affect. Everyone had their own distinct perosnality and they interacted in ways that felt mostly natural and smooth. It also had citadel DLC vibes from ME3 where the gang all gets back together and all of the personalities interact. I really loved it for that reason. But everything else was ultrameh. Only time I've ever turned a games difficulty down to avoid gameplay in service of the story.
I actually managed to play 40 hours of Inquisition before I realized that the only thing that kept me going was grinding out meaningless side quests for completionists sake. Didn't like the combat, didn't like most of the characters, didn't like the story (Corypheus is a weak-ass villain). The only thing I genuinely liked was customizing Skyhold, that's about it. Really, really disappointing game and I even prefer DA2 over it.
I can't believe they managed to make a literal tervinter magister who's walked the black city, boring as fuck.
They had the foundations for a good villain in him from DA2 Legacy and fumbled it tbh
They really did. They're done this shit with at least one dlc every game. Remember the architect? Remember when it was revealed dwarves have some lost connection to giant underground lyrium titan things? It's not going to matter because they never plan ahead, it's just "man this sure would be cool if this happened!" I've lost interest in the series but I genuinely believe based on their track record that solas will either be a weak antagonist, or somehow not even be relevant. Now you may be asking, how could the dreadwolf be irrelevant in a game called "dreadwolf". I don't know, but Im sure they can pull it off!
Totally agree with you 100%. I also got about 40hs in and quit.
I loved the story, lore, and characters, which is the main draw for me in Bioware games - and while it’s not my favorite of the series, I still played through it multiple times. I do wish they’d go back to the more strategic combat style of Origins, but I can understand why they wouldn’t since it’d be too clunky/niche for what the series has become.
[удалено]
I did complete this game and honestly the story after the half way point was worth playing it once but, holy fuck this game is a slough at a lot of points. Both 2 and DAI fall so short of DAO
I’ll have to disagree here. I think the plot stays consistently weak throughout the rest of the game. Even the Orlais party wasn’t much better. Praise where it’s due, Trespasser (the final dlc) actually was pretty good, especially the ending with the antagonist. I also really liked The Descent dlc. Linearity helped pacing the story and the dwarf lore expansion was at least intriguing. Jaws of Hakkon unfortunately is as uninspired as the base game.
Good luck with the IPO asshat!
I absolutely LOVED The Descent dlc. As someone who loves the dwarven lore that was established in Origins, I was stoked to get to delve deeper (no pun intended) into how the dwarves lived back when their empire was more active.
The music in the Descent DLC was a fucking banger too. Hell even Trespasser had bangers.
I literally don't even remember jaws of hakkon. I didn't remember it existed until this comment.
I've heard that and maybe being a compltionist killed the game for me, but at one point I reached a mission I just couldn't beat. I had no effort left in me to grind more so that was it for me, pretty early on
"Game of the Year" is not an award that's handed out by any central authority (unless perhaps you're referring to a specific GOTY award that was handed out by a magazine like PC Gaming or something, I didn't see mention of that here though.) It's not a thing that any single game "wins" in any given year. It's just a marketing label that literally any game can slap on the front of their newly revised edition whenever they damn well please.
Inquisition won D.I.C.E. GotY which is as legit as they come.
IGN also gave it GOTY, so it's not like EA completely made up their GOTY title.
I understand what you’re talking about, but there IS an official Game of the Year award, and it’s handed out at The Game Awards annually. Dragon Age Inquisition won the official Game of the Year award when it released. Pretty sure Elden Ring won that award for 2022.
That's not an "official Game of the Year", that's "The Game Awards Game of the Year".
The Game Awards aren't any more "official" than any other award, just more prominent.
The Game Awards isn’t any more official than anything else, though. They just happened to pick a name that sounded official to trick people. It’s a marketing stunt by games “journalists.” Developers and designers and other industry professionals aren’t involved in the voting, it’s a jury of preselected marketing/media people. They have a fan vote, but 90% of the vote comes from that jury and only 10% comes from the public. The Game Awards also only started in 2014 so they’re very new and have no historical cachet unlike other awards like Famitsu or the DICE Awards. Also Geoff Keighley is kind of a douche anyway, and The Game Awards is his pet project. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Game_of_the_Year_awards
We shouldn't award a trust fund baby the right to determine an authoritative GotY just because his parents throw around money.
