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[Vincent Grayson]

The point is that all of that is ASS

So the real answer is: you don't like playing Dragon Age: Inquisition.

That's perfectly fine, but there's a difference between "I like this game, but I wish it had fewer meaningless/fetch-style quests" and "I literally don't want to do anything that forms the core of this title's gameplay."

Like, the core gameplay of DAI is exploring the world, talking to characters, battling monsters, and solving quests while doing so. It sounds like you straight up have no interest in the vast majority of this (and many others have posted similar sentiments).

There's nothing wrong with that, but it's disingenuous to suggest you don't like fetch quests when the real answer is that you don't care for DAI's actual gameplay.

 

[Lord of Castamere]

The only difficulty DAI had was the restricting of when you could heal while in missions.

If healers had been in the game or barriers worked as a 2nd Health bar that didn't constantly deplete(like they do on enemies), then it wouldn't have had a fraction of the difficulty that it did.

 

[Ralemont]

There's an interview where they pretty much define a "fetch quest" as something that feels like chore. Their goal is to weave in enough narrative weight, unexpected twists and turns, and provide a satisfying payoff so that even if the quest is basically you doing a favor for an NPC, its framed in a way that you wont notice.

I think thats probably what a lot folks really mean when they trash the "fetch quest".

If that is their goal, then it is one I am comfortable saying they won't achieve. I find it difficult to believe that they can claim to have the world size they have for The Witcher 3 and have engaging stories for every quest you encounter out there. Either the quests will be widely spaced and sparse in number or unevenly distributed. In either case, in between quest locations you'll either have nothing or fetch quests.

 

[HK-47]

He mentioned one of the buggiest games in existence. Abandoning ship on Witcher!

Spoiler

I actually have faith in CDPR, unlike Bethesda.

Something is wrong in here.

 

[Shining Sunshine]

At least Skyrim has the mod tools for the community to fix it. Will DAI ever get mod tools?

It doesn't need mods, and the PC community will hack the game apart with mods if they wish.

 

[Durante]

Either the quests will be widely spaced and sparse in number

And that would be perfectly fine. Not every damn peasant needs to be waiting for someone to come around to give a "quest" to.

Of course, as I've said before, I'm also very worried about a quantity > quality approach in Witcher 3.

It doesn't need mods, and the PC community will hack the game apart with mods if they wish.

Completely disregarding the inherent support for mods in games when evaluating them as a whole makes no sense. It takes a lot of developer effort to make games as moddable as the post-2 TES entries.

 

[Lactose_Intolerant]

It doesn't need mods, and the PC community will hack the game apart with mods if they wish.

Did Half-life need mods?

 

[HK-47]

It doesn't need mods, and the PC community will hack the game apart with mods if they wish.

Oh I beg to differ.

 

[CGwizz]

Every genre now has to be some sort of competition , ffs just praise the sun we get 3 awsome rpgs in the space of 7 months and stop bashing one game just because you are a fanboy of another IP, every video and bit of news of inquisition is plagued by people saying it sucks the witcher is the best shit ever.
I played dragon age and its my goty last year, i did every quest but you dont need to make the fetch quests so i dont get the complain some people make, i ended the game with like 200 power left that i never used.
Btw i can´t wait for the witcher 3 and bloodborn.

 

[Deleted member 17706]

What difficulty is everyone playing on where you can defeat all enemies in Inquisition by holding the attack button?

Depends on your party composition, but Nightmare is really the only difficulty that requires you to pay attention. Assuming you're not fighting enemies that are 3+ levels higher than you, of course.

 

[-tetsuo-]

If you're excluding companion missions, there really isn't that many side quests left. Maybe go back and think on that.

Right. The game has poor at best quest design, and that is a bulk of the game. Well, besides combat.

And Wasteland 2 was pretty boring imo.

Well this explains a lot.

It doesn't need mods,

This explains the rest lol

 

[flaxknuckles]

So the real answer is: you don't like playing Dragon Age: Inquisition.

