February 2019
Ok so let me first start by saying i've finished DA:I twice already but that was years ago and now i've been replaying the entire franchise (1-3) and i love 1 and 2 BUT. BUT.
I don't understand WTF IS WRONG WITH THE GUY THAT DESIGNED DA:I's controls in comparison to DA1-DA2. **WHY** would you butcher tactics so much and why the hell is DA:I so clunky? It's like moving boulders, characters get stuck in some idiotic animations and you don't have mouse movement and you barely have any control over your group. Maybe you should play-test the game on nightmare difficulty so you can see how having crippled controls feels like absolute garbage. You have to pause 30 times more if you want to achieve the same results as the other two games in the series but even then it won't feel as good because the characters are clunky as hell and constantly stuck in auto attacking animations.
"clear commands" targets the entire party for some reason, hold position doesn't work as fluently as it did in DA2 (which is the best game of the franchise, for the record) attack my target doesn't work half of the time and you can't select the full group because there's no button for it like WHY? In DA2 i would select whole group > Deselect the tank > press hold position and cast aoe that also had precise measurement so it would hit the enemies engaged in front of my warrior but not the warrior cus friendly fire and it all worked perfectly. In DA:I however you can't do any of that, you can't select the whole group, hold position doesn't work
you cant'set up conditional tactics to cast X if X happens or mana or whatever. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand how bad this is but you need to actually play the game and unfortunately the people that have designed dragon age inquisition have clearly never played the game themselves. Dealing with a few terrors is annoying as * when they keep jumping on your squishies, the tactical camera is a complete joke. The angle it takes is *, it's too slow, its too clunky.
DA2 probably had 20 times less budget and it is still a better game. The controls are miles above, the story is amazing and the characters are better than DA:I and their chemistry is better as well. Sure they reused textures for places and all but the game has more soul than dragon age inquisition. Speaking of soul i literally played origins a few days ago and you can engage a 1-5 convo options each of which has three more 1-5 followups with random insignificant to the story npcs and you can chat with every npc while DA:I? You walk up to a guy and you have option 1: DO YOU NEED HELP and option 2: GOODBYE. LMAO. It's so bad, the world feels soulless in comparison. I've never played a game in which i cared about conversations but if you , by some chance, end up playing DA1 and DA3 close to each other then you'll realize how incredibly stupid modern games have become. In DA3 half of your character is already pre-determined because your conversation options don't translate literally to the text option you select, your character talks even when you tell it to remain silent (at the very start for example). Your character says stuff that's different than what you select and your conversation options are so much less which forces your character to have a partly pre-determined personality. In DA2 it wasn't an issue because A) Hawke is really cool B) all the 3 options you had were completely different from each other and could set up a different personality for you than you can in DA:I. In DA2 selecting a new target made your chars instantly follow your command, made your char do a small dash to gap-close which made the game feel much faster paced and the combo system was much better.
I really hope that DA4 will have da1/2 controls and tactics. This isn't mass effect (which is a shooter) i like having control over my unit and that was the main selling point of a party rpg. Not having a limited control over your companions which then play/act like idiots in certain situations and i really hope it'll be more fluid. At the same time i also hope that the world wont feel as soulless as DA:I does in comparison to DA:O. Dragon age is an amazing franchise but inquisition is so frustrating on so many levels. They added denuvo, they made modding much harder, they cut on the world to get a big fancy world with big fancy graphics, they cut on eye-candy characters to add some edgy feminism cringelords . Most of the chars in DA:I have completely horrible hair (sera, vivienne, solas, cole etc) and are EDGYYYYYYYYY w/e im getting offtopic and i nitpick on random DA:I things more than i should because of how frustrating some elements of this game are
February 2019
I think it's a great game, but I also have some issues with combat. My major gripes:
March 2019