The early part of Dragon Age: Inquisition is a tough one. We had one of those throw the controller down moments last night, and it wasn't because of a high difficulty. We got caught searching zones, running around the desert, exploring the coast, and generally wandering around an empty, boring, lifeless world.
The rest of the game can't be like this, can it?
We did the first forest zone, the swamp quest, the entire shoreline zone, the city thing with the Templars, and we are delving into the desert area and...and it feels hard to want to continue on. There is nothing going on, no threat, the quests we send advisers out on feel minor and petty, and there's no threat to anything.
The world, the Inquisition, rifts opening up and consuming the the world, the urgency of anything feels like it is out to lunch here in the beginning of the game.
We have one quest warning us if we support the Templars that's it for the mages, yet no option to do anything with the mages, so we are avoiding that quest in lieu of looking for an option.
And then we started searching the desert zone, and I just felt a strange sense of deja-vu, like I was wandering around this single-player MMO collecting herbs and mining rocks. Event the zone fights, once cleared, never came back, and we were wandering empty canyon after empty canyon doing collection quests. We had this feeling on the coastline, once all the fights were done, it was endless running around on foot doing make work.
Even the normally compelling dark fantasy elements in the game felt strangely removed (from the first two), like a team of politically correct writers redid Game of Thrones for a mass audience.
Where is the threat to my existence? Where is the world in danger? Where is the war between the Templars and the mages? Why do I even need a fort? For all our preparation and posturing, it feels like we are building an army to face nothing. I have not seen one Templar vs. mage fight for hours, and that storyline seems to have vaporized. I would at least be expecting towns and kingdoms at this point to be begging me for help against either side of this what appears to be a quite civil war.
It doesn't feel like a war, or even a rift invasion at this point, it just feels like a slow, sloppy, unfocused start.
I was reminded of the old games like Sega's Shining Force series, where you played a rag-tag group of rebels and warriors on a quest leading you into tactical battle after tactical battle. If you lost a battle, that was it, game over. But the consequences and stakes were huge. You were fighting for your life in every battle, and making allies mattered - you needed them for the next fight. Your backs were to the wall, and there was this sense of drama and urgency.
That is what I want to feel. I want to be gathering allies because we desperately need them. I want to fight battles that matter. I want to have our backs pressed to the wall. I want to be this world's last hope. I want the forces of chaos to be constantly pressing from all sides, destroying good lands, and the clock to be ticking down to doomsday. I want the war between the mages and Templars to matter, with battles happening on the map, and us watching (and possibly intervening) on the side of our choice for the common good.
I want a situation that forces me to be the hero of my choosing, or the best hero I can be at the moment.
We need to take a break for a while from this and play something else. I love the characters, world, and greater story, but the boredom and MMO-quests of this installment just got to be too much to take.
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