Aaryn Flynn says: We Have Learned From The Mistakes of Inquistion....

One of the best reflections I saw on this was from Mike Laidlaw, quoted from 'PC Gamer': www.pcgamer.com/the-making-of-dragon-age-inquisition/


“We underestimated, to some degree, the completionist drive,” says Mike Laidlaw, creative director on the Dragon Age series.
“It was possible, as a completionist, that you could damage your own pacing. It’s something I look at and go ‘that right there? That’s a lesson.’”

In discussing the problem of the ‘Hinterlands prisoner’, Laidlaw makes a connection to an earlier problem: the player who bored themselves in earlier BioWare RPGs by feeling that they had to click on every single dialogue option before they could progress.

“One of the most intriguing places this happened was when we moved to the conversation wheel,” he says.
“There were two reactions—one group of players were upset that it seemed like the game had been reduced. You had other players, though, who looked at the ‘investigate’ option and thought ‘oh, so it’s OK to miss those!’”


The reason I find this interesting is that whilst there were also some immersion issues with the DAI camera viewpoint for fetch quests,
it was entirely possible for players to mitigate some of the fetch-quest overload by purposefully leaving the Hinterlands early and balancing the quests a little bit better themselves.

With the player's ability to choose how they play, also comes the player's ability to play in a boring way.
A challenge for BioWare is not only on the quality of side content and side content camera, but also how such content may be balanced and signposted without taking away player choice.


 

ME3 idea of fetch quests where oddball and what I would consider extra objectives, not really side quests. Same with anything not on the Citadel in ME1 for that matter. Most of them, for instance, involved you picking something up in an actual mission. Some didn't, some just required you scan some planet and find a thing via the scanner or whatever.

Either case they all involved you eaves dropping on conversations, not talking to people, and then just finding the item either via said scanning and/or on some real mission as a bonus objective. None of that I would ever consider an actual 'side quest'.

Most other things you could consider side quest/missions where story missions that just weren't forced on you opposed to being completely separate side stories. Which isn't really what I'd consider a side mission. Dunno wtf I'd call other then optional main missions? ME2/3 where pretty bad at providing alternate missions that aren't literally directly tied entirely into the main thing.

ME1 was ok at that on the Citadel, didn't have much else anywhere else. As far as Inquisition, and the lesson they learned I hope has to do with the whole RP in an RPG. Most 'side stuff' or lack luster fetch quests involved 0 RP, and no choices. No choices parts fine, as long as theres some with choice. It's the complete and utter lack of any RP (your character getting personality choices in a conversation) that's the biggest issue for me.

As far as I'm concerned if your gonna do a simple fetch quest it needs to involve no dialog. I know that seems weird, but once you include dialog it's either like DAI where theres no real conversation just listening to NPC whine and as such a waste of time. Or it's not that simple as it involves an actual story beets and RP choices in dialog.

Witcher 3 is a good example of the latter, always involved a conversation and chance to RP it up a bit to see where it went. About half of them involved an actual choice beyond just getting to actually converse and figure things out. Always curious what 'lessons learned' when they say that. Cause every company says it about every game they're working on in relation to the last lol.

I felt they could of structured the exploration a wee bit better in dai, it was too easy to randomly run into high level mooks that would one shot you right near the start of the game, it would of been much better for them to have used those canyons as blockades that magically opened up at a later point in the game with another quest to go clear that zone, it was also way too easy to miss stuff if you wernt the srot of person to just run in any direction until all the map was no longer black ....

I played through the first time and totally managed to miss half the side quests simply by teleporting out of the maps too early and locking them out.... well that kinda sucked, but hey I figured out you can stand outside the dragons attack range and spam staff attacks at it for 35 minutes until it died, shame you couldn't do that in with all the dragons ...

i'm kinda lazy though I like map porting to get from a >b as soon as I've unlocked an area so I can get back fast for the next quest, and some of that was annoying as hell in dai, I didn't want to just jump on the horse and gallop across the land but I sure as hell wasn't about to stroll across it just to drop something off and then go back to the same place and pick up the next item ....

also persistent loot if you have ot return to places would be a big bonus so when your bags full you can teleport to a vendor then insta port back and continue looting .... way to much time consuming traveling around in DAI, ME didn't have any of that tired stuff just lots of story content and a couple of tiem wasting optional scanning missions.....

I hope they stick with the strucktured dungeon effect of me3 rather than try and go all skyrim in mea, sure the exploration of each map could be more big areas like it was in me1 but the whole zone should be level matched and fully open like it was in me1 rather than the dai stray to close and insta gibbed, and need ot replay the last 2 hours because glitched and no auto saves happened and you forgot to save the game, that shit was so annoying....

Yup that's 100% what I'm talking about. I kinda feel like most of those quests coulda just been on a notice board, skip the time consuming dialog. Take all that actual writing/VO work and cram it into 4-5 NPC's with full conversations and a bit more complex options so we have some actual RP going on.

I mean BioWare has said this before - it doesn't really matter if the outcomes dramatically different (or different at all) as long as you have different dialog options to represent your character that's really all it takes. Lemmy be an asshole, or indifferent or looking to help, all 3 can lead to me picking up the quest and doing it. But all 3 (or more) will let me define my character.

Plus you know throw in a quest or two with some actual different outcomes into the mix and it feels less... meh. Meh is a bad feeling when it comes to this kinda content.

edit:

lolslikemuttley LOL the blankets quest yeah. I've mentioned that and used it as an example to a friend recently. That's a prime example of a quest that makes little sense and could of easily of been on a message board. Like why isn't there someone who just I dunno, is making blankets for people but needs materials? Why is it an pissed off soldier whining about not having blankets, saying if they where somewhere else he could just steal them but hey maybe the mages have blankets, lets steal theirs? Wtf?

And sometimes you would find some interesting things like some old prothean ruins or the bodies of some dead explorers or a Thresher Maw... etc

I hope MEA bring this kind of thing back

2.5 million light years is a helluva horizon!

I'm not going to congratulate them for realizing those fetch quests are not fun. If you're making games, you should already know that and not do it in the first place.

But that's kind of the problem. More and more of these companies lose sight that they're actually making "games". And fetch quests aren't the only reason DAI sucks btw. That combat isn't much better.

It isn't just about the skills you use though.. but the skills the enemies use. Which is very little. Good gameplay is about figuring out patterns, and there is little to offer there. I'm not going to hold this just against DAI though. A lot of action rpg attempts suck.

Great news. Also OP, love your icon.

Oh my god yeeeees, this was my favorite part of ME1 and I really hope Andromeda does it like that too!

Most, if not all, of the side quests and side missions are optional. So it didn't bother me.
It's possible. Or Ryder just finds a spot that has resources and a crew is sent in to recover those resources while Ryder goes off in search of more resources.
While the mako was bouncing around in ME, the Inquisitor was hopping around like a bunny rabbit looking for the shards