You know the drill: You start Dragon Age: Inquisition. You make a character. You play through the opening cutscene and realise that your character looks like a duck. You restart and try again.
I have restarted Dragon Age: Inquisition… a lot of times. Like I advised in my tips post, I think it’s almost always worth it to restart, even if you’re a ways into the game. Better to replay a few hours with a character you love than spend 80+ hours playing as a character you don’t love.
It’s something of a honoured tradition with games like this, to the point where I wish developers like BioWare would just cut the shit and let us watch our characters act out a few cutscenes and conversations before we confirm our design. Well, that or just give us the option to re-make our character’s appearance mid-game.
I’m curious how many times each of you has restarted Dragon Age: Inquisition. It’s fine if you just ballpark it, but if you really want to know, you can also go into the load game screen and select “switch character,” and it will list every character you’ve saved a game for, which should reflect how many different characters you’ve made.
And a second poll, because I’m also curious how much time you were willing to sacrifice to get things right:
Comments
47 responses to “How Many Times Did You Restart Dragon Age: Inquisition?”
Restarted once after 20hrs as I got stuck with the bug of my male character being called female. It didn’t notice to begin with but then it got to me :p
You need to switch to female and back to male to ensure this doesn’t happen.. it’s an odd bug
I know that now! The tipping point was when I was asked to defend my honour as a woman….. wait a minute….
It must be very confusing being a male and getting called a woman while playing as a man.. I would probably just stay clear of all the love interest options if I were you.
Interesting bug. Is there a fix for the qunari being able to wear any helmet but the actual qunari helmets?
I am sure there will be a mod some day but when that might be…
Yes, Bioware patched this and the transgender bug today.
Didnt restart at all. have just been living with a block-head face….
Ain’t nobody got time for that. As much as I hate the way my character looks I hate losing 10 hours of progress more. That’s like two weeks worth of game time for us married with kids types.
I kept my stupid duck-faced Shepard through 3 Mass Effects, despite getting thoroughly sick of his stupid pursed lips after fifteen minutes, just to avoid losing progress. There’s definitely a mindset that sinks in when family starts to eat away what used to be alone-to-game time 😛
#wheremymods
I went through to delete some characters and found I had over a dozen. My first got to about 50+ hours before I restarted. I tried all sorts of combinations. My problem isn’t so much looks, I just want to try all the different options for covos haha.
Many, maaaaaaaannnnyy times. My worst is 37 restarts on Origins to get a face I could stand. I’m a bit picky…
Still on the same play through since the EA Access Trail and I would hate to restart haha currently sitting at 70 hours.
Three times.
First time looked too white and generic
Second time, two white, generic and cheek bones too big
Third time too dark
thanks to how ghastly the UI (and related things) the answer is not as many as I wanted to. Seriusly would it have killed them to put in a save profile option, or at least not have all those damn cut and dialogue options. Yes I know you can skip sorta. What could be really simple is made a chore by simple oversights. Hard to believe this is the same bioware who made some of the greatest RPG’s ever.
This is true of a lot of design elements in this game. Its got a lot of good points, but its just not very user friendly, and there are some really odd/questionable design decisions that detract from what should be an awesome experience.
The decision to split the war table into 2 seperate halves baffles me.
As, does having seperate loadings for the the undercroft and the inquisitors quaters at skyhold.
No reason to restart for me. My character looks exactly the way I want him to and I’ve had no game breaking bugs.
First guy, dwarf, looked great but the voice didn’t match up with his noble bearded self, played about 3 hours, restarted. rolled an elf rogue, she looked like she was hit by a shovel, restarted. Rerolled elf rogue as an archer, much better, have since respecced to dual wield but reasonably happy with the result, hair “could” be improved but I am ok with it
Hair in Bioware games is almost as bad as their character animations.
I didn’t restart at all, and am pretty happy with my mage. I just slightly tweaked one of the pre-configured faces, adding a twirly moustache of course. Though his eyes make him look kinda stoned all the time, it makes him look like he has the I dont give a fuck attitude, which I’m enjoying about him. Combined with the pommy accent, he’s turned out to be quite a character so far.
Haven’t restarted! I ain’t turning back!
I’ve restarted 3 times, only to find that my first attempt was in fact the best, so I’ve gone back to that one … sigh.
I really wish they’d just put some magic fountain or something in the game which allowed you to alter your appearance.
Didn’t restart at all, but I’d kill a homeless guy to get access to re-do my character. It would be great if they added that feature in!
I restarted my Elf twice.
My wife always makes a comment that I can’t get out of my head after that.
After being 30 hours into my Mass Effect when she mentioned my Shepherd looked like a chimpanzee with blue hair (I thought the blue hair was cool) I now get her to vet all my characters first.
I couldn’t look at him after that. After that I used the default character.
Except DA Origins and Inquisition. They are ugly default characters.
My elf looks perfect, my Hawke looked like a dropped pie, when she looked lovely in DA2. I loved the little DLC thing in DA2 where you could change what your Hawke looked like, because I remember tweaking her a little bit a few times just to smooth out some oddities.
