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

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To be cynical, did Flynn learn to avoid rainbow colour endings?

I feel as though I really need to pkay TW3 so I can meaningfully engage in discussions regarding it. Much as I played ME3 only so I could understand the complaints, I would like to play TW3 so see what's so great about it.

But I dislike action combat. How difficult do you think it would be for someone who doesn't enjoy action combat to play TW3? The ME games were fine because they supported a pause-and-play style, which TW3 does not. And Skyrim worked for me because I could play as a stealth archer and snipe everything from range (and then mod the game to make close combat easier by having 5 companions with me).

Is TW3 something I could get through, given that has action combat throughout?

As much as I love TW3, from reading your posts I honestly don't think you'd have a good time with the combat mechanics. Even as someone who does enjoy action combat, the combat mechanics are the mediocre black marks on an otherwise stellar game. But a step up from the truly awful ones in the first game.

You could play it on the lowest combat difficulty and just faceroll it with spamming the Quen sign if you want to experience the story and setting, of course.

You'd want it on easy to zip past them. I'd also recommend focusing on being a mage as you can mostly just burn stuff. The melee combat in the game is... functional. It's like, with so many things, they saw Dark Souls and wanted to do something similar (just like DAI) but the higher ups had this hard on for animation priority to the point of being a detriment and didn't understand for any kind of good combat system frames need to be consistent.

So you get this issue where, when you go to make an attack - light or heavy - you can't be sure the timing of it, at all. It could be a short and sweet 10 frames or it could be some spinning bullshit ballerina garbage shit that takes up 25 frames. Just as an aside, and this has nothing to do with the game 'really' but fuck the writer for being obsessed with pirouette. Fucker used it constantly to explain Geralts fighting style like he spent his whole time spinning in his fucking toes like a magic fairy. That bullshit made it's way into the game and it's just... guh god it's so pointless.

...anyway, ranting aside, I think ignoring combat you would like the way the game is structured since they literally don't force you much of anywhere. And your 100% alone so theres literally no one telling you to go do something. The downside with your tastes, though maybe it would 'work' in this case, is Geralt is 100% defined character. You don't make him, you just get to decide how grumpy he is in a conversation. So you know, making up your own background and pretending your character is using different inflections is even more pointless. But like I said, hes from a line of books, he exists in fiction prior to the games so I find it a lot easier not to be irritated with. But thats me.

Anyway yeah, if you give it a try I would recommend focusing on magic and just playing it on easy. Combat is funky enough as is, and that's from someone who loves action combat just as much as I love turn based stuff (unless it's the JRPG lets stand in a line bullshit). It's a bad system designed to try and 'look' good. Bit of a bummer but still worth it.

What the hell happened to the text of my initial post?  Hmph,,,,i will give you to tl;dr version.  combat at the lower levels of difficulty is endurable, the game is good and earns its praise.  The biggest impediment for you might be being forced to be geralt.

I know that spot. And I like that spot.

Combat like that encourages us to learn to use our resources efficiently. Much as the non-regenerating health encourages longer term thinking, adds do the same.

I really like that DAI discourages using all your tools in every encounter.

And since I quite enjoy DAI's combat (especially with the tactical camera, which I understand doesn't work well with a controller), I'm happy to spend time engaging in it. Combat is resource management, and having the potential for sudden bear attacks makes that resource management more fun.

Most modern games (even DAO did this) encourage the player to expend all of their resources in each encounter, and that makes combat less interesting, I think. Decisions should be more complicated than that. DAI's non-regenerating health and unpredictable encounters are better, I think.

"There was no mistake, it still serves its purpose"  

I'd argue that Inquisition encourages burning through your resources more so than Origins, specifically because mana/stamina regenerate very quickly in Inquisition.

If I burn up all my mana at the start of a fight, I'll just have it all back in a few seconds so why not burn it up? Basic awareness will keep me from surprise adds showing up in 90% of situations, so that adds might show up isn't much of an argument.

The only ability I have to actually think about if I really want to use it is rift powers, because that's a resource that generates rather slowly. Everything else is "Just use if it you want it, because it'll be ready again in a few seconds".

The only thing that non regenerating health really brings is that A. You should be not stupid about AoEs if you have friendly fire on and B. You have to make semi-regular returns to camps to restock your potions. Health isn't that hard to replenish between fights when you have unlimited potions outside of major story missions.

It's like the Vancian casting system in Baldur's Gate. In theory it limits how many spells I can cast per day. In reality I can just sleep after every fight if I want to.

I tried the first one. I made it about 30 minutes in before the combat convinced me to stop. TW1's timing-based combat was abhorrent to me.

The fixed protagonist didn't help, though Geralt isn't that different from the sort of character I might want to play. I like him more than Shepard, for example.

But ME's combat is, at worst, dull. It's never frustrating.

TW2 was an improvement over the first game in terms of gameplay, with less of a rhythm based system of combat. It is still very action oriented though and has problems of its own. You need to roll a lot.

I will say that I enjoyed the story and that act 2 is completely different depending on choices in the previous act. I have the third game, and I've been meaning to get around to playing past the first ten minutes for about a year now...

That I agree with, you kill a few bandits and you turn around and there's a bear squad charging you going RAWWW.

It's like Red Dead Redemption all over again.

I never found the fetch quests annoying and think the complaints are overblown, although I can understand why some might find them tedious.

Let's just hope that's not all Bioware took away as issues that need to be fixed, when there were genuine real problems with the story at times, various plot elements had no payoff, some characters or companion lacked any kind of arc or plot relevance, there were no real stakes after Skyhold and Corypheus was very thinly drawn as a main villain.

Compared to those issues... a fetch quest is hardly a deal-breaking flaw of the game?