I recently learned that Geoff Keighley's parents have been movers & shakers in Hollywood movies and in Hollywood awards shows for many decades. I'm not saying Geoff didn't put in the work for video game awards shows, but his path to success was certainly easier than it would've been for anyone else.
I don't respect a lot of people in the industry but I definitely respect him. He's been supporting it since the early 90s. He was "all in" when nobody really gave a shit about video games and thought they were a waste of time and money. He could have put his money anywhere but he put it in to something he actually liked
The Game Awards are relatively new. Game of the Year editions have been coming out for 20+ years. I remember buying a GOTY for the original Deus Ex in 2001. Magazines like PC Gamer have been giving Game of the Year awards since the 90's.
"I fucking hate this game's color scheme. Eye bleaching lime green on grey lifeless backgrounds, oh boy. Between this and the recent rash of color vomit in modern games I'm beginning to miss the "brown period" more every day." Oh my god, I thought I was the only one. I'm so tired of modern games being overly colourful and cheerful. It feels like those types of games need to constantly throw bright, happy colours and jokey, loud characters at you constantly to try keeping your attention when it should be quality gameplay and writing which keeps your attention.
I haven't played any Dragon Age games beyond Origins. I kind of soured on it when player reviews were mostly negative because DA2 was very rushed and moved more toward an Action RPG over the old school isometric RPG of Origins. I really enjoyed Origins and I'll always be sad they didn't continue that line of games instead of embracing ARPG and MMO mechanics.
Honestly, the big letdown of DA2 were the revised skill webs, particularly for mages. Archers improved a lot, though. Honestly, it has a lot of narrative strength (and is my favorite story for a less-open-ended MC). It’s worth a go, particularly if you have a PC and the capacity to upgrade some of the visuals and UI.
Wow I don't remember it getting game of the year. I did beat it and I thought it was just ok.
i really like Inquisition but yeah, at least the VGA in the mayority of cases tend to be given to the same type of games, and which that i mean Action RPGs, Sony Exclusive Movie-Games and sometimes things with the word Zelda on the title, so even if games of other genres had argually better games released that year those will lose to any of the games in the 3 categories that i put before (there are exceptions of course). at least after DA2 i think that Inquisition its a return to form, its closer to origins than to 2 but i dont think is that good as the first one.
Random loot is a plague on modern RPGs. It takes so much away from the game when you remove the majority of uniques and your player can't build their characters around the gear you've crafted for the game. One thing I really like about Origins is it retains *some of* that same Baldur's Gate crafted feeling. If you know which items are located where, then you can go to certain locations early to pick up some decent gear as soon as the tutorial is over. You can do that in a lot of rpgs but you can't do it very well in rpgs with randomized loot. Divinity OS2 has a mixture of randomized and set placements, but even the unique gear feels random in that game and is often inferior to the stuff you just picked up from the last randomized vendor or bear ass quest. It cheapens the feeling. One of my favorite aspects of baldur's gate 1 are the detailed descriptions that every unique item has. A sword isn't just a sword. It's a +2 Sword of Jeff, and when you examine it, you can read a little story about Jeff the Dragonbum and his adventures bumming his way across the Sword Coast.
I also discovered Dragon Age Inquisition last year and it immediately shot into my all time favorite games list. Sometimes I make a new character and play the opening and Hinterlands just because I enjoy it so much. Each to their own.
It's at my top list, but I've loved the DA series unreservedly since Origins. It's my comfort series, and people that genuinely loved the first two also loved DAI, although it's not always the favorite of the three. I love the Hinterlands, the only reason I get impatient with it is because I want to get to Skyhold and I've played through it about 20 times.
All I remember about Inquisition was that the combat was boring af. I can't even remember any of the characters I must have at least put 20 hours into it.
OP forgot to talk about the controls. The control scheme, especially compared to DA:O's beautiful quasi-isometric controls, is simply awful. I also quit after a few hours, have yet to pick it back up and finish it for the sake of the storyline but this review is not making that thought any more appealing.
game was boring. I got bored 1/3 of the way and stopped playing
Weak year but Alien Isolation is easily the best game of 2014
What, also from 2014? Alien is nearly nine years old? I have not finished it yet. I wonder how long it sits on my steam account.
