Bit overwhelmed- Just started playing Dragon Age: Inquisition.

[Zeze]

This game started out fine. You are given 1 hero to control, then you go around beating up bad guys.

Now I get turned off when games throw WAY too much stuff at once.

Suddenly I have a 4 party (within 15 mins of playing) AND I've been informed of the 'top-down' RTS mode.

Questions:

1. Why doesn't the game tell you what skills do- hotkeys of 1 & 2. As a warrior, it's a counter-spin attack & battlecry. It wasn't hard to figure out what they do based on status pop-up texts (battlecry taunts enemies + def up). But I'm still peeved as to why it's not told.

2. How necessary or useful is individually controlling all 4 characters? Is there a point to it? From what I gathered, most casual enemies are handled just fine by AI piloting my characters. I suspect it may be useful in hard bosses where specific commands are important AND microing noobs to 'back the fvck up' if they're low on HP. Am I right?

Now, 1. is particularly annoying because when I was given 4-member party, that's about 10-12 skills without their descriptions. Why is that hard to put in pop-up text on what they do and dmg/range/etc?

Any other tips?

 

[ControlD]

1. There are no pop-ups because it is a console UI and very little work has been put into the PC side of things. When playing with a controller your skills get activated with action buttons so there is no hover trigger to enable pop up text. I didn't realize the PC UI didn't have pop-up tool tips, but then again I switched to a X360 controller after a very brief start with kb+m.

2. For normal mobs you generally don't need to use the tactical camera. Sometimes I still used it to take out the strongest / most annoying enemy in the beginning of the fight, but other than than I could run most combat in real time with a few pauses here and there. For boss fights I found myself using the tactical camera more often.

You can see descriptions of you assigned skills by going into the menus. Honestly, there are only a few skills you will be using for most characters (8 max anyhow per character) so after a few hours of play you will have them pretty well committed to memory.

 

[Udgnim]

Tactical Camera use is dependent on difficulty

Normal difficulty and can probably play the game in real time if you want

Nightmare difficulty and definitely need to use Tactical Camera unless they've improved companion AI to require much less babysitting

I haven't played DA:I for a while so I don't remember what the world UI shows you but you can bring up the skills menu to read what the different skills do