I’m playing on a PC with M&K, and I have the exact same issues with crafting as you describe in your earlier post. It’s such a pain I usually don’t want to do it.
Case in point: Yesterday, I decided to upgrade armor. Go into crafting, see I have some schematics that let me up some resistance. So what resistances need upping? Ok, back out, look at each character, see what they have already. Sera is good on cold resistance, ok on fire, bad on spirit/magic. One of my other chars is the opposite. My char really needs cold resist. WTH, ok, pull out a piece of paper, make notes. Go back to crafting, commence with the hell Kinthalis describes above as far as clicking too many times, etc.
It’s really dull and difficult. Not fun, and I’m not sure if it’s even worth it. I’m playing on Normal, and have very little difficulty with any fight, probably because I’ve already outleveled most of the main quest.
Damn. I like the game, and I continue to play, but I’m sort of wondering if I’ll bother completing it because I’m already getting frustrated with the mechanics and the quests seem to be the same thing over, and over, and over…
Don’t give up on it yet. Like I said,t he main storyline quests are excellent. The last boss fight… well, ignore that too, but trust me, you’ll want to see the story through at least.
Just don’t worry about the side quests. Go for all of the war table quests with the rift above them. Those are the main-line quests.
I did that, and spent most of the last few hours enjoying the game more.
Yeah, I played mouse and keyboard. And I understand it’s superior to the console or PC controller options. Insert “master race” joke here, I guess.
I usually didn’t sweat specific resistances except for High Dragon fights. In which case it wasn’t trying to balance them but loading on the fire resistance or cold resistance, etc. In general, +4% Melee Defense was always a winner versus +12% Cold Resistance.
I won’t say that anyone else didn’t have trouble with it but the experiences described here were not mine and I thought the crafting was great. But I mainly crafted for myself and my favored companions. The rest got hand me downs or "New Tier 3 heavy armor schematic? Craft it using whichever best ore I have the most of ".
Crafted gear is so superior the only time it wad worth comparing to dropped gear was if a unique purple dropped. The rest was vendor junk. There was little need to carefully compare DPS because unless you got a new tier schematic or resources, there want much difference. A little bit (maces usually seemed to have better DPS than swords) but nothing that can’t wait until my next crafting spree.
It just seems weird to me because it has been such a positive for me when I hear people say it was so bad for them.
Probably not much. If anything, the game is easy to out level if you try and do everything. Plus you can always leave a region and level up a bit if you felt outclassed.
I was sick over the weekend and put a stupid number of hours into this while couch-bound, and I’m up to 56 hours in, with probably two-thirds of the open-world-MMOish content cleaned up at this point. It looks like with the holidays it’s going to be really close as to whether I finish it in 2014 or not (which would make it only the second game released in '14 that I finished in '14; I’m pretty consistently lagging 2-3 years behind the release schedule).
I continue to enjoy all the story-stuff: even when the decisions are transparently not-that-meaningful in the Bioware fashion, it’s all well enough done that it’s worth the time. I’m nearing the point where I just kind of want to start slamming the main line quests… but I really want to get all the dragons first. Even though they’re more variations on a theme than different fights each time, I always enjoy a dragon-killin’. The inherent epicness of dragon fights raises them above the general drags of the combat design. Plus, the better to craft all of that T3 crafted gear that makes the dropped loot pointless.
Also, Dorian still owes me a companion quest, and I’ve got some work to do on the repetitive pointless War Table missions that I love anyways. I think that’s my Dragon Age Missed Opportunity of the Day, actually: they put so much effort into doing all this lore-writing (which ranges from adequate to pretty damn good), and all these little quest lines, and a great feeling of assigning advisers to things… and it all falls apart once you realize you’re getting 30 influence and a similar result no matter who you send. Like I said, I’m still a total sucker for them - right now I have Cullen fetching me metals instead of doing a mission because Josie would be SO MUCH BETTER at getting me flavor text to go with my 60 influence! and maybe that decision will feed into my Dragon Age Keep profile for Dragon Age: The Deep Roads*! - but it’s like they did 90% of the work required to make this truly great and then ran out of time.
This is my vote for the next game. Dwarf Noble was a great Origin in the first game, all of the Dwarfy stuff we’ve seen in the series thus far has been among the best content and a great change of pace. Plus, easy excuse to keep Scout Harding around!
I would guess yes but not too much - as much as leveling, you’ll have to actually pay attention to having enough Power to keep the main quests going, since you won’t have it endlessly flowing in from clearing zones.
