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

"It's clear that Kaiden wasn't really talking to Shepard there, he was talking to the player." How could you tell the difference? In this case, the most logical course of action just so happens to be what all of your squadmates want to do. Is it such a surprise that none of your crew wants to walk a mile during a time sensitive mission? Same with Inquisition. Of course Solas and others would goad you into moving onto Val Royeaux; completing your main objective is vastly more important than completing whatever odd jobs you have in the Hinterlands. That you view it as developer coddling is your own fault.

"The game should create incentives for the character, not the player." It's odd that you say this, yet dislike in-game advice from your companions. It's the least intrusive and one of the most immersive forms of direct communication with the player. You're not getting railroaded into a specific option, you're getting another character's opinion. Incidentally, having your trusted advisors give you advice about your progression seems like a perfectly good in-universe incentive for your character.

"We should know better than they do what I like." Anecdotal, but generally false. I don't have vomit in my dorm's communal bathroom every weekend because every college student knows better than the warning labels. And alcohol has objective scientific research behind it. We can guarantee bad things will happen, and people still drink too much. The fact is: what people think is fun in the moment might not work out in the long term. Games are almost worse in that theoretically, none of the content in a game can cause you physical harm, so players may get lulled into a false sense of security. They won't get a hangover, but they may inadvertently tire themselves out because they think playing through all a game's content couldn't have any negative side effects. Hell, I shouldn't need to even argue this point. The fact that exhausted themselves in the Hinterlands proves that players can't control themselves. That's all the evidence we need.

I've also never understood why people like you consider breadth of quests to be more important than depth. Are 5 quests with one choice (whether or not to do it) better than a single quest with 5 choices? What's the exchange rate on choice? Are 5 choices of whether or not to do a quest more valuable than 3 choices in a single quest that demand deeper roleplaying?

None of this really matters of course because Inquisition wouldn't have needed better pacing if most of the sidequests had been any good in the first place. Pacing obviously matters, but spreading out your mindless collection quests across more time won't change the fact that they're mindless collection quests.

You got it all wrong! Nobody said "it was bad design" - no! The players were bad and obsessed with completionism. The only mistake BW admits is the amount of those "bad players" who, because of their obsession, badmouthed a good game.

That's a valid opinion.  I know lots of people who prefer ME1 to the others.  Or ME2 to the others.  And I personally prefer ME3 to the others, barring the ending.  We all have our reasons.

Personally, I don't have a whole lot of spare time, and I also have that compulsion to do all the quests and collect everything.  This has resulted in me not finishing many a good game.  The only reason I finished DA:I was because it was more than a good game, it was amazing IMO.

I used to play games through the first time without being a perfectionist, then do a second playthrough to do everything.  But the older I get, the less time I have and the more good games come out.  There's just no time.

Why is it that when I notice character inconsistencies (from a silent protagonist for instance...) it's my fault, yet when you notice them, it's on the devs? Why do you think it's weird for Kaiden to note that the cave is creepy? That's a completely valid thing to note, as are the things your other squad mates say (which actually do reference the desire to hurry and avoid walking).
Which is to say: "why don't devs cater to my every whim?" But also, you do get to fail horribly: if you don't bring the Mako, you can't safely traverse to the bottom of a large drop off and stop Saren. There's no game over screen, but that is a fail state.

I won't bother arguing with you about why Ilos was time sensitive. You can believe what you want in this regard, but that's sort of the point isn't it? 
Obviously. That's my point. It's a completely immersive hint that your character has every right to ignore.
So now you're complaining that some dialog doesn't add new information? I apologize on BioWare's behalf for not reading your mind in the future and putting in specific dialog to assuage your particular concerns. I also apologize on behalf of all people everywhere who repeat themselves in an attempt to spur haste. You seem like you're bending over backwards just to dislike a hint from the developer.
I would like you to prove that in most cases, vomiting was an objective of the person drinking. We can sit here till the end of eternity saying "well someone might like [FEATURE]," but that wouldn't matter because beer isn't made for that one guy who just wants to throw up in my bathroom every weekend, it's made for normal people who don't want to be in pain and would rather not be nauseous.
I'm advocating that if drinking were a game made by developers, that they build in some set of mechanisms (e.g. dialog hinting that you move on) to inform users that their current actions may result in an undesired effect. Or, even better, that they develop a drink that has all the benefits of the original without the negative side effect of vomiting.

Obviously, people should have a choice to do or not do sidequests, but clearly DA:I's implementation rubbed people the wrong way. I don't care if you didn't have a problem with it. Others did, and I know for a fact that there are mechanisms that achieve balance between what people like you want and what most others want.
How would better pacing disadvantage you? If the same number of quests were allocated differently in DA:I, how would you be worse off for it?
That's literally all I'm saying. That's what good pacing is. Having Solas nag the player to get moving is a good (albeit fairly inelegant as game design goes) hinting mechanic that doesn't sacrifice immersion.
And if you don't help them at all, then they stop playing the game and write a bad review. Regardless, the point is that there are ways to make everyone happy. Disregarding everyone else just to make yourself happy isn't one of them.
I know, but what I ask is: are all whys and hows equal? Many of the quests in DA:I are mainly about getting a person some arbitrary thing. Concequently, a lot of the whys behind your character's choices are more likely to be similar to one another. "I don't have time for this" is a fairly valid stance for
Would you not prefer a quest that solicited successively deeper decisions from your character? For instance, your character may be willing to help someone get an object, but are you then you learn that you have to take it from someone else. Now, not only do you have to compare your desire to help the quest giver to your desire to not take from some other person, you have to deal with the fact that the quest giver may have lied by omission. Would you take one of those quests over two straightforward "go here, get this" quests? As a roleplayer, I'd imagine that it's more rewarding to define a single aspect of your character very specifically than a few broad aspects very nebulously. That's why I think fewer, deeper quests are generally better.

