Not too hyped about the new dragon age trailer/reveals

I've been a fan of the franchise since DAO.

I've got a few bones to pick. for starters i jumped into dao waaaaay back then because of how the game is marketed. i am the hero. this is my story. this is how my story begins (hence DA Origins). in retrospect, it could have meant how the "dragon age franchise" begins not my character specifically but that was how i perceived it back then. they also touted how my decisions in the game would influence the world in future games.

i played the shit out of dao. i made my character unique and really strong. was eagerly waiting for da2.

dao was a masterpiece, so lets see what da2 brought. for starters the graphics was much better in da2. but the series was no longer about me. no longer about my origins. i played a "character" instead of "playing myself" lol. i did not like da2 as much since it had less urgency and even had to timeskip in order for the story to progress. the game also felt more "flashy" which is not necessarily a bad thing.

i barely saw any result of my actions from dao. in fact i was disappointed at how whatever i did in dao DID NOT MATTER. technically there were some things that were affected but it seemed more cosmetic than anything meaningful. to make matters worse, i came from the mindset of "earning" my background. i played the shit out of DAO to see what choices would be the best choices that i felt i would want to bring over to the sequels. all that was invalidated when in all the sequels you can specifically CHOOSE what choices were made in the previous game. it invalidated all the hard work and effort i had put crafting my origins. why do i even need to bother? all i need to do is just answer a set of questions and i m good to go.

dai, departs from dao and even da2. the world expanded but with the expansion i no longer felt any attachment to the entire DA world. wheres my warden? we get to see morrigan but my warden is nowhere to be found. where is all my riches and all my gear i saved up on my warden? gone to the void i guess.

by the end of dai, they released an expansion or dlc but i was quite done with the series and didnt even bother getting it.

now the new da trailer dropped they introduce another new protagonist. but to be honest i like how in DAI and the new DA we play "ourselves". ROOK could be a code name or something.

but that said it feels quite forced. varik talking about getting a new leader, someone they can trust etc. and YOURE SUDDENLY THAT LEADER? i dont see the comradery earned. where is the trials and tribulations? varik should be more akin to han solo, hes a scoundrel, a survivor. he shouldnt be trusting of strangers at the drop of the hat. with him being aged and wiser now, it would be more proper for him to assume the role of the leader of the team.

in the gameplay trailer its shown that the objective is for him to reach solas to talk to him. HE SET THE OBJECTIVE. and you end up protecting him while he does main protag work. what sort of leadership is this? it feels poorly written. imho, it would be better if instead of showing how varik gets rook to be the leader, varik recruits rook as a lacky but along the way varik gets injured but rook proved to be a worthy ally who can be trusted. varik could then hand down the reigns of leadership to him. that would have been much more organic.

but no. this feels so badly written. what happened to dao's writers? i remember how i felt when loghain betrayed us. i remember how conflicted i was when i understood why he did what he did. i was simply on the wrong side by circumstance. there was a lot of amazement and wonder and it felt just so well written.

then again the cracks already appeared in da2. the summary of da2 is you survived a darkspawn raid, have to work to survive, then later you somehow got tangled up with a mage terrorist who bombs the church and in retaliation the cops go arresting/killing mages. you were just there by circumstance. dai arguably had you more involved as you were the sole person who could manipulate rifts.

now to the combat system. dao was not "too flashy" it felt more akin to the old baldurs gate rather than an action game. you could pause the game and strategically issue commands. it was a crpg affair and i loved.

in each newer da title, the game drifted more towards action game rather than crpg.

in the latest one, its gone full action.

i find myself amused as i've seen this system before. this is MASS EFFECT. lol

if fallout 3 is oblivion with guns. what is the latest DA? Mass effect with magic?

anyway mass effect actually plays a large part of why i'm not hyped for this new title.

ngl i love ME. but by ME3, i could see a similar pattern with DA franchise. your past actions BARELY make a big impact. to make matter worse we got a "pick your own ending".

personally i think ME1+2+3 (except the ending) was peak bioware. the graphics were amazing, music etc spot on. ME3's ending technically wrapped up the series and the story. as much as i disliked the ending it was a good package. a trilogy.

what about DA? its NOT a trilogy. its just things happening. in fact i think the real protagonist of dragon age is VARIK. DA might as well change the title series to "Tales of Varik" at this point.

oh wait i m digressing. i brought up ME because ME was what i believed was Bioware's peak. but even at its peak, it failed to make past decisions feel like they mattered. everything was cosmetic/lipservice. to top that, i almost forgot ME Andromeda exists. ME was a complete package but EA/Bioware wanted to milk it more. and boy oh boy andromeda is so bad it got my face tired.