That's perfectly fine, but there's a difference between "I like this game, but I wish it had fewer meaningless/fetch-style quests" and "I literally don't want to do anything that forms the core of this title's gameplay."

Like, the core gameplay of DAI is exploring the world, talking to characters, battling monsters, and solving quests while doing so. It sounds like you straight up have no interest in the vast majority of this (and many others have posted similar sentiments).

There's nothing wrong with that, but it's disingenuous to suggest you don't like fetch quests when the real answer is that you don't care for DAI's actual gameplay.

DA's actual gameplay was a bunch of fetch/terrible quests with a few good main missions that you can't get to unless you do a ton of yawn-inducing busywork

 

[Shining Sunshine]

Did Half-life need mods?

Are you talking about stuff like CS and DoD?

 

[OverturePT]

That's good to hear. Dragon Age Inquisition had a lot of fetch quests and basically not a single decent side quest if I stop and look back at it, which is a shame (I still enjoyed the game but I felt that Divinity was much better). I don't really mind fetch quests but in Inquisition you end up having to do them in order to obtain more power and that's where the problem lies for me. Xenoblade also had a lot of crappy side quests but I was never once forced to do them. Actually, the only ones I did where the ones I accepted and while progressing the Main Quest ended up killing or collecting whatever I needed for those side quests and that's fine by me. Obviously I would like to have better side quests but if I'm able to enjoy the main story without being hindered by these fetch quests, that's fine.

Looking forward to see what CDPR pulls out since this is a much bigger game than their previous attempts.

 

[Deleted member 17706]

If someone plays on an easier difficulty and then complains about the game lacking strategy, then that's on them. DA: I isn't even close to the pinnacle of strategic combat, but the claim that you can hold a button to win is wrong (....except if you're playing Knight Enchanter. ). Then again, last I've heard you haven't played this game, Durante, so I'm not sure how much we can discuss here.

No, it's on the developers for creating a game that is completely brainless on the standard difficulty. It's on the developers for creating classes that are wildly unbalanced and overpowered. It's on them for caring more about stacking their game with easily accessible filler content to appeal to a wider audience rather than making a compelling gameplay experience.

You have to jack up the difficulty to Nightmare and purposefully not play a few classes to make the game challenging. What is your reward for doing so? Frustration in dealing with the worst interface ever implemented in an RPG and a whole lot of time wasted pounding on damage sponge enemies. Yay.

 

[Ralemont]

And that would be perfectly fine. Not every damn peasant needs to be waiting for someone to come around to give a "quest" to.

Of course, as I've said before, I'm also very worried about a quantity > quality approach in Witcher 3.

It would be fine, sure. It would create its own experience and certainly give more emphasis on mounts. I don't really want The Witcher 3's open world to feel like DA's and vice versa. As the OP says, variety is good.

In either case, most of Inquisition's story content focuses on hubs, with Skyhold being the most obvious hub in the game. There's also a TON of non-quest story content, which I suppose some find unappealing. The amount of NPC interaction in Skyhold alone is pretty staggering, but it leads to a division wherein wilderness zones contain either extensions of quests started in hubs or pure gameplay, whereas Skyhold is 95% dialogue and story. Perhaps they would have been better off taking some of those NPCs in Skyhold and transforming them into NPCs out in the zones involved in quests.

 

[Altairre]

Lol, that's Skyrim for you. I once found a dragon skeleton (beside the tavern) in a town for some reason.. never figured out why.

DAI definitely handled dragons better as enemies, but I liked that Skyrim had Dragons attack from a distance and such. IIRC, you can even mess up their wings to ground them, adding a tactical element to targetting them.

That's true, Skyrim had a few neat ideas I'll give it that. Unfortunately it didn't work out well most of the time. Skyrim was one of those games I really wanted to like but couldn't in the end. I put in about 25 hours because I was in this "I should like this game, it will click any moment now" mentality before I finally decided that I actually did not like any of it. I doubt there are any mods that could fix it for me. And yeah I found a bunch of random dragon skeletons in the dumbest places. It's just hard to listen to the "gotta stop the dragon manace" talk when I know that they regularly bash their heads against rocks and die because they're apparently too dumb to avoid them.