Actually, the M&KB interface is “Slap some key bindings on the controller interface and call it a day”. No tooltips etc. The interface was made for controllers first and foremost. This is a pet peeve of mine.
The crafting interface, as mentioned before, is horribly awkward. I took to making a spreadsheet of my characters and followers gear so I could refer to it when checking if something is an upgrade.
The menus on M&KB are clunky. You would expect if you bring up a list box the first item would be at the top of the list. Nope, its in the middle. Why? Because that’s how controllers work. If you select the first item and scroll down, the selected item stays highlighted right? nope, the middle item always becomes the selected one if you scroll, or delete an item or anything.
In the tac cam with a controller you drive the camera icon around to see the field right? You’d think on PC you’d be able to drag the map around using the mouse, or move to the edge of the screen to pan. Nope, we have to drive the dang cursor around just like a controller would.
Oh, and we don’t get a walk toggle. I don’t really miss it, but here’s why. To walk using a controller you press the analog stick half way. To run you press it forward all the way. On PC to move you click the ‘W’ key. To walk you… umm, well you can’t half press the W key. oops. sorry KB users!
Some of the operations can change based on who you send. For a non specific example. If you send Josie for a diplomatic resolution to a situation, there is no followup. however if you send Leliana her agents might find a lead to further that storyline, such as it is. It’s not much but it’s there.
I’d like to see more ‘dwarfy’ stuff as well. They totally avoided the deep roads in this game. I still want to follow up on the primaeval thaig thing from DA2. I remember then saying the Dwarves from that time were different etc, but how?
Sorry about my previous post, I missed this. With a mouse you do indeed get comparison tooltips in the inventory screen, just not anywhere else. Forget what all these similar skill icons do? Sorry, no tooltip. Just open up the skill menu, and navigate (using the damn controller selection) to the skill you want to look at, if you even remember what tree it’s in, click on that skill to see what the skill does, rinse and repeat for each skill.
But I’m not bitter.
(sorry about the post spamming, I’ll stop now. heh)
The M&KB crafting interface is indeed superior. From what I understand, the controller interface doesn’t even say what tier a schematic is from the list (the keyboard interface does). And it does offer item pop-ups showing comparative stats.
Even if it is better, it is still a bloated, slow-loading obfuscating piece of shit of an UI. It’s supposed to help you manage your inventory but it just tries too hard to look pretty instead. It didn’t ruin the game for me or anything, but in my 25 years of CRPG gaming I’d rate it firmly in the bottom 10. Can’t remember the last game that made me dread getting upgrades because I’d have to start shuffling pommels and hilts around again.
Didn’t bother me half that much but I guess I just handle poor interfaces better or something.
It could certainly be improved but people act as though it was akin to wrestling poison alligators and I didn’t have that much trouble with it at all or ever “dread” using it.
That is indeed superior then. And I thought it was bad that you can’t sort or filter by schematic level. I don’t remember having comparison tooltips in crafting though. I’ll have to check tonight.
I phrased that poorly. It does offer pop up comparisons but I don’t think it’s in crafting because crafting is separate from inventory/equipped.
Really, I think I must just roll with user interfaces better than some or at least not let poor interfaces bother me. Skyrim had, in my opinion, a far worse UI than DA:I but I’d probably never think to mention it when taking about the game. Maybe it’s from years of playing on clunky Commodore 64 and DOS based CRPGs. Anyway, if someone says it was Hell for them I can’t say “no it wasn’t” but I can’t really relate either.
I can see how if you’re approaching the crafting system from a real nuts n’ bolts angle, the inventory system would be unwieldy. But I don’t think DA:I really rates that much squinting. Generally speaking, the only number I really looked at was raw DPS or armor rating. Everything else was gravy on top of that. Enemies are varied enough that resistances didn’t seem to matter too much. It’s not like you would say, “Okay, we’re venturing into the realm of flame next, so let me stock up on fire resistance.”
I kind of lost interest in the game, but I’m trying to get back into it. I’ve decided to play something a bit different- instead of going for a mage, I’m going to try to play a warrior. One thing that really irritates me so far, though, is the way I’m locked in place while attacking. If the enemy moves backs up just the slightest amount, I’m left flailing at empty air until I realize I’m no longer hitting him. I really hope that abilities start to make up for that sort of thing.
I just finished a sword & board game, and yeah I know what you mean. Sometimes you jump to your target, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes it re-targets after your enemy dies, to a far away mob, but you keep attacking air. I think if you have a hard target, it will do more to reposition you. it would be so much better if the game actually hard targets for you each time rather than just flailing at whatever you are facing.