now lets talk visuals. dao to be honest IS UGLY. but back then it was cutting edge graphics. da2/da3 all had good graphics. the new one? the graphics are actually good but the art direction, the theme. it doesnt FEEL dragon age. for starters we have purple/neon colours for DA's themes. like wut? is this a cyberpunk game now? it doesnt capture the fantasy vibe of dao/da2. da2's theme of blood splattered in the shape of a dragon was damn epic to me. it was iconic. i could put frame it up on the wall and it would look nice. why am i nitpicky about colours? that goes into the game itself. the monsters are "neon"ish. with bright neon highlights.

i kind of feel its VERY DISJOINTED from the franchise. the pride demon looks like a VR monster with it's neon brain/highlights. it doesnt look like how pride demons look like from previous titles.

with all that. its likely i m not gonna be playing it. then again i m hyped for poe2 now so no biggie. its just a little sad to see a game franchise which i used to love evolve itself into something i want nothing to do with.

Unfortunately for DA, they have the distinct honor of following up on BG3.

From what I've seen so far, it's not even going to come close to measuring up. Maybe that's unfair to DA, I'm not sure, but it doesn't appear this is going to be a very smooth end to development / release, and I fear the reviews and BG3 comparisons will torch this game.

It's just hard to get a game on the market remotely as good as close as good or even better as Bg3 tbf.
But at the same time good part is that it is also very hard to get a game on the market that ends up being worse than D4.

Hey! how did D4 get into this! Hoho

As the kids say, 'rent-free'.

__

Bg3 is the best two-thirds of a game I've ever played.

As for DA, I skipped all of it but of course have Inquisition in my library from one sale or another. It's up there with Witcher 3 in my 'probably will never play but it's nice to know I have it' list. The games version of a shelf-filler, I suppose.

hoho actually same for me DA: Inqui sitting in library untouched.

Hmm i found DA:I actually to be a good game, if and only if they would have removed the MMO/farcry shit from it. They zones were beautiful, the main-quests were ok. the combat system, while already very much ME styled, still had a little bit of tactics to it, at least at high difficulty.

my main gripe with it was the grind, and the sidequests. Only a few of them were actually good and those disappeared behond the 200 collect and kill quests, and those in turn were overshadowed with the collection challenges in each zone.
I actually blame ubisoft for this, those guys were all the rage back then with their world design :/ ah well, i did do one complete run of DA:I, that was enough.

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tsunamikun wrote:

Hmm i found DA:I actually to be a good game, if and only if they would have removed the MMO/farcry shit from it. They zones were beautiful, the main-quests were ok. the combat system, while already very much ME styled, still had a little bit of tactics to it, at least at high difficulty.

my main gripe with it was the grind, and the sidequests. Only a few of them were actually good and those disappeared behond the 200 collect and kill quests, and those in turn were overshadowed with the collection challenges in each zone.
I actually blame ubisoft for this, those guys were all the rage back then with their world design :/ ah well, i did do one complete run of DA:I, that was enough.

DA:I, to me is decent but i really hate the MMO aspect of it. i refuse to replay the game as i would always keep collecting from all resource nodes even tho i have damn plenty. i guess its ingrained that i see something collectable i must collect it.

its also why i cant finish witcher. i keep farming random stuff i no longer need and i cant help it.

another thing i hate is the real world timed events. its a stupid time waster. the moment i found out you could cheat the system by changing your windows pc clock i became a time traveller that went to the future.

one run of DAI was all i could muster. i m not going thru all that over again. when the expansion came out... i just chose not to get it for some reason

My opinion on DAI is its a decent game, but far from great
For one: The difficulty scales terribly. Enemies cant keep up with party progression and even the "enemies are always at least on inquisitor level" with nightmare wont fix it. Game have good dificulty on first hours, but when you start to hit level teens, it becomes easy. By level 19+, its braindead. Dragons are hit badly by that. The first dragon you kill is gonna be the best fight, on every subsequent dragon your party will be both objectivelly AND relativelly more powerful so most of those epic fights becomes "more of the same, but easier"
For two: The bad guy(cant spell his name) is atrocious... the fact its someone we ALREADY beaten on the previous game makes for a very bad start, but thing is, the narrative completely fails to make him an impressive antagonist. The guy just fails and fails, and by the teleporting mirror point of the story, hes already on desperation mode, and its super likely you didnt even see it coming because you didnt made that many moves against him, hes just THAT easy to twart
And three, the late game in general lacks payback for what they set up. It reminds me of skyrim... there are super interesting quest hooks all over the game that completely fail to deliver. Probably the best(worst?) example is the shards quest. Its quite misterious and theres a whole area dedicated to the quest, but the grand finale? They are just keys to unlock doors that function on exact same way red lyrium shards worked on a previous quest and those locked doors just leads to rather generic rooms with random loot and a boss at the end that is basically another pride demon you likely already slain by the dozens at that point. Quests with interesting starts and "meh" endings like that are EVERYWHERE. I can only thake so many dissapointings finales before i get sick of it. Combined with the mentioned lack of difficulty, i just struggle to keep myself interested on the game at some point(have 3 saves on the cloud that are stuck around the point morrigan joins because i cant keep myself interested to keep playing past that point, by comparison, i finished origins at least once for every origin story and played some more than once)