 

[Lactose_Intolerant]

Are you talking about stuff like CS and DoD?

There are mods for half-life that aren't total conversions and are great.

Half-life is a great game by itself, did it need to have modding? No, but it added to the package.

 

[misho8723]

Fallout New Vegas is definitely the only modern open-world RPG that did main missions and side quests good... Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout3, etc. were really, really bad in this ..
And Gothic series is one that made the open-world feel alive.. so it's great that he talks about those games and I take it that overall the studio took some influcences from these games..
And in one interview from January, they said that W3 has overall over 280 quests and from those are 70 - 80 main quests,,

 

[FACE]

Half the PR for this game is just trashing other RPGs.

I remember when it was first announced, the only media that came out would be accompanied with "This is why we hate Skyrim" or something.

Get your game out then you can talk about what makes yours better.

You're thinking of Daniel Vavra(Kingdom Come) who wrote an article called "100 reasons why I hate Skyrim"

 

[IvorB]

I find it funny how polerising DA:I is. I guess it's a true Marmite game.

 

[tattooed_dwarf]

Those quests you get from table in war room would be much more interesting to play through myself instead sending others. I could then send others to search for letters or what not.

 

[Durante]

Fallout New Vegas is definitely the only modern open-world RPG that did main missions and side quests good... Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout3, etc. were really, really bad in this ..

Interestingly enough, it's also the only one I finished. There's clearly something to this.

 

[Ralemont]

No, it's on the developers for creating a game that is completely brainless on the standard difficulty. It's on the developers for creating classes that are wildly unbalanced and overpowered. It's on them for caring more about stacking their game with easily accessible filler content to appeal to a wider audience rather than making a compelling gameplay experience.

You have to jack up the difficulty to Nightmare and purposefully not play a few classes to make the game challenging. What is your reward for doing so? Frustration in dealing with the worst interface ever implemented in an RPG and a whole lot of time wasted pounding on damage sponge enemies. Yay.

The interface is its own issue, but you might want to consider that more people play BioWare games for the story than some other RPGs which are more difficult at the default setting. It makes sense that their Normal is easier than other Normals.

Knight Enchanter isn't actually that unbalanced. It's almost impossible to kill but it also takes much longer to kill enemies. I'd personally rather play a Rift Mage any day of the week. The specializations in general are actually well-balanced. There are no useless specializations compared to something like Shapeshifter in Origins. Really it's just Thousand Cuts which is broken at the moment.

 

[Shining Sunshine]

Right. The game has poor at best quest design, and that is a bulk of the game. Well, besides combat.

Well this explains a lot.

This explains the rest lol

You know what's the only explanation you need? More people and critics thought DA:I is their GOTY than any other game last year. So what about that?

I played Fallout 2 plenty of times. Wasteland 2 just didn't have interesting encounters.

And no games need mods. It's on the developers to make the game great, not the community. If people think a game needs mods, they think the base game is bad.

 

[HK-47]

Interestingly enough, it's also the only one I finished. There's clearly something to this.

You never finished gothic?

 

[Denton]

Fallout New Vegas is definitely the only modern open-world RPG that did main missions and side quests good... Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout3, etc. were really, really bad in this ..
And Gothic series is one that made the open-world feel alive.. so it's great that he talks about those games and I take it that overall the studio took some influcences from these games..
And in one interview from January, they said that W3 has overall over 280 quests and from those are 70 - 80 main quests,,

Yeah I said it many times, NV is the current pinnacle of open world AAA RPG. It is funny and amusing how Obsidian schooled Bethesda at their own game in their own property for their own money (making them shitload of money in the process and getting snubbed on bonuses because of one metacritic point, too, FUCK). And they only had 18 months to do it all, from conception to release.