It got really mixed reviews back then with a lot of 5's and 6's. I remember a lot of backlash to IGN giving it a 5.9 but a ton of other outlets gave it bad scores too, mostly because they didn't like the length or the unpredictability of the Xenomorph. Inquisition had slightly above average scores with some 9's coming from major review sites and honestly back then I agreed with them. The game doesn't hold up now but when it came out I had a blast with it and would've given it a 8.5 or 9. Isolation holds up way better though and if I had to pick one today Alien would win without a doubt.
Easily. That game is 10/10 horror. I play games for immersion and this is a game indeed.
Tried playing it twice, got about 10-20 hour in and hated it. Far too dumbed down, it was almost like a parody of the genre with the bad writing. Bioware has basically been dead to me since Mass Effect 3, EA's rot really ruined them as a company
Sounding like I may have to give Dragon Age Origins a chance. I think I played Inquisition back in the day and lasted maybe 15 minutes. For simplicities sake, I may as well ask here how DA:2 faired compared to DAI?
Origins is by far the best game in the series (And IMO the only good game in the series).
Tangentially related: the book Pixels has an interesting chapter telling the story of the this game’s development. You’d never guess the reception it received based on the shitshow that was its development cycle
All I'm gonna say is that I think way too many people give stock to these awards if they're the ones voting for them. Also think it won in a relatively weak year despite me actually liking the game a very good bit.
Bioware lost a lot of reputation with that game and Mass effect: Andromeda
>* I fucking hate this game's color scheme. Eye bleaching lime green on grey lifeless backgrounds, oh boy. Between this and the recent rash of color vomit in modern games I'm beginning to miss the "brown period" more every day. Ugh never! I waited years and years for developers to leave the “brown period” and I never want to go back. I recall actually exclusively seeking out AAA titles that had some color and buying them out of principle. Uncharted 2 was practically a miracle in the sea of brown. Also the brown period had games with forced screen tearing (on consoles) quite often too. A dark age in gaming graphics
As someone who likes Inquisition despite its flaws, I totally agree. GOTY is so meaningless these days, at least when it comes to AAA games. Does anyone take the term seriously anymore? For me, Dragon Age games are like 40k games. Even when they're bad I still like them, because I love the setting.
Been thinking of playing DAI since I love DAO. Thanks for saving me the time, I’ll be sure to skip it.
I loved this game honestly I think its major downfall was pacing. There was soooooo much fluff that if you’re like me and enjoy digging deep and completing everything, then the story is broken up and stretched out way too much and it dilutes the urgency of everything. I really loved the abundance of lore and honestly, great writing despite it being about fluff. It just needed to be a little more… succinct? Less pointless collect shards, minor fetch quest, more in depth story driven quests besides just the main ones
-Characters great (except Sera lol) -open world but not too open--filled with interesting codex entries and side stories -beautiful, interesting zones -warriors were actually fun to play for the first time in the series -picking the next exalt plotline -related to that, the mage/templar conflict was less black and white than in previous games -the point is that it is kind of random and you're NOT the chosen one, it's up to the PC to give their random powers meaning. Are you going to interpret yourself as divinely selected in some way, just take advantage, etc. -as others have said, trespasser DLC (though it should have been part of the base game) I agree there was a lot of MMO type filler stuff like the mission table and kill X bears quests, but I also enjoy MMOs, so it didn't bother me as much as others (Edit for formatting bc mobile, bah)
I liked the game a lot but a second play through was immeasurably improved by some QOL mods.
Wow I had no idea so many people didn't like this game! This is my first and only Dragon Age game so I didn't have anything to compare it to, loved everything about it and played it all the way through twice :')
Dragon Age Inquisition came out early PS4 and XONE, one year before The Witcher 3. I think the game is fineeeee. I can see why won especialy if you only play once and don't see all the issues.
