Quick Look: Dragon Age: Inquisition

So goddamn excited for this.

And I'll say it: Dragon Age 2 was a pretty good game.

Rorie reviews and quick looks. I love 'em!

@rorie

Do party members level up when you're not using them?

New to this series. Are we trying to convert Dragons to Catholicism?

Glad this is good, since AC:Unity wasn't

Thanks guys!

No one expects the spanish Inquisition!

Very exited! Nice to see bioware back to form.

@jonathan: Yeah, that's kind of why I'm so excited for this game. If I liked Dragon Age 2, DA:I simply can NOT fail to deliver!

Dragon Age: Rorigen

Dragon Age:Inquisition has got pretty good reviews. Also Kevin van Ord gave this game a 9 in his review which is a pretty promising sign.

Looking forward to Dragon slaying which unfortunately comes to us europeans a bit later than our northern brethen.

My last couple of Bioware experiences haven't been great so I wasn't paying any attention to this, but if Rorie's into it... ? How does this lean between DA:O and DA2, I wonder?

Oh, the Mass Effect wheel? Aww. ME wheel belongs in ME, I want my DA:O sentences.

Rorie: "I don't think there's any new races or classes that weren't in DA2"

How about all the races? DA2 only had human. Qunari is the new race that wasn't selectable in DA:O.

Your mom was an inquisitor.

Seriously though, I'm excited for this.

After playing Origins for a few hours and 2 for half a month, I realized this franchise isn't my cup of tea.

Still, I'm very happy for the people who want this type of game and the fact that this game delivered.

please be good please be good.

Oh Rorie here? That's a good choice.

Kind of weird they didn't show the pc version at all? I would guess the people who really care about dragon age would play pc after all? (could be wrong with that)

Also fantasy politics sounds awesome! Only way that would be terrible is if your choices have no consequences or that you only have a choice out of 2 extremes on the political spectrum.

I'm sorry but I can't stand Rorie being the one driving this quick look. I hate to say it but IGN actually had a way more informative and better put together look at the game. Would have been nice to get Dave Syder on this.

Who had "5 posts or less" in the pool?

game seems pretty impressive, can't wait to play it next week.

@hassun said:

Rorie reviews and quick looks. I love 'em!

I'm pretty sure the num pad on my mouse will work :)

I love the art design on the character cards, distinctive and cool. The stuff on Dragon Age Keep is nice too. I just wish they had fully gone with that look for the whole game.

It looks like they spruced up the UI in some areas compared to those preview shots last month, but other parts look like a mixture between a phone game and a powerpoint presentation.

alot of references to "boning" by rorie. i like it.

HYPE

Thank god there is someone at GB trying this out.

I've heard good things about this - will I be totally lost without playing the other games?

Jeff Gerstmann not liking a big ol' RPG that is otherwise getting stellar reviews? Say it ain't so.

If anyone was unclear, the Dragon Age Keep is the ONLY way to import your choices into the game. I guess it's another form of DRM on EA's part, since the save file will only auto-export to your Origin account (which you have to log into before playing around with the Keep at all.)

By the way, how spoilery is this? I'm trying to go in pretty much unspoiled come the 20th. Would you recommend me skipping this quick look?

I know Quick Looks are supposed to be off-script, first-blush affairs, but for a game @rorie seems to be enjoying, this video doesn't make a very good case at all. You guys can tend to get flustered when trying to condense big, feature-rich games like this, which I totally get, but sometimes I feel a bit more effort would go a long way toward addressing this. I think it would really benefit you guys to go into certain QLs with some kind of rough itinerary, which might curtail some of the "running in circles and explaining mechanics" bits.

Like, you don't need to show me the crafting table and face creation just to prove they exist. Maybe just run through a short quest so I can see how the game flows?

Hope I don't sound like a nagging dick, just trying to be constructive!

Rorie, you're killing me with your lack of understanding of the tactical view.

I had over 250 hours of experience with it in DA:O then DA2 rendered it useless with "Press A to AWESOME!" I was hoping Rorie would have embraced tactical view so I could get a good look at it.

AWWW YEAH! As I stupid silly fan of everything fantasy, I've been waiting a long time for this. I love the world of Thedas, and I can't wait to lose myself in this game. I almost peed myself when the reviews at both Gamespot and IGN said they had spent 80-90 hours in the game, and still had tons of content left.

This game looks really good. The mounts look comically slow though, hope you can get a faster mount later in the game. Slow move speed in a big open world game is always a bad thing for me.

You are high off your ass, sir.

"You can import your saves if you want to. We can leave my saves behind. But your saves didn't import, and if they don't import, then they're no saves of mine." - Matthew Rorie

Or something like that.

I think I'll put another 200 hours into Dragon Age Origins.

Doesn't seem like it's necessary on normal mode. It goes with that weird video game reviewer hang up some of the crew has that makes them play every single game on normal. Seems like the only one on staff who can appreciate a decent challenge is Brad.