You're thinking of Daniel Vavra(Kingdom Come) who wrote an article called "100 reasons why I hate Skyrim"

That article was awesome. I remember the shitstorm that ensued with thousands of comments, it was most read article ever on that site

 

[Durante]

You never finished gothic?

Gothic is a "modern open-world RPG"? I thought I was old!

(I meant out of the list of Fallout: NV, FO3, Oblivion, Skyrim provided by the poster I replied to. I played all of these for quite some time each, but FO:NV is the only one which kept my attention throughout)

 

[LurkerPrime]

Those quests you get from table in war room would be much more interesting to play through myself instead sending others. I could then send others to search for letters or what not.

Those make the low-level stuff your Inquisitor ends up doing stick out even more. Like, you have agents moving all around Ferelden to fulfill your will, but still somehow end up picking flowers to stock the Inquisition, or solving a murder mystery, or save a town, or lead a secret mission... and so on.

DAI handles immersion vs. gamification in one of the worst ways possible, creating maximum cognitive dissonance by aiming for immersion whilst simultaneously making things as gamey as possible.

 

[HK-47]

Yeah I said it many times, NV is the current pinnacle of open world AAA RPG. It is funny and amusing how Obsidian schooled Bethesda at their own game in their own property for their own money (making them shitload of money in the process and getting snubbed on bonuses because of one metacritic point, too, FUCK). And they only had 18 months to do it all, from conception to release.



That article was awesome. I remember the shitstorm that ensued with thousands of comments, it was most read article ever on that site

KotOR 2 becomes more impressive when you realizes it was only 13 months of dev time. You can also see all the corner cutting they had to do (reusing planets and such)

 

[Altairre]

Interestingly enough, it's also the only one I finished. There's clearly something to this.

To be fair, the combat in the Fallout games is quite bad as well. Maybe I should go back to it now that it's been fixed (I hope?) but my last experience was incredibly frustrating and I always had a problem with the dull world design (it's post apocalyptic I know, I still think it could have been done better).

 

[Deleted member 17706]

The interface is its own issue, but you might want to consider that more people play BioWare games for the story than some other RPGs which are more difficult at the default setting. It makes sense that their Normal is easier than other Normals.

Knight Enchanter isn't actually that unbalanced. It's almost impossible to kill but it also takes much longer to kill enemies. I'd personally rather play a Rift Mage any day of the week. The specializations in general are actually well-balanced. There are no useless specializations compared to something like Shapeshifter in Origins. Really it's just Thousand Cuts which is broken at the moment.

Almost impossible to kill is not unbalanced? I... what?

The Normal difficulty in Dragon Age: Inquisition is far easier than the Normal difficulty in any other Bioware game I've played.

Anyway, I'd actually rather they just focus on story at this point. I don't think it was particularly good in Inquisition, but a lot of the character interactions and lore were interesting. I'd totally be down with them just taking out combat and doing a big budget Telltale style game.

 

[Ralemont]

And no games need mods. It's on the developers to make the game great, not the community. If people think a game needs mods, they think the base game is bad.

I don't think someone is going to make a mod in the first place unless they feel the game is good enough to warrant improvement. Making mods is in many ways a compliment.

And I don't think you'll see much traction with pointing to the mainstream media's approval of Inquisition. Many people in the old-school RPG line of thinking distrust them implicitly.

 

[Daingurse]

You know what's the only explanation you need? More people and critics thought DA:I is their GOTY than any other game last year. So what about that?

I played Fallout 2 plenty of times. Wasteland 2 just didn't have interesting encounters.

And no games need mods. It's on the developers to make the game great, not the community. If people think a game needs mods, they think the base game is bad.

You seriously using this as your argument? I don't give a shit how many people had the game as their GOTY, the quest design is fucking weak. Just a blatant open sore on the game.