And for dragon age story in general, i think its kinda inevitable that origins was gonna be the highest point

That is mainly because the very premiss of the series have a critical problem: You simply cant make sequels that accomodate the choices the game offers without basically having to make multiple games worth of story for every major choice
So what they do is make your choices as meaningless as possible. The sadistic choice of impregnate or not morrigan on the first game? Even leaving the warden living or not because of it aside, that choice should by all means have MASSIVE consequences, the implication the archdemon soul being around if you took the deal could mean enough plot to fill a whole game. So what they did? Basically the consequences of the choice was downplayed to the point wether you took or not the deal is inconsequential. You just have or not one rather insignificant NPC, thats it! And if on your save the kid exists, its extremely unlikely the archdemon will manifest, simply because that would mean the narrative would have to adapt the ocurrence or not of a whole freaking blight. It would require AT LEAST a whole quest chain that is only available to saves that impregnated morrigan. Its extremely unlikely they would do THAT much work(and even if they do, they would have backlash from players complaining tons of content is locked for a playtrough because they made a specific choice)
The result is that DA is a franquise where major choices are presented but even the most world-bending dillemas are ultimetly inconsequential on the grand picture, big choices are just smoke: Who is the king of the dwarven city? You killed or cooperated with flemmeth? You sided with mages or templars? The golem-making anvil still exists? Liliana and Alistar were hardened or not? Who cares, the plot will still railroad you towards the same general place

Granted, the choices of a tiny heroic goup being insignificant in the grand scheme and the idea of a single hero being able to save the day if he only took certain measures being deconstructed ARE the central themes of DA2. Too bad that game kinda sucked both on gameplay and on story

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feike wrote:

My opinion on DAI is its a decent game, but far from great
For one: The difficulty scales terribly. Enemies cant keep up with party progression

For two: The bad guy(cant spell his name) is atrocious... the fact its someone we ALREADY beaten on the previous game makes for a very bad start, but thing is, the narrative completely fails to make him an impressive antagonist. The guy just fails and fails, and by the teleporting mirror point of the story, hes already on desperation mode, and its super likely you didnt even see it coming because you didnt made that many moves against him, hes just THAT easy to twart

And three, the late game in general lacks payback for what they set up

And for dragon age story in general, i think its kinda inevitable that origins was gonna be the highest point

That is mainly because the very premiss of the series have a critical problem: You simply cant make sequels that accomodate the choices the game offers without basically having to make multiple games worth of story for every major choice

1. agreed, tho theres 2 ways of viewing this. one is you're being rewarded for being strong, but the other is like what you say, things no longer feel challenging. its hard to make both sides happy

2+3 iirc corvus is his name. i think its a huge shame that he was relegated to being a dlc boss. the premise of him "never dying" is really scary. you defeat him, he posseses a warden and raises to power again. he may fail 100 times but he will return. in the dlc he was scary somewhat. but in DAI i wiped him so fast i didnt even bother to deal with any telegraphed attacks. may be i did but i no longer remember. its such a shame that he seems kinda "just there". he didnt feel like the main villain and solas was revealed to be the real mastermind. but even then i felt nothing. to me the feeling i felt the most was "oh the entire plot of this game was just to push me along to play the next game".

what happened to my companions from dao, da2, dai? they are inconsequential. all except varric. i would argue hes the real face for DA at this point. morrigan and leliana too to some extent but even then they have faded into the background.

i really hate how separate the games are from one another. its a "final fantasy-esque" game at this point where the previous games dont matter too much. they do influence the game but not enough that makes me want to care.

i understand that its not easy to make a game to be able to facilitate 1001 different choices.

but that was how the game was marketed. i know now that its just marketing and i hate that i believed in what they sold.