Dragon Age: Inquisition, and Bioware's Return to Greatness

Hey everyone! I'm back again, with a review of Dragon Age: Inquisition to hurl in yo' faces!

Dragon Age: Inquisition is the third instalment of the Edmonton-Based game studio, Bioware. In it, you play the Inquisitor/Herald of Andraste, and fight against a world gone mad after a conclave meant to bring the Templar-Mage war to a halt was destroyed in a magical explosion, tearing a hole between the world of mortals and the world of demons. You have a mysterious mark that allows you to close these tears in the veil that have opened in the wake of the Breach, and this lands you as a key member of the reborn Inquisition.

But before we can discuss the story, lets get the technical shizwa outta the way. Inquisition is built on a new engine for Bioware. Before, they typically used the Unreal engine, but for their latest game they've switched over to the much more powerful Frostbite engine, and it shows. Animation is much smoother, and the physics are much more visceral and engaging. So many times, I've had my warrior smash apart a cart just because it happened to be behind an enemy I was slamming through it, and my hits really feel like they connect. The gameplay is somewhere between the Action-based RPG of Dragon Age II, and the more tactical combat of Dragon Age: Origins. However, unlike both games, it's managed to succeed surprisingly well at both. The tactical camera mode has an option to allow you to advance time only a short distance, allowing more tactically focused players greater control. The decent computer AI allows players who prefer more action-based combat to let their party members make generally decent decisions while the PC focuses on hack-and-slash. Combat also makes tactical positioning and combat more varied and emphasizes its importance. While in the previous instalments, things like flanking and positioning were important, the gameplay never really emphasized this except with the melee-built rogue in Origins, who received a backstab bonus and . However, in Inquisition the bonuses for flanking are much more obvious, as some enemies are extremely difficult to fight head-on due to their defenses.

But the game is far from perfect. There are a number of conversational glitches, such as with many of the scenes involving two spoilery-characters. They'll often stop talking in the middle of the cut scene, and not resume talking unless you skip through the scene, causing you to miss a lot of details of what's going on. This only seems to happen with cut-scene conversations, however, and the contextual conversations work very well. There's also some issues in cut scenes and even the main game with clipping, such as a dual-wielding dwarf rogue wearing the Inquisitor's Hat, as your daggers stick up through the brim of the hat. It looks hilarious but it can take you out of the game a bit.

No more murder-knife in Inquisition as well. Your character will use your equipped weapons in cut scenes (with one exception, but it's story based), rather than some mysterious super-knife like in Dragon Age II, or some sword your warden picked up off the ground as in the final scene of Origins.

The characters, however, are where Inquisition really shines. Where in the previous two games, relationships often felt a bit forced or like something you just needed to earn enough points in to win some sort of prize, in Inquisition the relationships feel much more organic. This is helped by the lack of an “approval” bar somewhere. You're still informed whether or not someone approves or disapproves of your actions, but there's no numbers attached. This also helps the romances a great deal. Unlike in previous games where, once approval was high enough or you flirted enough or whatever the characters would throw themselves at you and you'd unlock a sex scene, romances in Inquisition are much more involved, frequently requiring side quests and your character going out of his or her way to win their companion's affections. One of the romances even involves a duel! It makes them feel much more realistic and organic, and above all earned than in previous games. Also, you can't be stealth romanced in this game. You'll know right away if you're getting involved, and you have multiple opportunities to abandon a romance. There's a reason this game's version of the Paramour achievement is for “Committing to a romance.”

Inquisition is a massive, sprawling game with easily 80 or 90 hours of gameplay for the most dedicated of players, and no two playthroughs are ever going to be exactly the same. There are no “right” or “wrong” decisions in this game, and there's no perfect playthrough like in previous Bioware games. Above all, it feels like a return to Bioware's standards of excellence that we saw with Origins and even Baldur's Gate 2. If Bioware keeps this up, there will be only good things ahead for the studio.

Fate Core Gaming Reveiw

Hey everyone! Today I'm going to do a quick review a new gaming system that was backed by Kickstarter, and is fast becoming one of my favourites: Fate Core!

Created by Evilhat and available for the amount of "Whatever you want to pay, even nothing" on their website, Fate Core was created to be a modular gaming system that can be quickly adapted to just about any setting imaginable.

Teachability: Fate Core is a quick system to understand, with their only being 3 major actions to take. However, it can take players familiar with more crunch-heavy RPGs such as Dungeons and Dragons, or worse yet systems like Shadowrun, to understand the amount of narrative freedom given to players. The concept of Aspects can also be a little difficult for new players to understand, but most of this can be taught simply through playing. When it comes to getting a firm grasp of the rules, the game is very teachable and is easy for new players to pick up and play. The best advice I can give for teaching new players is to have the GM simply tell them "Tell me what your character would do, no matter how complicated, and I'll make the rules do it for you."

Character Creation: Character Creation in Fate Core can take as much or as little time as you want. It's easy to pick skills and figure out your character's stress tracks. The hardest part is coming up with the aspects, and unlike most games the players often help to determine the setting as well, meaning that character and setting creation often takes up the entire first session, although it probably doesn't have to, particularly if you're using one of the premade settings from the Fate Worlds books.