 

[jem0208]

Fallout New Vegas is definitely the only modern open-world RPG that did main missions and side quests good... Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout3, etc. were really, really bad in this ..
And Gothic series is one that made the open-world feel alive.. so it's great that he talks about those games and I take it that overall the studio took some influcences from these games..
And in one interview from January, they said that W3 has overall over 280 quests and from those are 70 - 80 main quests,,

You're talking rubbish, Oblivion had some fantastic quests. The Dark Brotherhood quest line was absolutely amazing and some of the best quests I've seen in any RPG. The Mages guild was also fantastic and the Thief's guild was pretty good too. Then you had stuff like the quest where you go into a painting and so many others. Oblivion had some incredible quests.

 

[Denton]

KotOR 2 becomes more impressive when you realizes it was only 13 months of dev time. You can also see all the corner cutting they had to do (reusing planets and such)

Oh yeah, KOTOR 2 was also insane case. They had to release if several months early too. Obsidian is just so good. They have these insane conditions to work with set by publishers and they still manage to put out best games. From KOTOR 2 through Alpha Protocol and NWN2 and South Park and New Vegas...hell, I even finished Dungeon Siege 3 and it was much better than expected. And now PoE in march. Though I hope they get another AAA RPG contract soon. Wish someone like Notch would finance them, Kingdom Come-style.

 

[HK-47]

You're talking rubbish, Oblivion had some fantastic quests. The Dark Brotherhood quest line was absolutely amazing and some of the best quests I've seen in any RPG. The Mages guild was also fantastic and the Thief's guild was pretty good too. Then you had stuff like the quest where you go into a painting and so many others. Oblivion had some incredible quests.

Bleh. Oblivion had a few good quests lines in a sea of adjusted to your level shit. Morrowind makes it look absolutely pathetic.

 

[Shining Sunshine]

I don't think someone is going to make a mod in the first place unless they feel the game is good enough to warrant improvement. Making mods is in many ways a compliment.

And I don't think you'll see much traction with pointing to the mainstream media's approval of Inquisition. Many people in the old-school RPG line of thinking distrust them implicitly.

I suppose your right in some cases, but the mods we're talking about are to fix issues.

Like when Witcher 2 came out, people immediately modded infinite inventory because there was no storage. CD Projekt Red eventually made it so they had a storage in the game.

Fixing the game is on the onus of the developer.

You seriously using this as your argument? I don't give a shit how many people had the game as their GOTY, the quest design is fucking weak. Just a blatant open on the game.

Sure, just like how sometimes MGS4 is the worst game ever and GAF's GOTY.

 

[Ralemont]

Almost impossible to kill is not unbalanced? I... what?

Every tanking class in Inquisition becomes almost impossible to kill at endgame (Champion, Templar, KE) so not, it's not really unbalanced. KE does far less damage than damage-based specializations, so the inter-specialization balance is actually done pretty well.

As for the general combat balance, just because KE can up your individual chances for survival doesn't automatically make it better. Rift mage, for example, is far better at AOE damage while essentially maintaining infinite mana, which makes it great for places like Rifts where you might need to gather and nuke enemies.

I do think there should be a Fade-Touched Nightmare difficulty, though.

 

[erawsd]

If that is their goal, then it is one I am comfortable saying they won't achieve. I find it difficult to believe that they can claim to have the world size they have for The Witcher 3 and have engaging stories for every quest you encounter out there. Either the quests will be widely spaced and sparse in number or unevenly distributed. In either case, in between quest locations you'll either have nothing or fetch quests.

We'll see. I'm not going to guess at what they are capable of doing, since I really have no clue. It wouldn't surprise me if there's something in there to pad out the play clock. We already know that they have a substantial mini-game, so I could totally see a quest that tasks you with beating various people in the world. Whether something like that feels like a slog or not will depends entirely on your opinion of the minigame.

 

[IvorB]

Bleh. Oblivion had a few good quests lines in a sea of adjusted to your level shit. Morrowind makes it look absolutely pathetic.

Morrowind was awesome. I don't think Elder Scrolls has been worth a damn since then.

 

[Phat Michael]

Good thing those quests are optional, right?

Doesn't matter they are still shit. Even if it's optional, doesn't mean they can't be fun or interesting. There were way too many of them which contributed nothing beyond artificially increasing the length of the game.

