That’d be cool if that was true… But I installed nobara on my brand new PC and kingdom come crashed when I fast traveled, Hades 2 ran at like 20 fps, and dragons dogma just wouldn’t launch. I get Linux is cool and all but I don’t have time to troubleshoot every game I install anymore…
So there’s a mechanic in the base game where to start quests you have to wait X hours in real life. And to unlock those quests to start the timer, you need “power” which is gathered from doing side quests or clearing a repeatable encounter. Combine this with all of the grinding stuff like gathering herbs and unlocking fast travel spots everything is a drag.
There are mods to reduce or even remove those requirements I listed so it’s up to you how “cheaty” you want to get. I essentially removed the timer, doubled my power and XP gain, and removed the harvesting animation (honestly the best mod). Even then, after only doing main story quests, what I felt were important side quests, and like half of the companions quests, and only the final dlc to see the true ending, it still took me 55 hours…
Best I can say is start it up and when the game dumps you into the first map, only do the main story quests and then move onto the next zone. Because each map honestly probably has its own 55 hours of picking up rocks and killing bandits.
Origins by a mile. There’s just so much thought put into the overall story and the gameplay really harkens back to bioware’s heyday of crpgs. Mages are a blast to use and there’s still some strategy in the combat.
DA2 was rushed in every sense of the word and it’s blatantly apparent. The whole story takes place in one city, there are like 3 unique dungeon maps that are reused over and over again, and the gameplay was changed to basically be an arpg i.e. hold down M1 and you win.
Inquisition was like they tried to return to form but EA said fill every pixel of the map with fetch quests and herbs to gather. What should’ve been like a 25 hour story driven game becomes a 90 hour slog fest.
I’d honestly just say play origins, then watch a story summary on YouTube for the other two.
If you enjoy crpg’s, definitely. There’s a lot of player agency and the companions are for the most part interesting to talk to. Completing every quest will you burn you out fast, but if you just finish the ones that seem interesting to you you’ll have a good time. DLC is pretty hit or miss though.
I replayed all three games this year so I can be even more throughly disappointed at the decline of this series when this releases.
Here’s an article that ars just posted yesterday in fact about that.
Tldr some group states that piracy affects company’s bottom lines by up to 20%. They also state that since game sales figures are almost never published, they had to derive a replacement by using reviews and active player count. To me that just kinda invalidates the whole thing because who the hell knows what the actual relationship is between those variables, and especially when it’s making such a gargantuan claim that pirates are taking such large chunks of cash from developers pockets. If companies want to show they really are being hampered by piracy to such a degree, they should post their actual books and stop hiding key information.