First of all, let's start with the title, Inquisition. Can you imagine a more uninspired title than that? Worse, the first thing that the title will remind people of is either Monty Python or the song-and-dance sketch from Mel Brooks' History of the World, Part 1.
Secondly, it's clear that BioWare learned nothing from the debacle that was Dragon Age II. Despite whatever pretence they may have towards "humility" or "listening to feedback," it's clear that BioWare regards Dragon Age II as being the "right direction" for the series and I suspect that, much like how Mass Effect 3 played almost identically to Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age III's gameplay will be nothing more than a slightly-tweaked version of Dragon Age 2's gameplay. Honestly, it's being developed by the same people who made DAII, who have shown themselves to be utterly unrepentant regarding how that game turned out. What else can one expect?
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| BioWare's "humility" on display. |
- The same yawning chasm between gameplay and story that has characterised the past few BioWare titles. You, the player, will have no purpose but to kill enemies to advance to the next cutscene. The entirety of the story will play out in these long, "cinematic," largely non-interactive cutscenes, where at most the player will be offered the chance to say one line of dialogue or another, which will affect absolutely nothing. Inquisition will exist only to show off BioWare's "brilliant" writing, not to let you actually interact with the story in any way, shape, form, or fashion.
- The player character will be human and voiced, because BioWare loves blowing huge sums of money on making everything voiced, despite this making little improvement on gameplay and greatly reducing the number of dialogue options due to budget constraints. Unlike a game such as Fallout: New Vegas, where there were numerous skill and intelligence checks in dialogue, DAIII will have the same three responses - nice/mean/unfunny twat - that DAII had.
- The Mass Effect-style dialogue wheel will return, and once again your character's responses will be summed up in paraphrases that bear no resemblance to what he actually says. They will also be oh-so-helpfully colour-coded so that people don't even have to read, because even reading three or four words is too much for today's gamer.
- Quests will be linear, on-rails, and involve little more than "Go to location X, kill everyone, bring back a Y." There will be no alternative solutions, no other means of completing quests, and no divergence at all. You will not be able to play as a character who uses diplomacy or guile to accomplish his aims; combat will be the only way through the game.
- Characters who can be killed Dragon Age: Origins or Dragon Age II will inexplicably return to life in Inquisition. When called on this, David Gaider will, with his usual sneering condescension, proclaim that "This is MY story, damn it! I'm the writer, I OUTRANK YOU!!!"
- There will be multiplayer, and you will have to play it get the best ending, just like in Mass Effect 3. Completing quests will raise your "Inquisitor Points," which will ultimately determine what ending you get. Obtaining enough Inquisitor Points to get the best ending will require you to play multiplayer. This is so that EA/BioWare can make extra money by selling Online Passes to buyers of used games.
- There will be Day 1 DLC. So much of it, in fact, that its combined value will exceed the price of the base game. BioWare will go through all manner of logical gymnastics trying to convince people that the Day 1 DLC isn't just some content that they deliberately left out of the game to make more money, but something that was developed separately. Of course, a quick examination of the game content will reveal their claims to be complete bollocks.
- The developers are "checking out aggressively" the gameplay of Skyrim, so DAIII will feature long periods of wandering through empty wilderness, looking for cookie-cutter dungeons filled with enemies and loot that are all scaled to your level, rendering exploration pointless.
- The game will be praised to high heavens by the sycophantic "professional" reviewers, who will proclaim Inquisition as "10/10!" "A masterpiece of the artform!" "Redefines the entire genre!" But the actual players will hate it, give it an abysmal user score on Metacritic.com, and this will result in the "professional" reviewers condemning the dissatisfied players as "a vocal minority of entitled whiners," a claim the developers will dutifully parrot. David Gaider will blame the low user score on 4chan or RPGCodex, Mike Laidlaw will once again mutter something about "people clinging to stupid old crap."
- Like Dragon Age II, there will be an Awesome Button. Like Dragon Age II, it will be helpfully labelled "Uninstall."
David Gaider is kind of a dick isn't he? :-)
ReplyDelete"The Mass Effect-style dialogue wheel will return, and once again your character's responses will be summed up in paraphrases that bear no resemblance to what he actually says."
ReplyDeleteWhich is dreadful
"They will also be oh-so-helpfully colour-coded so that people don't even have to read, because even reading three or four words is too much for today's gamer."
The fact that the 3-4 word description has nothing to do with what is actually said, makes color coding it absolutely necessary to have even the barest of hints as to what it will result in doing.