What was their thought process when making this? How can anyone think that making bazillion of trivial activities and uninspiring lore (how can it be inspiring when there's probably thousand of pages of it, I expect to find a notice about how people of Thedas wipe their asses) is the way to go is beyond me.
The question you must ask yourself is whether you'd be able to stomach the generic content if the critical path was more interesting, or even if the core gameplay was unique and empowering. To many codexers the answer is, in fact, Yes. NwN2 has such painful core gameplay that it almost invalidates the rules system, but MotB's story is notable enough that lots of people recommend it. At which point the problems with Inquisition are very fundamental and describing this third installment doesn't really explain all of them.
Well, the founding principle of the Dragon Age franchise was echoed by the first game's marketing. The "Spiritual Successor of Baldur's Gate". But not any Baldur's Gate -- not the one we know for giving us BG2's encounter design, its rules system and insane amount of content -- but rather the one that entered mainstream consciousness. The one that gave us "memorable characters" such as Minsc and the "masterful storytelling" from BioWare.
Dragon Age: Origins borrows from that by creating an experience akin to binge watching a fantasy series on Netflix: the dialogue evolved into a full blown soap opera and the game itself is very streamlined. The result was, at the time, one of the highest selling products ever released by the company and it had a following even on the Codex. True, a major part of the latter is the fact that it was 2009 and the dark ages of CRPGs were still with us and true still, the fact that it was the first game of the franchise allowed a few people to forgive certain mistakes -- such as the very limited beastiary and character system -- but I'd argue that until this point the franchise knew exactly what it wanted to be. It was a top down CRPG with a focus on cinematic dialogue and party management.
Later on those two core aspects of the series were changed with Dragon Age 2. The cinematic bent would face overhaul as BioWare abandons the Starmap Formula and seeks to tell a more focused story. That was a very positive change in theory that still ended up failling horribly because Dragon Age 2 was shittily made and there wasn't enough time to reiterate on much of anything, main plot included.
What is more important though is that it was strangely decided that the success of a mere two years before was a thing of an archaic past, that party based management pleased too few people, such that the series succumbed to
Consolitis and, most importantly,
Actionitis. The focus on consoles kept BioWare from making a decent PC UI, while the efforts to make combat more 'visceral' ended up placing Dragon Age in a weird limbo I like to call the
Tacticool Valley: enough people
think your games are 'tactical and deep' that you can't really make the Assassin's Creed with Darkspawn and Auto Aim that you really want to. The result is something that doesn't really please either of your imagined customer bases -- the CRPG hardcore fanatic or the Action dudebro.
That brings us to Dragon Age: Inquisition. You'd think that the overwhelmingly negative feedback from Dragon Age 2 would be enough to change the above picture but the Tacticool Valley is truly insidious and its really easier to ignore it altogether and focus on the Story instead. BioWare defaults to the Epic Adventure that is unable to really flesh anything out. The result is perhaps the most anticlimatic story I've ever seen. One that lies unsupported by the cramp inducing exercise otherwise known as 'Holding R to auto attack and spam cooldowns as they come up'. Add a bit of Skyrimitis and you know the rest.
As you tally the bold attempts to 'push the envelope' and 'innovate', what you have in reality is a tale of jumping on bandwagons with no care for core fanbases or the game's roots. In my view, the chains of history binds Dragon Age too tightly and no other series out there is this doomed into mediocrity.