This weird idea Jeff has about difficulty levels not being relevant to your enjoyment of a game is ridiculous. Normal mode nowadays is targeted at Jo Blow Call of Duty who only plays 1 or 2 games a year. Difficulty levels are there to make the game accessible for different kinds of players. Game reviewers who have been enjoying games for 20 years shouldn't play on Jo Blow Call of Duty mode.

If you want TLoU to feel like a survival/tactical game instead of a dumb shooter you have to play it on hard. If want to use strategy in dragon age you have to play it on hard.

You can play on whatever difficulty you want of course but you can't criticize a game for being too simple or for god's sake, don't ever say it's too easy (something I hear often) when you played it on normal.

I loved DA:O. DA2 was a good game with some problems. DA3 looks awesome, can't wait

Fancy a little running competition, Inquisitor?

http://speedofanimals.com/animals/grizzly_bear

Yeah no, I don't care about the gameplay and I don't trust Bioware to write good stories anymore so no buy.

Glad Jeff is in here to just hate right off the bat.

I don't complain much... but c'mon.

@pyrodactyl: Fair points here.

A lot of people don't want to take anything in their own hands. It's something I've learned. I think about how I'll hear people, for example, complain about a mechanic or ability in a game being overpowered and ruin someone's enjoyment of it. If that's something I ever encounter? I don't use it. I can think of multiple times I don't use a character or an ability or a class, whatever, just because without it the game is more fun and challenging.

It's like Orlandu in Final Fantasy Tactics. When I get him, sure I can use him, but do I want to trivialize all the fights then and make it easy? No, so I don't. Some people, like Jeff, would just put him in the game and complain.

I get that ideally you want a perfectly balanced difficulty but at some point games are interactive and the player takes things into their own hands.

I know that I'll be playing this game on Hard first go because I plan to have to use the tactical view.

It sounds like Jeff spent the whole 52 minutes trying to find something to complain about. I'm getting pretty tired of the "everything sucks" nitpicky attitude at this point.

Maybe it's just Jeff rubbing off on me, but I feel like this game is suffering from a bit of an identity crisis.

They want everything to look character action cool, but know that a big portion of the fanbase want old school RPG flavour. By the sounds of it there's a Dark Souls-ish system with the potions/lack of healing options, but that's a system that doesn't make sense in a game where taking hits is an inevitability. The movement is slow and plodding, which undercuts the sense of fun that most open worlds have.

My initial, kneejerk, reaction was actually to say that I thought it looked really sloppy, to be honest.

Ultimately though I think it comes down to this (for me, anyway): Between the revival of turn-based tactical games (Divinity, Banner Saga, Shadowrun and even XCOM), upcoming throwback Isometric RPGs and, on the other hand, more skill based RPGs like Dark Souls, I don't really think Dragon Age is really filling the niche that it was when Origins came out.

Even back then it was a slightly truncated experience compared to the 1998 glory days, and it looks like they haven't totally out of the mindset that has them chasing the look of more action/skill based games. They've never even come close to matching those games (certainly not in how much fun they are to play), and now that smaller studios are going more directly back to the well in terms of RPG design, it just feels like whichever direction you try and approach it from, it looks a bit lacking.

Then again, this is entirely based on the QL here, so please feel free to disregard!

so, if the QL is right this is Bear Age: Inquisition

They play games on normal (the default option) for reviews because that's the difficulty a vast majority of the audience will play every game on. Also, whether a higher difficulty makes a game more enjoyable or not depends on the game. If higher difficulty just makes the enemies take more hits and hit harder, that's generally not enjoyable. If the AI changes up and stuff like that, then a higher difficulty is often preferred as long as the changes are well-designed.

I haven't played DA:I so take this with a grain of salt of course but, for all the length the previous games, their main story beats have not been that complicated. I would imagine that reading through the wikipedia entries for those games or looking at one of the guides to the Dragon Age Keep would probably be sufficient (perhaps if supplemented by the in-game codex entries).

Game looks awesome but was kind of hoping Brad would be on this video...

I'm just tired of when they put someone who is going to hate the game (or already does) on the Quick Look. It's usually Jeff but it happens otherwise. Doesn't serve much of a purpose.

Has he even played either of the first two?

IIRC he played a big part of DA:O, not sure if he finished it or not (been a while now). No one except for Vinny played DA 2.

They were much more about the characters and relationships and choices than having a strong overall narrative. I loved Origins in particular but if you just laid out the main plot it'd probably seem like a boring game.

Dragon Age 2 was such a let down, but this looks pretty fun and worth a shot at. Plus it's been getting decent reception.

What does "surprisingly few dragons" even mean? I'd think having ONE dragon would be sufficient. Hell, if a dragon showed up in the real world I'd say it'd be a pretty good time to switch from Information/Social Age to Dragon Age.