I will be the first to admit that I'm a bit of a sucker for sword and sorcery fantasy settings. If you want me to forgive - even enjoy - some of your most hackneyed tropes and mechanics, simply make them ~Tolkienesque~. Space marines fighting alien hordes? Derivative. Pathetic. An elf gathering enchanted herbs in a forest? Hell yes brother I am there. But even despite this predilection, 40 hours of DAI has left me unable to be compelled by... almost anything in the game.
This is an unusual experience for me, so I set about trying to diagnose the malaise. An easy answer might be the music: relatively sparse, and what's there is mostly generic Dorian scale fantasy orchestra. Not a mortal sin by any means, but its contributions to the game are fairly negligible.
The story, combat, lore, and environments can all be characterized similarly. The environments especially: layouts of most settlements are organized in such a manner that walking from one point to another requires a Family Circus-esque traversal of ramps and stairs. My guess is that the designers wanted to give the impression that each location is rich in histories that get reflected in their layout (like Brazilian favelas maybe [?]), but it ends up feeling like they plopped "Medieval Town – Free Pack 2" assets down onto a map and forgot to rotate them. They are missing the spatial logic that exists in actual lived-in towns. If Redcliffe existed in real life it would be littered with desire paths.
But I believe the real problem is that there's nothing that I can identify in DAI as distinctly "Dragon Age" aside from, of course, the dialogue system and cutscenes with people casually drenched in blood. Peer S&S games – Skyrim, The Witcher, D: OS 2, possibly even Pillars of Eternity, World of Warcraft, Trine, etc. – all have distinctive thematic and stylistic leitmotifs, despite using settings that are otherwise fairly off-the-shelf, or at least highly referential. In DAI, the designs of the character and codex cards are probably one of the best parts of the entire game and could have been expanded into something truly interesting– perhaps the story is told through cards, similar to a tarot deck, invoking questions of fate, storytelling, and tropes/archetypes themselves. Instead, the cards relegated entirely to being a neat design element. So while countless pieces of media have been described as "like Skyrim" over the past 11 years, I can't imagine what would make me say that something is "like Dragon Age" besides, perhaps, a beta version of a fantasy MMO.
Does this make it a bad game? No. I can imagine returning to this for something predictable and not very challenging. And lots of people seem to be heavily invested in the relationships between characters, for what that's worth. But I did feel like I was playing through the whiteboard brainstorming sessions for other games. With the budget and cachet available to them, this should have been a very different game.
This is an unusual experience for me, so I set about trying to diagnose the malaise. An easy answer might be the music: relatively sparse, and what's there is mostly generic Dorian scale fantasy orchestra. Not a mortal sin by any means, but its contributions to the game are fairly negligible.
The story, combat, lore, and environments can all be characterized similarly. The environments especially: layouts of most settlements are organized in such a manner that walking from one point to another requires a Family Circus-esque traversal of ramps and stairs. My guess is that the designers wanted to give the impression that each location is rich in histories that get reflected in their layout (like Brazilian favelas maybe [?]), but it ends up feeling like they plopped "Medieval Town – Free Pack 2" assets down onto a map and forgot to rotate them. They are missing the spatial logic that exists in actual lived-in towns. If Redcliffe existed in real life it would be littered with desire paths.
But I believe the real problem is that there's nothing that I can identify in DAI as distinctly "Dragon Age" aside from, of course, the dialogue system and cutscenes with people casually drenched in blood. Peer S&S games – Skyrim, The Witcher, D: OS 2, possibly even Pillars of Eternity, World of Warcraft, Trine, etc. – all have distinctive thematic and stylistic leitmotifs, despite using settings that are otherwise fairly off-the-shelf, or at least highly referential. In DAI, the designs of the character and codex cards are probably one of the best parts of the entire game and could have been expanded into something truly interesting– perhaps the story is told through cards, similar to a tarot deck, invoking questions of fate, storytelling, and tropes/archetypes themselves. Instead, the cards relegated entirely to being a neat design element. So while countless pieces of media have been described as "like Skyrim" over the past 11 years, I can't imagine what would make me say that something is "like Dragon Age" besides, perhaps, a beta version of a fantasy MMO.
Does this make it a bad game? No. I can imagine returning to this for something predictable and not very challenging. And lots of people seem to be heavily invested in the relationships between characters, for what that's worth. But I did feel like I was playing through the whiteboard brainstorming sessions for other games. With the budget and cachet available to them, this should have been a very different game.