Okay.  The truth, now: I don’t like Dragon Age: Inquisition, and I’m not having any fun with it at all.  I’d say “It’s time to stop playing,” but the simple fact is I just had two weeks off from work and I haven’t touched my PS4 since about the third day of the break.  So I sorta already did that.

There has been an interesting backlash happening against the game lately, where a whole lot of people who put 100 hours into the game are looking back at it and going “What the hell did I do all that for?”  I played the shit out of the first two Dragon Age games; I have literally every single Achievement point available for the first one and beat it with every character class; I didn’t replay DA2 quite as much, mostly because Skyrim and, oh, right, the birth of my son prevented the extended replay time the first one got– but I am a fan of this series, guys.  And DAI has done nothing for me.  A fair amount of this is my own changing priorities as a gamer, granted, but a lot of it I’ve got to lay on the game.  They’ve already done this right twice; the fact that the crafting interface sucks so horribly and managing inventory is an enormous pain in the ass and there’s so much of the game dedicated to literally waiting around is on them.  I’m, I don’t know, maybe 35 hours into it?  I just completed a quest that effectively made me emperor and yet at the same time I feel like nothing I’m doing is changing the game at all.  By the midpoint of both previous DA games I had all kinds of stuff I wanted to go back and do a different way to see what happened.  This game?  I can’t think of a single meaningful choice I’ve made since the very beginning of the game, where I went up a path instead of down a hill.  This last quest could have ended a couple of different ways, but I don’t care about how it might have gone differently.  That’s a serious problem.  There has, to date, not been a single decision made in the game that I had to think about for even a couple of seconds.  There were decisions in previous games where I had to stop playing for a while to think about what I was going to do.

I hate the war table.  A lot:

I ended up having to just take a picture of my TV, because I couldn’t quite find a picture that showed this exactly the way I wanted, but this is how you activate most of your missions.  You have to go to this one specific spot in your castle (which, by the way, you had to find on your own; there was literally a “find the war room” mission.  This?  Bullshit.) and then move that little glowing eye thing in the center around one of the two halves of the “map”– yes, there are two halves, for some reason they couldn’t put everything together.  Some of the little spots and lights and exclamation points are things you can do.  Others are things you have other people do, and there’s a bunch of words to read and  then a little prize anything from ten minutes to several hours later and don’t worry about it because none of it was important.   There are tons of these little things and by now they’re not making me curious; I just want to find a way to turn them off.

Each stage seems to have lots of shards to find.  I don’t know what the shards are or why I’m looking for them.  There was one of those somebody-else missions that had something to do with them but I accidentally hit a button too fast and the text went away, so I don’t know what happened.

Right.  Words.  There are lots and lots and lots of words to read in this game.  Ordinarily this is a good thing for me– I read every syllable in the first two games– but this game doesn’t even want you to read all that shit, making me wonder what the hell it’s there for.  An example: during loading screens, there are three little cards you can shuffle through on the screen. Each of them gives you a fact about the game, or a tip, or a little bit of backstory for something.  Some of the bits of backstory are several hundred words long.

The game gives you maybe five seconds to cycle through those– not remotely enough time to read anything– and then will fade to black for thirty seconds or so.  What the fuck?

Combat is boring.  This is a little bit my fault, as I chose an archer for my main character– meaning I tend to be a fair distance from the battles– and by predilection in these sorts of games I’m very resistant to the idea of playing characters who aren’t “me” even though the game is perfectly happy to let me take anyone over.  But my role in combat is to hold down a button.  That’s about it.  There’s an overhead tactical view; I’ve never used it for more than a couple of seconds.  I suppose I could play at a higher difficulty level but I suspect the big difference would be I was bored and dying a lot.

The game wants me to take time between missions to talk to each of my party members, so that I can advance each of their own individual storylines.  In previous games, I did this.  In this one, I can’t be bothered any longer; it feels like a chore and I have no interest in it.  I’ve not started a romance with anyone because I just don’t have the energy.  I’m willing to accept this one partially being on me, because it’s effectively the same mechanism the previous DA games as well as all three Mass Effects used.  Then again, I played along in those five games.  This one?  Nah, bald elf dude whose name I can’t remember, for Christ’s sake, you just go be boring over there by yourself.  You’re gonna have that staff for the rest of the game; I hope you like it.

I hate it when I don’t like something that I feel like I wanted to like.  I’m perfectly happy to dislike something that lots of people like, but dammit I wanted to really love this game, and had perfectly cromulent reasons to think I would.  But I stopped playing it over two weeks ago and at this point I’m really not sure if I’m gonna go back to it or not.  The thought that they released a Dragon Age game that I can’t even get into enough to beat really sucks.

Blech.