Am I the only one that hate this so called "open world"? NO SPOILERS

[Vaalyah]

I personally have no idea what were in the mind of the developers, but I can summarize what I've seen in my game so far (I've just moved from Haven, so, please, NO SPOILERS of the plot, I am speaking only of game mechanics):

 

- I have to walk in these huge maps, without fog of war actually indicating if 2 min ago I've walked right or left at the rock. The result is that I have to re-walk the whole map about 3 or 4 times, for being sure to have covered the whole of it.

- I keep pressing the reveal button, to find iron, grasses, ingredients, whatever.

- I keep pressing it again, because it doesn't show you anything if you are just 20 centimeters lower than where the iron actually is.

- Once you've found something (and there is something every 2 meters), you have to move the damn camera and trying to spot it with your eyes, since highlighting it with a faint yellow contour was surely a great idea, among light green and yellow grasses...

- Then I give up and try to locate it on my compass...

- Just to find out that the compass is simply not useful to actually spot the damn ingredient.

- After 2 minutes looking around, you have to almost walk over it, or you won't be able to catch it. Of course, camera and movement are still dreadful. And I've opened DA2 for comparison: I am not asleep, they ARE dreadful ("It *is* filthy" quote).

- In the meanwhile, other 5 spots are blinking and ringing around... but, hey!, those are the craft tools, or the tents, or the road signs... all things that are not going to disappear, so you will STILL seeing and hearing the blinking and you have to come back to check if there is something else, since again, you can't just glance and look, and compass is unreliable.

- Have I already said that I can't remember if I have turned left or right at the rock?

- So I check the image-map and it is so poorly drawn that I can't get any idea from it. Let's walk back from the start, AGAIN.

 

In the meanwhile, I haven't yet understood if elf grass and iron will respawn, or if you haven't picked them up, they're lost. So I keep walking up and down, trying to loot everything I can. I don't even have time to check the view, for I am too focused on finding ingredients.

So, what this open world is there for? Just a waste of time, from my point of view. And then, you find a location, but you can't reach it, for it's too high and there's no access nearby. You watch the image-map, but no guess from it. I find this "open world" 100% tedious. It is just a way to make people lose time walking up and down.

I am here to play a ROLE play game, not a walk-and-collect one, I thought.

[Thandal]

Well, it is deliberately a HUGE environment. But unlike the previous Dragon Age games, there's no point in trying to cover a whole map at one go. Things will change as you go along and you'll find yourself returning to the same areas for various reasons regardless of how thoroughly you may have explored them before.

 

As for your apparent difficulty/frustration with navigating in it, well... It is different than anything I was used to, but after a bit it seemed pretty easy to get around. And also pretty easy to find things. Although I do know what you mean about wishing the search wouldn't keep pinging on things I've already noted. I also recommend mods like Search Radius Increased, for those who feel the default search size is too small.

 

And yes, crafting resources will respawn, so you can't rely on them as indicators that you "haven't been here before". (Which I tried to do for the first few hours of my first playthough before realizing that I had, in fact, been by that particular tower. Twice. :pinch: )

 

The Number One tip I would give to anyone starting off is: "Get out of the Hinterlands early! Don't spend all day in that one (enormous) area. Explore the rest of Thedas that's open to you. You'll have a lot more fun that way." :thumbsup:

[Vaalyah]

Thanks for the link, I've downloaded that mod, maybe it would help.

But if resources are respawning, this means I CANNOT rely on them as indicator that I've not been there before :confused:

 

I must admit that I am finding the game quite frustrating. Not for the game itself, but for the lacking of information. An example. The quartermaster asked me to find iron (already had) and woods. In Haven I'd found a place map-indicator said it was good for wood. But when I've come back to quartermaster, she didn't get it and the quest is still there. I had to look for online help to understand that you need to plant a flag to claim the terrain. But the game doesn't tell you this. I find Ocularum (or similar) on the map, but I had no idea of what they were, before reading online. Same for establishing a camp.

 

The tutorial is not enough to make you understand all the new things this game has.

[ThingTheWiz]

Learning what the Ocularum (Ocularae?) are, and what they do is is actually part of the plotline - don't be over-worried that there are no pointers telling you what to do at every step of the game. Just read your open quests and take them forward in whatever order works for you. The game is more about discovery and choosing YOUR way forward as opposed to THE way forward.