Same thing for how. If most of the quests are "go here, get this," the your character's approach will likely be the same (or quite similar) for most of those quests. Most in DA:I involve walking around, killing the usual mobs, interacting with the objective, and walking back. You can try to diversify the gameplay yourself, but the game doesn't make it easy for you. Would it not be preferable to have fewer, better designed, quests that call for more unique approaches or just have a larger number of different considerations, like more dialog encounters, distinct enemy designs, and different puzzles?
But exploration could be encouraged in any number of ways. To get back to exchange rates: would you prefer 3 separate quests that tell you to go to 3 different areas or 1 longer quest that takes you through those areas as well?
The problem is that a game called The Witcher 3 exists, and it was able to give me a quest about finding a pan and still be interesting. Clearly, it's not impossible to design a game where busywork quests are still enjoyable. I get that we're playing Jesus, but that doesn't mean the quests themselves can't be interesting.
Not unless you think the breach isn't stable or you don't like the fact that small breaches are appearing everywhere or any other number of valid reasons. Justify your views all you want, but that doesn't make Solas less justified in nagging you.

I have no expectations for open-world content being designed well. Even Witcher 3's world was filled with garbage, even if the side quests were substantially better than DAI's.

Kaiden's is the only one I've heard, but there's no reason for Shepard to change her mind about anything based on Kaiden thinking it's creepy. But given that the trench run cannot be completed without the Mako, it makes sense for the game to tell the player about that. It just does a lousy job of it.

Solas's comments bother me more, though, because he keeps saying the same thing. But even that only bothers me because I know it was added later specifically to tell players they can move on, even though that information was already provided by the game's other systems. It's condescending.

Exactly. That's a good thing. I really like that ME1 let me do that.


I wasn't even vaguely claiming that. That I don't think students were actively trying to avoid vomiting doesn't mean I think they intended vomiting. I suspect most of them were indifferent to vomiting, or willing to accept it as a cost of heavu drinking. They wilfully chose the vomiting outcome because they wanted that outcome. Not the vomiting specificly, but the whole outcome taken altogether. They voluntarily risked vomiting.

It's insulting to them to suggest they didn't know what they were choosing.

That I would oppose, from a game design perspective. If there's no potential downside, choosing the option is a no-brainer. Having to weigh both costs and benefits is what makes the decision interesting.

If that was done by denying us the option of approaching the content differently, yes.

The value comes from the presence of decision-making opportunities.

I define the character during character creation. That never happens during play.

That said, in theory I would prefer the deeper quest, but deeper quests are much harder to build in a way that allows a wide variety of character designs. If it turns out the first guy didn't tell me something relevant, what can I do about that? Can I confront him about that? Can I kill him? Can I get his item and hold it for ransom? Can I demand an explanation? A game that was less rigid in structure would allow that (BG, for example, let us attack anyone). But in these tightly scripted games I worry that a deeper quest would leave us with no acceptable ways out.

Shallower quests are less likely to be character-breaking.

That said, DAI had some deeper quests that did a pretty good job of offering options. Sera's companion quests are basically exactly what you describe, and we do get the option to call her on it, accept her explanation (even agree with it), or send her away forever.

As long as they don't break the character I designed, sure. But I'm not going to tailor my character's design to suit the quests as they come. That would defeat the whole process of roleplaying.

How much of that pan quest relies on the sepcificity of Geralt? I won't play The Witcher 3 because of the action combat, but I think it's probably easier to write engaging quests if you know something about the character who is doing them. But I dislike fixed characters. I always want to design my own. A blank slate will always be better for me.

If The Witcher 3's pan quest would still work with a blank slate protagonist, then it's worth looking at.

Unfortunately, the mandatory action combat prevents me from checking that game out myself.

There's no evidence for either of those. If a player wants to invent problems for himself, fine, but that's not something the game's design can foresee.

The player needs to invent content to populate the protagonist's mind (otherwise there would be no way to play the game from an in-character perspective), but making up details about the world just to create obstacles is the player's own fault.

This is just like how I think the player is at fault for thinking that any given NPC is the same person across multiple playthroughs.

Of course. It doesn't break Solas's character by doing so. It just creates a metagame incentive to leave him behind or to spend Power unnecessarily just to reduce the available total below 4.

Or, I suppose we could just go to Val Royeaux early and pretend we didn't. But I'd rather not have to do those things. Solas's nagging reiterates things the player already knows. What is the point?

That wasn't even the problem with combat.

The problem was monotnomy. They gutted a lot of passives and removed sustained abilities...I liked having the variety in Dragon Age II a lot more as well, even had more skills and spells I believe per class in the end. 

I really hope they don't get rid of respawning foes, call it what you will, but I don't enjoy exploring areas that are lifeless and empty.

This . SETTING THE TACTICS PRESETS is literally one of my favorite features in Dragon Age combat.

And they cut it out.

The hell?

This isn't relevant to Andromeda, of course, since Mass Effect never had presets. But I'm just saying. I am relieved to see Bioware openly acknowledging my discontent with Inquisition, which means that future games will hopefully address those problems and I can continue enjoying their games as a fan. And not become an ex-fan, which is ugly business.

Maybe there will be mobs from the 82nd Airborne  drop from the sky like the mobs did in DA2

Apparently being a fan is also nasty business.