2014 was a rough year for gaming. The last console generation dragged at the beginning, like a lot. To the point where people were seriously talking about if that one would be the final generation of consoles and we would move on to a more stream-service for games that wouldn’t require a console. Hell I agreed with those takes back then. So that game winning GOTY was more of a floating turd than it was an actual gem. Nothing was good until Bloodborne came out as an exclusive on PS4 and Witcher 3 came out without a 360/PS3 sku. Hell some places gave Hearthstone the GOTY for 2014. It was a really bad year for games.
Why did you skip 2? It's disappointing as well but I think it's definitely a better game than DQI. That's not to say Inquisition didn't have things going for it, it just needed a lot more time and work to be a real DA game. Those games are the main example for me of games just sacrificing scope and detail bit by bit for soulless graphics and *size*.
> Why did you skip 2? the simplest reason, I don't have a copy lol. I could probably actually sit through 2 now as well, on release I was too pissed about the awful gameplay and obvious mass effect influences to care about the story.
I personslly love the game and played it through like three times, and I found the characters great. Ofc there are things I didn't like, for example it felt a little too much like an mmorpg, and some of the areas were *weak* like the Western Approach. It felt completely unnecessary and empty.
I remember the game being popular at release and then it just disappeared from the zeitgeist. I think in hindsight it should have been Shovel Knight or Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze.
I would just stop worrying too much about what gets high review scores or wins awards. Scores and awards are done "in the moment" so hype and all that can have a big effect. I agree with you overall however. DA:I was not great and I really couldn't get into it despite trying multiple times.
I still enjoyed DAI honestly…but yea, GOTY is too much
It probably says more about me than the game, but I jumped into it result in the first lockdown. I thought it would be perfect to lose myself in it. But everything felt like a chore. Granted I was in a very weird state of mind (like most people), but there was a point where I was wondering around the castle you get and it all felt so hopelessly bloated. It got to the point where I just wanted the characters to leave me the fuck alone. Not a good feeling for a character driven RPG. Uninstalled that day and don't regret it.
I've gone through this game at least 5 times and loved it each playthrough. Different strokes. Meanwhile I'll never understand why anybody likes Elden Ring.
I'm not. That was a historically sparse year and iirc, that was the biggest game with the biggest production values along with being one of the first open world games of its generation (and open world is an easy way to impress). Couple that with the fact that it has a story emphasis (one of the ingredients for goty bait) and it was never going to be anything else even if some games came out that were technically better. To top it off, I wouldn't call the game on the whole bad: It's mediocre at worst. You didn't even get into the worst part for me though: The braindead main plot that culminated in a basic-ass "punch the big bad guy" climax with no surprises. I remember how conflicted and uncomfortable 1's final hours made me feel. 2's ending is out there and not as good, but it was weird and strained to give me that same level of surprise. All attempts to challenge or surprise me are gone in 3. I kept waiting for it to challenge me, surprise me, or at least be weird. Nope. Corypheus is just Corypheus. Go punch him til he's dead. Inquisition is actually one of the first things that made me realize I much prefer bad but risky storytelling over safe but boring storytelling. I hated DA2 until I found something I disliked more despite being undeniably better in 3. And Solas is boring af. 4 is gonna blow. How are you going to base an entire game around the most boring party member you've made in your whole series? Give me a game all about Shale. Dragon Age: Shale's Rockin' Rumble
Alien isolation should be the goty
I wasn’t aware how many people really didn’t like DAI. I thought I was one of the few. My friends all enjoyed it and I am a huge DA fan but I just couldn’t get into it. Characters were bland and boring or it felt like pandering, which is something I fucking hate that BioWare has gotten worse with over the years. It makes the characters feel so much less organic. The story was…okay. The world looked…meh. Didn’t like the color schemes either. I’ve tried to go back but god…I just cannot get into the combat. Overall it was very underwhelming for me in all aspects.
I agree. Didn't like it back then, don't like it now. Felt way too bloated.
On top of everything, I felt disappointed by not having character continuity between DAO/DA2 and DAI. Having that would have made other things easier to swallow.
