da:i notes

gistfile1.txt

	- There are no dungeons, I like dungeons, Its like zelda without dungeons, it's the meat of the game and its missing.
	- The game has no day/night cycle, In a game you spend 10+ hours in a single area this feels weird.
	- Weather is preset, same issue
	- You drown in water that goes above your head, Adding a swimming animation was obviously too hard.
	- You can not harm villagers, yet there are no children in the entire game, where did all the children go?
	- Character creator only lets you change the face, Probably because its easier to do armours if there is a set body.
	- The inventory/menu system sucks balls
		○ At a glance it is impossible to tell what is better or worse
		○ Two clicks to get to deeper comparison, which takes up the entire side of the screen so you can't see what it looks like
		○ If someone else is wearing something it is gone from the inventory of everyone else, which makes switching party members in and out a giant menu chore.
		○ All menus must be navigated via sticks not dpad.
		○ Sometimes left/right change a thing left/right, sometimes it requires l1/l2/r1/r2
		○ It has to load in the model for characters who are right there in the game anyway, how was that not loaded
		○ There is no sorting options in any menu
		○ Most of the equipment you find is level locked, often higher. You will end up with a mountain of items you can not use yet, yet do not want to throw away. You have an inventory limit which makes this a giant pain.
		○ Destroying items to pick up an item gains you nothing, No scrap, no materials, no gold. It is the games way of punishing you for not taking its item limit seriously.
		○ When crafting there is no way of comparing anything to your current armour
		○ Crafting often yields weapons and armour far greater than what you find, yet sells for a fraction of the price
		○ When crafting items you can not look at item details such as what characters does this thing fit, what type of item is it,  what kind of item does it upgrade
		○ There is no unequip button, so whenever you want to do that you have to go down the list of equipment until you find the one you have equipped, then you can unequip it 
		
	- Only Helmet and 'armour' no separate graves or anything like that
	- All the armours basically look the same and i can't tell any of them apart so why bother
		○ Subjectively, All the armours look bad. Nothing that makes me say oh wow, i want THAT. 

	- Healing system poorly thought out, just quaff potions from a shared stash that can only be refilled at camp. 
	- Character AI is poor, two modes defend <thing> or follow <thing>. 
	- Enemy AI is poor, enemies will simply stand where they are or go after the agroing tank.
	- Horse riding is pointless
		○ Horses are slow
		○ Horses do not allow combat whilst riding
		○ Horses do not allow searching for things whilst riding
		○ When you get on a horse your companions magically vanish. No explanation of where they go, no magic causing it, they just did not know what to do with them.
		
	- Companions will randomly teleport around you if they can not path find to you, Compounded by terrible path finding
	- Companions will constantly try to arrange themselves into a diamond behind you, causing awkward scenes during conversations whilst your AI tries to figure that out.
	- Fighting is super streamlined to the point of boredom
		○ To fight you hold down R2 until you have an ability off cooldown, then you do that ability and go back to pressing R2. This is all you ever do, there is no strategy. It's Dull
		○ You fight the same things over and over in each area, the only things that change that up are the 'rift' fights where you fight the same rift monsters you have fought at every other rift.
		○ Some of the enemies are so spongy that I would just press R2+forward and watch a youtube. They would deal no damage and were no threat, but took forever to die
		
	- I Feel like I am making almost no decisions whatsoever, Dragon Age 1 was all about that, 2 less so but it was still there. I do not think I have made a single decision this far into the game.
		○ In DA1, you save a town from zombies that rise every night by defeating the undead and solving issues at a higher level. In DA:I you do things like go to a place and deliver a note or go to a place and kil some bandits
	- You are not actually doing anything, it is all busy work. The quests are of a go here and get a thing type. 
	- The game is full of glitches
		○ Animation glitches are constant, especially during battles
		○ The game often spawns things in incorrectly, sometimes late. It does this by spawning the thing in high in the sky above the terrain and then you watch them fall down and carry out their animations like it was nothing. 
		
	- Non of the villagers or anything feel like they are doing anything, they just stand around saying hello to each other. Do they have jobs? Where do they live? There aren't any houses here, do they all just sleep outside? 
	- The minimap does not display terrain, it only displays the icons from the map and red/blue circles for enemies/animals. This is very disorientating. 
		○ This is compounded by search this area quests where it overlays a symbol on the map that rotates at odds to your orientation for no reason.
		
	- The map often has pointless icons with no way to turn icons on or off
	- Merchant icons on the map are all labelled as merchant even though they sell different things. I just want to know which one is the weapon shop
	- Doors are sometimes locked behind keys that you do not have yet, you are not allowed in this area despite there often being large windows you could easily fit through
	- There is jumping in the game, so the level designers thought they should add platforming parts, the jumping does not work well, you are often asked to glitch yourself up a cliff face in order to reach something 
	- The Female voice pack is terrible, All the line reads are flat and sound much like 'What's a paladin?'
	- The main character is hinted at having backstory, but the reality is that you have no way of carving out your backstory through dialogue. For all intents and purposes you were born when you came out of the rift.
	- There are a million accents in every area. This does not make sense. This does not make sense and it is really distracting. People say they are from a certain area but then they have a different accent than other people from the same area.
	- The Camera is poorly thought out. How it works is that it attempts to always keep a line of sight between your character and the camera, no matter what. Even if the thing that would be in front would be fine. This results in often super zoomed in visuals and not being able to get the angle you want during conversations. 
	- Why does anyone care about the Rifts. 
		○ All the rifts do is spawn a few demons, not many, immediately around the rift and the demons never leave that area. Indeed if you run out of that area they will not follow
		○ There are sometimes rifts contained within cities/castles/whatever, no one seems to give a shit. 
		○ I would of thought that the rifts drive people mad, given the types of demons that spawn out of them. Maybe Desire demon spawning rifts change the populace in some way? No, nothing happens. No one cares about the rifts but you.
	- They didn't put in proper animations for dwarfs to interact with tall characters like qunari's - thus my dwarf characters interactions with Iron Bull resulted in the dwarf looking at his nipples the entire time and Iron Bull tilting his head to the side in a glitchy fashion  
	- AI Characters have no footstep sounds, which means you often lose where they are and forget they are even there.
	
	
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