Game Creation: As I just mentioned, the players often have as much of a role in world building as the GM does as everything is generally done cooperatively. That said, it can be really easy to come up with a simple combat for the players on the fly, and since the game doesn't use miniatures or battlemats, there's very little prep time for a GM pre-game. At most, a GM might spend ten or fifteen minutes before each session just to catch up on where they left off and to review notes from previous games. This makes Fate Core and it's simplified companion Fate Accelerated Edition ideal for convention play and one-shot adventures, but even more ideal for ongoing living campaigns.

Playability: The game plays like a charm, and action can flow even with new players. The key to playing any of the Fate games is to remember the credo of "narrative comes first". The rules are designed to be flexible, which allows the players and the GM to tell their story together. The rules can be adapted to fit literally any situation, with actions being open-ended, and aspects being able to cover anything you can come up with a name for.

Non-Combat Resolution: Fate Core is excellent at making non-combat resolution fun and exciting. Non-combat resolution can include systems that are identical to combat in how they work, although narratively they're not combat at all. There's also the idea of challenges, where characters compete using skills and actions outside of attack and defence to try and beat their opponent (such as in a foot race, or when cops are chasing a perp). This means that even when your players are doing nothing more than an indepth investigation, the game remains tense and exciting.

Price Point: One of Fate's greatest features is that you can get the PDF for free. While the additional books might cost you a bit of money, the prices are incredibly reasonable. That said, shipping hard copies to Canada can be prohibitively expensive off the Evilhat website at the moment, so you might want to see if your FLGS has some shipped in already through a supplier first.

Other Impressions: Fate Core's modularity is one of the things that make it such a fun game to play. You want to do noir 1920s detectives fighting alien invaders from the planet Necron? Or would you rather be a group of plucky barbarians from the sand dunes of Azagar? Both are totally playable in the Fate Core universe. I would strongly recommend everyone go to Evilhats website and download the PDF for yourself. Read it, love it, and adore it. It's worth every moment.

Review of D&D 4th Edition

Hey everyone! This will be my first gaming review that I'll publish on this blog! As part of this review, I'll also explain what each of the categories for my gaming reviews will be, starting with the first category:

Teachability: Teachability is how easy a game is to teach to new players. 4th Edition D&D as a game has a very complex rules system that can be difficult for new players to grasp. However, once the basic concepts are more-or-less understood, the game can run rather smoothly, as there's lots of references on the character sheet and the power cards.

Character Creation: Character creation is usually the first and most important thing players do in a game. In D&D 4e, this is no different. It is difficult to seriously mess up a character and make a character who is completely ineffective, however Character Creation is an intimidating morass of rules, feats, and power selections and for this reason can take ages, especially if you don't use the Character Builder on the D&D Insider tools on the website. While choices are normally a good thing, there are simply too many choices at this point, so it would be wise for GMs to place some basic material restrictions for newer players, or just to roll up the characters for them entirely (as I did).

Game Creation: Game creation refers to the act of a GM writing up games, campaigns, and modules. D&D 4e, unlike most of it's predecessors, is actually very easy for encounter building, using a simple points-based system for generating encounters. Some pre-writing is required, but a GM could easily make up a game on the fly.

Playability: Playability is about how smooth the game runs. The game runs rather smoothly up until the characters reach the Paragon Tier, where the game can get a bit bogged down in the sheer number of action choices PCs need to make each round. This problem is only exacerbated when they reach the Epic Tier, where the problem becomes even worse due to the number of magic item powers and bonus powers each character gets.

Non-Combat Resolution: Non-combat Resolution refers to how non-combat situations are handled in game. In 4th Edition D&D, there is a basic skill system. For more complex situations, a skill-challenge might be used which is simply a series of skill checks. The skill-challenge system is very difficult to tell a story with, and can feel very artificial. It's a valiant effort to try and make non-combat encounters more interesting than simply "roll diplomacy" or "roll a search check", but it ultimately failed in it's execution.

Price Point: Pretty straight forward, Price Point is about how much it costs to get into the hobby, and how much value you get for your dollar. D&D 4th Edition is an expensive hobby. I will come out and say that right off the bat. However, if you start off by buying right into the essentials line, you can save yourself a bit of money as the soft-cover essentials pocket-sized books are considerably cheaper than the hard cover splat-books that are the 4e release line of books. If you don't buy any extras other than the stuff included in the Dungeon Master's Kit, you're looking at between 60-80 CAD$ to purchase the materials and start playing, excluding a set of dice which will cost between 10 and 15 CAD$ for a cheap set. I would strongly recommend buying at least a one month subscription to DDI, if only to benefit from the character creator programs and to get the extra material from the other books for free via the Compendium.

Other Impressions: Overall, D&D 4th Edition is a fun game. It's very different from previous editions, but you can still get impressions of the core mechanics of older versions of the game in the way some things are handled. D&D 4e's Essentials line is easily the best set of products released for 4th Edition, in my humbled opinion, as it breaths new life into the game and it, along with Psionics in Player's Handbook 3, is the first time that characters really started to feel unique in the way they're played.