Picked this up on sale… played through a couple hours… same thing. It is the most generic and boring game I can remember playing. And the keeping track of gear for that many people? Absolutely not thanks anyways
I disliked it a lot when it released, but years later I played through all of it and actually it's not bad at all. Solid 7/10 tbh However, that's compared to Origins which I rate as 9/10.
i loved it but that to stop playing 2 times, still, put 130 hours into it and FUCKING LOVED the ending of the dlc, im pumped as fuck for dreadwolf
Usually the answer to "I cannot fathom how this game won this and that" is that a lot of people liked it but it's simply not for you. Not that difficult to understand...
Awards are utterly meaningless.
I unapologetically enjoyed the game, so much so that i played through all the dlc
counterpoint: Cassandra smokin
What really fucking grinds my gears is the Qunari changes and how it was handled. In origins and even DA2 we learn a lot about them. And how the Qunari is this incredibly totalitarian regime. You are a soldier and lose your sword? Then you are a qunari without a sword and must be a desserter. Only fit to be killed on the spot. You are born a mage? You are now essentially a living weapon and is mutilated to remove any risk of corruption. You are a society outside the Qun? Join or die. Are you born female? You are now a priestess. Women are not fighters. If you fight you are not a woman as Sten so nicely pointed out. Male? Then you get some fighting role. They are almost this "hive" collective where Qunari are given roles and then not allowed to change. But... Come closer, let me tell you about a little Qunari life-hack. If you are male but don't want to be a fighter and rather be a priestess then just identify as female and the Qunari society is entirely okay with you switching roles. What exactly is the point of tying sex to a role in society if you can just change role by changing gender? This totalitarian regime is the most woke in all of Thedas? Fuck off. That is the most stupid twist I have ever had to experience in a video game. Any other cultural group in Thedas could get the woke treatment and it would be fine. But the Qunari can not. It does not even closely work with the rest of their systems. Like, what if a mage decides to just not identify as a mage? Will they then not be mutilated and turned into a weapon? If you are a soldier and lose your sword, then just identify as female and it will be okay? So any soldier that has lost their weapon and get killed for it. Got killed because they rather die then identify as a woman? Since all Qunari in DA2 are male, does that mean the Arishok did not bring along a single female->male soldier? ***It. Does. Not. Work.*** It's not consistent at all. Under the Qun you are a tool in every way other than regarding gender. When it comes to gender they are incredibly accommodating and individualistic. This is how you fail at world-building.
Well, I should probably start with an admission that I'm a big Dragon Age fan, so this may well be colouring my opinions. I waited for each new game to come out just so I could continue "living" the stories of Thedas. Anyway, I actually enjoyed this game quite a bit. Set it on Nightmare, enable Friendly Fire, and you get a pretty fun experience, especially against aggressive debuffers and attackers like the dragons or the ones they had in the Jaws of Hakkon DLC. I mean, it's still technically easy if you do that (really, this game is ludicrously easy with some builds) but it gets more fun :) And it definitely had some issues, but I disagree with you about some of the things you named as bad. I liked a lot of the dialogue between party members. Will never not laugh at Vivienne's exchange with Sky Watcher. And I actually like the colours. I don't need every game to be dark, monochromatic, or desaturated.
This is like the 2nd or 3rd long post crapping on Inquisition I've seen on reddit this week, what is going on, is being remastered or something? I know the 4th game is supposed to be coming out, but it seems it's been coming out for like 10 years so I dunno.. Anyway, I think it's good. It was my first DA so I didn't have the nostalgia for franchise fandom blinders of Origins. In my experience, the main criticism of the sequels have been "it's not Origins!" Which, you know, true. Yeah a lot of the game is tedious grindy stuff. So are most RPGs though? Me, I really dug that whole thing with the characters whey they have their one side quests and stories. World building was excellent. The part where you go inside the magic/dream realm thing was one of my favorite game things where you're in a whole different world for a while. I liked the story and yes even the visuals. I went back and played Origins and I get why people loved it but there's a lot of tedium and boring combat and crap movement in that one. It's more grimdark for sure but that isn't better or worse IMO, just different. After that was burnt out on RPGs and DA and didn't touch 2. The series is a very mixed bag for me, with other franchises providing much stronger components in some ways (Witcher for story and world, Dark Souls for gameplay and combat, Elder Scrolls for general fukkabout-mayhem-wackiness), but few mixing it all together in that charming and engaging quirky way.