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

melbella
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Aaryn Flynn says: We Have Learned From The Mistakes of Inquistion.... Sept 29, 2016 1:38:31 GMT

Post by melbella on Sept 29, 2016 1:38:31 GMT

Sept 28, 2016 8:47:00 GMT Natashina said:

Also, one of the chains can affect the world state. A few missteps or lack of a guide and there go the rest of the Wardens in that part of the world. If they do something like a WT, I'd hope that they learned from DA:I and saved quests that can affect a world state for cutscenes and dialogue choices.

Well, it doesn't really affect the world state (as of yet) because the Warden WT chain isn't in the Keep.- only whether they were rebuilt or exiled. Same with killing off Clan Lavellan. The only WT sequences in the Keep are Sutherland's crew, Jecin/Celeste (why is this one important?) and Red Jenny (again, why?). Other than that, it's just a general "did you WT?" tile.

So, you may have (accidentally :whistle: ) killed off the Wardens in your game, but you didn't really kill them off since it's not an importable decision. Only exile is.

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Aaryn Flynn says: We Have Learned From The Mistakes of Inquistion.... Sept 29, 2016 2:27:52 GMT

Post by bshep on Sept 29, 2016 2:27:52 GMT

Sept 28, 2016 15:15:41 GMT Iakus said:

Sept 28, 2016 3:39:31 GMT Natashina said:

[...]

1) Agreed the head of the Inquisition shouldn't have to go around picking flowers. But I'll take War Table missions over "Creeper Shepard listening in on conversations" any time.

2) I miss the tactics menu

I liked how they did that "mingle" thing on Citadel DLC. Wish they had thought about that since the start.

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Aaryn Flynn says: We Have Learned From The Mistakes of Inquistion.... Sept 29, 2016 2:34:43 GMT

Post by PapaCharlie9 on Sept 29, 2016 2:34:43 GMT

Uh ... I just found this thread. :blush:

I just read all 13 pages to catch up. Apologies for the slight necro of stuff said about a week ago ...

Sept 23, 2016 19:56:29 GMT @tzeenchianapostrophe said:

Another note in regards to emotions in protagonists.

Adam Jensen. He didn't ask for this :hue:

, but he has an awesome VA with an awesome name (Elias Toufexis), but his range of emotions is rather limited.
Sarcasm is the most common, with anger on occasions, and some sympathy usually as an optional choice.

I suppose his broody persona kinda fits the Cyberpunk theme, and personally I don't think this harmed his character in any way really.

Still, curious to know what others think of him.

I have a love/hate relationship with DX. I think Adam Jensen's characterization and performance is spot on. But that is also the primary reason why I feel kind of meh about DX, compared to loving ME and DA.

Jensen is emotionally distant. He has a perfectly legitimate reason to be emotionally distant, well established in his backstory, and the writers do play off of that to really amp up the things he does care about emotionally. When he has an emotional moment, it's a huge payoff.

But that emotional distance, which is his ground state for 90% of the game, makes it hard to connect with the guy. He doesn't care, so you don't care. Or at least, I don't care.

It's still a good game, but I like it more for the problem-solving/puzzles/exploration aspects than for the narrative. The narrative leaves me flat.

BTW, Bioware could learn a thing or two about player agency and emergent gameplay from DX. Say what you like about Eidos being complicit in the greedy money grab, but you can't say they didn't nail emergent gameplay. They wrote the book on it. No matter how many times I replay a mission, I find a completely new way to do it. For example, there's this one short mission where you can complete it by running-and-gunning everyone dead. Easy-peasy. Or, you can knock everyone out, no one dies. Or, you can negotiate your way to a settlement with the bad guy, no one knocked out, no one dies. Or ... and this is what I love about this game ... you can get the cops to kill the bad guys for you, just by throwing a bowling ball at a nearby cop's head and then going invisible so he thinks the bad guys threw it, not you.

I have yet to have one of those crazy ideas for completing a mission and not have it actually work.

Bioware, do something like that for MEA.

Last Edit: Sept 29, 2016 2:50:06 GMT by PapaCharlie9

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Aaryn Flynn says: We Have Learned From The Mistakes of Inquistion.... Sept 29, 2016 2:47:09 GMT bshep, cigne, and 1 more like this

Post by PapaCharlie9 on Sept 29, 2016 2:47:09 GMT

Sept 18, 2016 16:19:01 GMT SofaJockey said:

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!’”

I'm really glad to read this. In the other thread, the DAI poll on how many hours the first run took, there's a discussion about this exact Hinterlands prisoner problem and where the blame lies. Is it entirely Bioware's fault for a bad design? Is it entirely a player's fault for not progressing the main quest?

I think it's a bit of both.

