Dragon Age News Thread

You've missed the point I was making.

All the games you've mentioned either have a fixed character OR have less involved main storylines. Heck, you can skip main quest in Morrowind or Oblivion or Skyrim almost entirely - they take about 25%/30% of the whole content and don't have much in terms of followers. DAI is simply a different game.

So far the only games that 'lacked this' that you mentioned happened to not put that much emphasis on main storyline, hence they could have more involved side quests. That was sort of the point. MOST of content in Oblivion, for example, is pretty much entirely optional. And don't get me wrong, I love TES games and Oblivion was my introduction to the world of RPG games, but I know what those game are and what they aren't. And they aren't built in a way the Dragon Age game is. They are built on a different premise, just like games with fixed characters are built on somewhat different premise. We refine, rather than define characters that we play there and that itself enables writing of a different content, just like less involved main storyline enables putting resources into all those sice-quests that rival the main quest with its scope or involvement or less content for followers enabled Witcher 3 to put resources into some more elaborate optional side-quests we can find when venturing around the world.

The irony is that games like Morrowind or Oblivion enables you to play all those side-quests, but they're not building up to the bigger whole (they exist within the same universe and timeline, but they don't really tie to the main quest), which undermines the point you were trying to make before. The emphasis in these games is put into us choosing our own adventure and don't really overlap with one another - in fact I've always found it amusing that I can be a guildmaster of Mages Guild and Fighters Guild/Companions and be master assassin at the same time or somehow sell my soul to all Daedric Princes and pretty much nobody is like "waitaminute...HOW!?".

Yes, I must've imagined all those steps and things I've been doing aside from "mowing packs of enemies"...

I'm sorry, but all this is just a matter of you not recognizing a different way to do design quests. For you a quest is something that is laden with cinematic, choice and fairly linear and self-encapsulated - for me, a quest is something that is following a clear, sometimes quite long and involved narrative. Despite your insistence, that's what the zones provide - even Hissing Wastes you don't like. None of the things we're doing there is not overlapping with one another, like, for example, Oblivion or Morrowind or Skyrim. All the main objectives and some smaller ones are inter-connected and if we choose to follow all the objectives we manage not only to stop the Venatori, release the slaves and deprive them of some of their leaders, I can find the treasure they're looking for and solve the mystery of something unheard of in Thedas which is dwarven ruins on a surface (hardly a small lore tidbit, especially with all the other 'tidbits' and implications left all over the place). These are hardly "tasks" or scavenger hunts - all of this follows a cohesive narrative.

Hmmm, I see you really don't remember all the stages of the quests there, nor the fact that helping the Dalish clan on Exalted Plains is hardly a small side-quest either. And do you even remember that we can choose to reveal Fairbanks' noble birth and that we have to talk to an enamored peasant to gain access to that quest, but she won't talk with us until we save her friends from hands of the Freemen? Or that fact that this ain't even the end of being involved with him, given that we can continue and ensure a better settlement for refugees, but that requires the elimination of the Freemen - the Freemen we know that are in cahoots with Venatori because of what we've found out in Exalted Plains?

Like I said - you're ignoring a lot there's there and just how inter-connected these things are.

I agree that JoH was an improvement and I'm hoping to see more of those in DA4. However, I wouldn't be objecting to the type of content like in zones in DAI, even if you refuse to see those as legitimate questing. Like it was mentioned somewhere above, at times it was a matter of presentation rather than lack of content and I'm fairly sure that with experience the DA team has as well as improvements on technical sides, we'll probably see improvements to game experience overall. Only recently Mike Laidlaw has said during an interview that he views Inquisition not as something akin to Witcher 3, but Witcher 2 - both are first RPG game on a new engine and in many respects they are a prototype. It's only after they gained experience and learned which things worked and which did not that has let them create TW3. I don't think BW is really aiming to create next TW3 - they can't, because in many respects those are different games and I doubt DA4 will be the last of the series (like TW3 was, which allowed for some definitive end results), but they seem confident that whet they're building now will greatly benefit from experience gained during DAI development.