Edited August 6, 2018 by ThingTheWiz

[Thandal]

^^^ What ThingTheWiz said! ^^^

 

Plus, the Quartermaster didn't actually ask for iron and wood. She said that she needed better weapons for the Inquisition's solders, and that better weapons needed iron and wood. Hmmmm... Is there anybody in Haven who might be able to use iron and wood to *make* better weapons? :whistling:

[ThingTheWiz]

As Thandal suggests, just keep "forging" ahead........

[Vaalyah]

Learning what the Ocularum (Ocularae?) are, and what they do is is actually part of the plotline - don't be over-worried that there are no pointers telling you what to do at every step of the game. Just read your open quests and take them forward in whatever order works for you. The game is more about discovery and choosing YOUR way forward as opposed to THE way forward.

O.o

 

Guys, I am not the average 12yo console player. I come from glorious time of Baldur's Gate, Torment Planescape and so on. I am an hardcore RPG player, both P&P and on pc, please!

I am not referring about difficulties in completing the quests (quests which are, actually, plain stupid. More MMORPG kind than what an RPG should be: go in place A, kill enemies/gather supplies, go to place B, speak with XXXX, end of quest), I am speaking about GAME MECHANICS.

 

My problem was not finding the wood spot. My problem was discovering that for the game to actually UNDERSTAND I had found the wood spot, I have to plant a stupid flag in the spot with the "blurred" flag. And since nothing in the game tells you so, I had to watch a youtube video to discover that, for the game to mark the spot as "discovered", I had to right-click on the blurred flag. That's also why I had to re-walk half of the Hinterlands to put flags here and there in the historical locations.

And no tutorial, no codex, no in-game character simply tells you that you must mark everything you meet.

 

THAT's my problem. Not finishing quests which are so damn stupid and tedious, that you just have to look for the marks in the map to know where to go. The quest quality has not improved since DA2, even if every player and their mothers had asked Bioware to do something about that. Since I don't want to write my review over again (already done in a site, but it's in my native language), here you can find a good summary of why the quest system is dreadful:

http://mygodwhathassciencedone.blogspot.com/2013/04/dragon-age-ii-is-horrible-game-and-you.html

 

Another thing I've found randomly, and not for the due tutorial in this game, is the cyan wind rose. I had no idea what it indicates, and it is not present in the legend. It has been just pure luck that I've realized it moves if I right-click on the map and that it happens to show a cyan light column in the game. My game experience has improved tons of times since that, because now I am finally able to actually FIND the place I mark on my map.

Isn't the game supposed to tell me I can place a pin-point in the real world? Of course it is. Does this happen? No, it doesn't (at least in my game, localized in my native language. I still keep hopes for the English version).

 

And about open-world, the point is that I am wasting too much time in wandering around, just to find a path to reach the higher peak in the map, where the Ocularum is (why the hell they build everything on mountains? Since ancient Egypt, every society has always build things preferably in plain, near a river!!!), instead of progressing with the plot.

This is just wasted time, not fun at all.

 

As someone said in another site (specialized in game reviews), they have stretched a 40-hours game in a 150 one, by filling it with pointless wondering. That's the exact feeling I am having.

[Thandal]

Well, the manual does discuss setting a "waypoint". (Admittedly, it was obviously written for the XBox controller.)

 

Hero Map
Quest Map
View the map for your current quest or location.
Press [A] to set a waypoint.

[Vaalyah]

 

(Admittedly, it was obviously written for the XBox controller.)

Not only that, it is also extremely bad. In this site, there's something I would call a manual: https://guides.gamepressure.com/dragonageiii/guide.asp?ID=27786

By the way, I am looking into google since 2 days: I am unable to gain inquisition perks. I am level 10 of influence, but only got 3 perks (spent) and nothing more. Is it a known bug? Because really, I am not gaining any other perk since a while and I'd need them.

[Thandal]

"Perks" are earned by completing objectives along the Main Plotline.

One can spend days exploring and doing side quests, even leveling-up more than once, without earning any. :laugh:

 

(BTW: There's a hard cap of 20 perks that can actually be applied in-game. Which means you'll never get them all. :dry: )