The problem is broader than underestimating completionism -- in fact, I don't think it has anything to do with completionism at all. It's FOMO -- Fear Of Missing Out. Others have said it in this thread -- FOMO or the hope that even though you've done 10 boring fetch quests in a row, the 11th will be the magical one that unlocks untold riches of hidden juicy content. That's what Bioware has to look out for. They need some kind of clue, like the new dialogue wheel with the ? hint, that this stuff is optional and there ain't no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. If you're looking for juice, do the damn main quest!

I don't agree with all the clamoring to remove all fetch quests and all thin content -- it serves a purpose. Certainly, thin content shouldn't replace meaty side-quests altogether, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. If the completely optional thin content serves a greater purpose, like encouraging you to explore an area you otherwise wouldn't even know about, or get exposed to some cultural fallout from the Breach or the mage/templar schism that you wouldn't otherwise encounter -- the cultists in Winterwatch Tower, for example -- why not have it?

More meaty side-quest content? Absolutely. Make it more obvious that thin content is optional? You bet. It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing, zero sum. Unless Bioware explicitly says so, in which case, I''m with you all 100%, dump the thin content entirely.

Last Edit: Sept 29, 2016 3:00:47 GMT by PapaCharlie9

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Aaryn Flynn says: We Have Learned From The Mistakes of Inquistion.... Sept 29, 2016 5:23:13 GMT Addictress, Gileadan, and 2 more like this

Post by Frost on Sept 29, 2016 5:23:13 GMT

Sept 29, 2016 2:47:09 GMT PapaCharlie9 said:

I'm really glad to read this. In the other thread, the DAI poll on how many hours the first run took, there's a discussion about this exact Hinterlands prisoner problem and where the blame lies. Is it entirely Bioware's fault for a bad design? Is it entirely a player's fault for not progressing the main quest?

I think it's a bit of both.

The problem is broader than underestimating completionism -- in fact, I don't think it has anything to do with completionism at all. It's FOMO -- Fear Of Missing Out. Others have said it in this thread -- FOMO or the hope that even though you've done 10 boring fetch quests in a row, the 11th will be the magical one that unlocks untold riches of hidden juicy content. That's what Bioware has to look out for. They need some kind of clue, like the new dialogue wheel with the ? hint, that this stuff is optional and there ain't no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. If you're looking for juice, do the damn main quest!

I don't agree with all the clamoring to remove all fetch quests and all thin content -- it serves a purpose. Certainly, thin content shouldn't replace meaty side-quests altogether, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. If the completely optional thin content serves a greater purpose, like encouraging you to explore an area you otherwise wouldn't even know about, or get exposed to some cultural fallout from the Breach or the mage/templar schism that you wouldn't otherwise encounter -- the cultists in Winterwatch Tower, for example -- why not have it?

More meaty side-quest content? Absolutely. Make it more obvious that thin content is optional? You bet. It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing, zero sum. Unless Bioware explicitly says so, in which case, I''m with you all 100%, dump the thin content entirely.

I don't know. If there are one or two, okay, but more than that and it really starts to impact my enjoyment of the game. To me these types of quests are worse than the repeating environments of DA:2 because quests are more important to me than the game's graphics/environments (which is not to say I love repeating environments ;p). I don't want to remove all side quests; I want better quality ones. It may be optional (the whole game is optional), but if I want to skip so much, it makes me wonder about the game. This is something I really want them to fix because I really like Bioware games, and they didn't always have this problem.

Last Edit: Sept 29, 2016 5:40:24 GMT by Frost

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Aaryn Flynn says: We Have Learned From The Mistakes of Inquistion.... Sept 29, 2016 5:48:28 GMT FireAndBlood, Ahriman, and 9 more like this

Post by Hanako Ikezawa on Sept 29, 2016 5:48:28 GMT

Sept 28, 2016 15:15:41 GMT Iakus said:

1) Agreed the head of the Inquisition shouldn't have to go around picking flowers. But I'll take War Table missions over "Creeper Shepard listening in on conversations" any time.

Relevant:

SPOILER: Click to show

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Aaryn Flynn says: We Have Learned From The Mistakes of Inquistion.... Oct 6, 2016 15:40:04 GMT PapaCharlie9 likes this

Post by flyingsquirrel on Oct 6, 2016 15:40:04 GMT

On the completionism thing, I think one other factor is that so many sidequests (and not just in DA:I) are presented in the dialogue as OMG REALLY IMPORTANT! Even if I know that it's probably just going to be another fetch quest or a few minutes of fighting, it sometimes feels wrong in terms of playing my character to just shrug it off. Maybe a better way to handle this is to give the player-character a third option besides just saying yes or no that implies that you still aren't just ignoring the situation. In the case of DA:I, perhaps allow the Inquisitor to dispatch subordinates to handle the problem, but you don't get as many assets, XP, or whatever as you would if you handle it yourself.

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