For someone who has never played Dragon Age

So I've never played a Dragon Age game but Inquisition does look very interesting and I want to try it. But looking at the gameplay it seems that the combat is very weird and different compared to most RPGs like Skyrim or Fable or games like that. For anyone that has jumped into this game without playing Origins or 2, what do you think? As well as veterans of the series what are your thoughts towards this?

Normal mode should be perfect for a first-timer, just keep an eye on your mage and/or rogue companions to make sure no big enemy is moving towards them. Warrior companions tend to keep themselves healthy.

It's not particularly difficult to learn how to play this game. While not really complex, it's certainly more intensive than Skyrim's mash r and win gameplay.

Yeah it's more complex than Skyrim, but I actually think never having played the earlier games is an advantage, since you'll be more open minded and won't have any expectation on how things should work based on the previous games.

You're right, this is hold down R and win!

I kid, I kid....kind of.

It's not hard to figure out. If things get a bit too hectic or difficult you can always pause it to set up your actions more carefully.

Well if you play on normal and overlevel your guys you can just go around and autoattack everything to death sure. Playing on harder settings or tackling enemies above your level you will have to deploy some tactics. Both ways are valid.

They kind of gutted the ai customization for this game, Rorie talked about that, but your companion ai is fairly intuitive as it is. They'll use anything that you teach them (which weirdly makes them more useful than you, cus you're limited to the 8 moves you binded to keys) and normally use the right thing for the context. IE, you start a fight, the mage summons the barrier first. I only really needed the tactical pause when fighting my first couple dragons.

Just wondering, is playing a mage or an archer any more interesting than a warrior in this game? Because both Rorie and Patrick seemed to find the combat very simple, but I feel like the tank wouldn't have as interesting combat as another class.

I have been having a good time, but there is a lot of non combat stuff in this game. After a few hours of fighting and wandering, I have to spend 30 minutes managing inventory. Than you have to manage war room and keep. Also most of the story missions have lots of dialog and searching. So the combat isn't the main focus. Most fights you can get through with out much thought, and once you get an gameplan most rift go same way too. You can usually see a big fight before walking into, and than you need to focus more.

Having played all three games, the overall combat style is closer to DA2 than it is to Origins. The only difference is that they backed off the pace a little bit so that it isn't quite as Michael-Bay-shit-explodes-every-nanosecond like it was in DA2. Depending on the difficulty, it can play very differently:

On normal combat is probably closer to Diablo than anything else. Hold down auto-attack and use your abilities when they come off CD. Nothing really that hard and you can pretty much steamroll everything without giving it much thought.

Above normal you need to start using pause-and-play more, be more aware of ability combos, character positioning, and some of the more advanced mechanics, such as how Dispel can stop rift enemies from spawning. It also means a little bit more micromanagement, since the AI stuff isn't nearly as robust as it was in past Dragon Age games.