That was The Black Emporium. A lot of people have asked about a face modifier like that and the devs have said they would look into it for a future DLC, so it might still happen.
Yes! That thing. I didn’t care much for whatever else you got there, but the tweaking of the face was the actual best. I wish all their games had that, because the other problem I have with their character creators is the really weird lighting they have on them so it is actually really hard to get your character looking decent in game. (See: Mass Effect 1, 2, & especially 3)
I am pretty sure that’s why my Hawke looked so awful, the DAI lighting in the character creator was weirdly lopsided.
That really bugs me about char-gen for so many games. When they put you in this black space that has weird lighting so whatever you create always looks so different when out in broad daylight. 😛
Twice.
The first character I created, I was trying to create a burly, gruff, MANLY man.
Try it. Go on, try it. It’s physically fucking impossible – the body and neck are all identical, so anything you try is going to end up looking like goddamn Quagmire from Family Guy.
RESTART
The second character I created, I quite liked. A warrior woman with shock white hair, vibrant blue eyes, some pretty heavy eyeliner/eyeshadow, and a scar. Striking! Pretty. However, in that character’s world, Hawke was apparently a dude. NO. NO, NO, NO, NO, NO. My Dragon Age Keep changes hadn’t exported properly.
RESTART
Third time’s the charm. Much the same look as the second, but this time the import worked. (Although Hawke doesn’t look like she did in DA2 and you can’t make her look the same. That’s not my Hawke! Though she does sound the same, I’ll give’er that…)
I’m not 100% sure the Keep is working properly anyway.
I chose the option
where the Urn of Sacred Ashes was poisoned and Leliana died. Guess who still wandered in at the start?It looks like after launch the ‘export’ option went red. I had to log back into it and mark my saved world for export, again. Maybe try it again on another playthrough?
I remade my Hawke twice and the second time around I realised I really should have stuck with the first one, because the second one had that… Jeremy Renner weirdly squashed features look. Hawke, no.
I think there’s actually an auto-save before that point. When I realized I was about to be responsible for shaping the face of Hawke, I loaded that point again and saved it as a proper save, to revisit if I (very likely) needed to go back.
…Which I did.
Yeah, I was relying on the autosave and I was super tired after the second time I recreated her and by the time I realised the next day that actually it was all a disaster I’d played too much and didn’t have a save close enough, because I don’t save nearly as often as I should.
At least I know for future playthroughs!
I think the trick to not restarting is not taking characters too seriously.
My first character, Sadsack McNeedsataco:
http://i.imgur.com/0WggEfL.png
And my second, Loghain Mac Two:
http://i.imgur.com/3s3LeI3.png
I also made a Qunari Rogue, but I restarted when
Leliana was still alive, to try different options in the Keep (it made no difference).Oh my god, that first one.
That second guy’s moustache looks loke it’s coming from out of his mouth it’s that low..
LIP SHINE + INFINITY!
I restarted once. All these types of RPG’s need to have an option where you can change your character freely for the 1st 30 minutes.
It’s so annoying making a character only to realise that he’s got a really weird skin tone compared to the rest of the planet when you haven’t even seen another character. It’s particularly hard when you’re designing the character in the weird light that DA3 has in the creation screen.
My character (the one I settled with) has this weird facial structure that makes him look like a character out of Team America. Just this eerie lifeless gaze behind a plastic looking face.
I restarted 3 times to try and get a character that I liked. I eventually settled on a Qunari mage, mostly because he was the oddball of oddballs in the universe, and 2nd because the male voice matched his appearance. So far loving the authority given by his size in a lot of the cutscenes and his facial expressions.
I restarted so many times, but not once was due to me not liking my characters appearance.
I had some serious graphical issues that I had to work through. It takes so long to get to the first save point in the prologue that it was quicker for me to just start again.
This game’s so awesome, I don’t regret losing sleep over it and coming into work bleary eyed and half asleep. I call it Dragon Age Syndrome.
I haven’t got DA:I yet, but in general playing games I don’t have to restart many time, if at all.
This is because instead I spend 1-3hours in character creation debating whether my nostril flair should be set to 63 or 64, and comparing every hairstyle and colour combination until I am 100% satisfied.
Then there are the times where I confirm it all, play a few hours, and decide no I’m not satisfied.
1-3 hours of deliberating on cheekbone height and eye spacing all over again.
i restarted coz my characters name stuffed up into a long line of some weird character letter thingy. 😐
Both times during the prologue.
First time was due to bad hair. (With shiny hair, he looked out he was out of a Lego movie..)
Second time was (doh) shiny lips!
So glad I found this article. I thought I was the only one that restarted this game over 5 times.
The hair is just awful, probably the worst I’ve seen since ps2 generation. As someone who works in 3d graphics, I can say that Bioware made the mistake of using a procedural hair generator vs simply texturing the hair on transparent polys. This explains why the hair also doesn’t cast shadows on the mesh beneath it.