 

[ironcreed]

I was planning on getting this for Xbox One, but I am tempted to just go ahead and get it pre-ordered digitally on PS4 at the discount price they have it at. That is the best deal for it on consoles and it will probably be a bit better on PS4 as well.

 

[Ayt]

DA's actual gameplay was a bunch of fetch/terrible quests with a few good main missions that you can't get to unless you do a ton of yawn-inducing busywork

Which involves a bunch of terrible combat.

 

[-tetsuo-]

You know what's the only explanation you need? More people and critics thought DA:I is their GOTY than any other game last year. So what about that?

Then a lot of people like doing fetch quests. That doesn't mean it is good. A lot of people like a lot of shitty things.

I played Fallout 2 plenty of times. Wasteland 2 just didn't have interesting encounters.

There is a lot more to Wasteland that just fight encounters, though. Lots of dialogue that lets you bypass fights and solve quests in different ways.

And no games need mods. It's on the developers to make the game great, not the community. If people think a game needs mods, they think the base game is bad.

Right. Base Skyrim is borderline terrible.

 

[ViciousDS]

Not if you want to advance. I need 30 power to advance right now. Have 8. Time to scour those zones for shards, rifts to close, camps to set up, points to capture and a whole host of " I need butter for my biscuits".

yes, that shit killed it for me playing DA:I. Otherwise it was a fantastic game.

 

[Amir0x]

We'll see how fetchy Witcher 3 gets in such a huge world >

DA: Inquisition was most overhyped disappointment of last year for me personally. Reminded me of offline MMO at times, similar to Curt Schillings game. Lots of good aspects about it, but getting past that mission design standard for the fluff quests to advance was just mind numbing at times.

 

[Verger]

DAI's main quest was just not compelling and memorable. By the time you got back to focusing on the main storyline you forgot most of what was pressing and I personally didn't care enough to continue. Which is the downside of this sort of "open-world" game design. The villains always seem like they are on "pause" while you go around doing your thing. That's true across all open-world games though. DAI however is egregious in that the game makes you think that you're gaining "Power" but its a completely meaningless stat.

But DAI was made more cumbersome by the aforementioned sidequests that were wholly uninteresting and that the combat was boring. The world itself was also not very creative with most reference being taken from real-world locations.

 

[Elandyll]

Very much looking forward to Witcher 3.

About DAI, I loved every minute of it (all of the nearly 200hrs I have spent in it with 2 completions and my first Platinum ever), but I'd be the first to admit there was bloat.

In particular, the shards (128 I think), the location flags (for completionists), and the requisitions were a bit on the insane side of things.
Too many fetch quests were pointless or even did not make sense (sending the Inquisitor to fetch a prized goat, or to put flowers on a tomb), but I did not mind too much tbh.

What seems weird to me is the giant zones that seem barely attached to the plot through side quests: Hissing Wastes (the Dragon there could have been placed in any number of other zones), Fallow Mire, Emerald Graves in particular (even Forbidden Oasis only really exists to justify the Shard collection).
EDL is kinda barren as well, but it was visibly designed to have a strong tie to the

Spoiler

Red Lyrium

storyline, so I can only imagine it had always been meant to have a pretty important role, story wise (which kills me is that they made "Before the Dawn" a Cullen missable side quest, when it SHOULD obviously have been part of the main story line).

With the deafening absence of any Single Player DLC announced yet, I cannot help but wonder if those zones were not originally developped for some kind of DLC plan, and with those plans possibly scrapped during development, they were put in and attached to the game via some flimsy side quests or collections.

 

[ShadowSoldier89]

Indeed, and that's why I stopped playing it. Twice.

Xenoblade has probably the worst side quests of any game I ever played.

fucking easily the worst...UGGGH
I really hope XBX fixes that.

I'm quite looking forward to the witcher 3. New Vegas is a great game, and the quest structure helped. I often stopped caring about what I was doing and just went with the flow, almost everything was enjoyable.