For those who liked and didn't like MEA, do you think DAI was better?

aslightjump for me, the MEA steadily supplied the bright missions that both entertained me and were interestingly set up, fought. I loved the vaults too. In DAI, the only mission that was really interesting was the mage's recruitment.

The battles included too much of do nothing element, like rotating wheels or standing there channeling the rift, and the bosses I fought were barely ever introduced by name. The Winter Palace sequence was the most boring section in any video game, with the palace intrigues overshadowed by finding 15 Halla statues. 

I was also taken aback by how many really corny jokes the game had, naked guy here, naked Cullen there, dumb interruption of the"caught while kissing" style. It was so weird after the high drama of DA2 relationships, and so far away from the epic storyline... and peeps complain Andromeda is campy. Well, at least the schoolyard humor fits the narrative and era in Andromeda.
 
Except for Dorian, the characters barely mattered to me in Inquisition. If there was perma death chance like in the old games, I would not have reloaded for any of them. I have no idea how they have achieved it, but Cassandra and Varric, so awesome in DA2, are lackluster in DA3... so much for returning characters. Life was sucked out of Cullen, who used to be a controversial character with both spirit and edginess to him, but now is a shy stuttering boy slash broken man.

And, yeah, that whole necessity to run around the endless, endless Skyhold passageways and open doors to talk to a dozen characters I did not really care about turned interaction into a chore. Why, why, why? Second time, I've deliberately recruited only the characters I'd fight with, but I still had the advisors and three default chars on my hands, making it 6 extras I had no use for.

And it was not just interactions that became a chore in Inquisition; literally everything was. Gear, fights, walking around the maps, getting to the next point in the storyline. Everything that I like about gaming was suddenly made frustrating and as tedious as possible.

The areas were so boring... no story like in Andromeda to follow, not enough interesting side characters to give each map someone you care about. In Andromeda, Jaal carried the Angara planets, Eos was important to Liam and Cora, Kadara had Reyes, Eladeen was linked to Drack... each planet stood out, each I could remember by name. The two dozen areas in Inquisition? I did not even realize half the time I've finished the main quest in a place like that green forest with a cave and some Outlaws of some sort. I have not even been able to get to a lot of areas on some maps, because of locks, and how interminably boring playing something like the Exalted plains or a swamp was. Boring, boring and boring pretty much describes the Inquisition for me. And, oh, my particular frustration is reserved for the quest that has three antagonists, a corrupted Warden, a dragon and a demon, in the course of which quest, the dragon flies away, the Warden commits a suicide and you run away from the demon. That's anticlimactic to the nth degree...

The only bosses you get any inside scoop on (and have... a name, woot!) Alexis and Calpernia, you don't really fight. Heck, even what was supposed to be some sort of ersatz boss fights with the dragons was turned into... more nameless mobs. Dragon mobs, one per each area or something.

As a main villain, Archon is present in the game at a regular intervals, and his agenda is pretty clear. I understood well enough what and why he is doing, and I got it why Ryder does what he does to counteract it. In Inquisition, I can never grasp, not really, just how Corypeus plans help him achieve his goals, and why what Inquisitor does at any moment of the 50 hours game is actually opposing Corypheus in some way. And Solas is even less tractable.

DA3 does not work as a sequel game either, because it has no continuation of the stories that were so important, let alone the setting departure of a few hundred years culturally in a span of barely two decades. Where DA2 ended, I was expecting to take sides in a harsh internecine strife between the Mages and Templars... well, they were mobs too.

All and all, I half expect to end up fighting with semiautomatic weapons and flying early airplanes in DA4, while qunari established a theocratic republic in Tevinter with the help of a K-9 unit from Ferelden, and Dorian is hiding in the Deep Riads in camo trying to cobble together the former Dark Spawn who are now very nice to bring the Elven Empire back, while Varric rules the Orlesian wastes.

Aug 11, 2017 18:13:30 GMT vonuber said:

Max's eat shit and die response is more heartfelt and powerful than anything Shepard did, mainly because of the position of vulnerability and powerlessness it is said from.

The entire dialogue system is better than Bioware's. They actually have "dialogue boss battles" instead of magic bullet lines like charm and intimidate.

Wait until they reveal Chloe's backtalk ability at Gamescom for Before The Storm......