Just finished playing Witch Hunt. What a shameless, unabashed, and completely unnecessary cliffhanger that turned out to be.
So what's the story with Bitch Cunt? Well, it's based on a very simple real-world event. Bioware got word of KotOR2:TSL, realized that this incomplete game alone was worth more than anything ever released by Bioware taken together and multiplied by a million, and began ripping off selected elements. And, in true Biowarian fashion, dumbing them down to sponge levels of intelligence.
They ripped off the influence system, labeling it "approval", only while in TSL characters gained or lost approval entirely depending on their conversations with the player and their reactions to the player's interaction with the game world, in Faggot Age you get most of their approval bar filled out by giving them gifts. Yeah, gifts. Random objects that you find/buy, and that give you free approval points. Brilliant.
Then they ripped off the "visit four places and find four PEOPLE" formula. Whereas in all previous Biowarian games you simply traveled to four places to find four plot coupon objects, in Dragon Age you do that to gather four ARMIES that you can use in the last battle. Except that the last battle is piss-easy, the trollocks drop like flies, and you don't really need to summon any army to get through it. And this is way less interesting than finding four Jedi Masters who sentenced you to exile and hold important knowledge about your past and present state.
And finally, they decided to rip off the character of Kreia (and Ravel Puzzlewell, Krea's Planescape version), by having their own morally ambiguous witch who helps the player for mysterious reasons, and uses every opportunity to teach them some harsh life wisdom. Only this time, this character is literally a witch. And her morality is only ambiguous at first - the game eventually makes it clear she's evil and a monster. Oh, and you have the opportunity to fight and kill her, after she transforms into a dragon. And in DAII it is revealed that Flemeth has many different "threads", and that killing one Flemeth does not necessarily immediatelly affect others - very original, totally unlike Ravel.
So Witch Hunt is a nostalgic journey through some of DAO's locations we will never see, because Witch Hunt is the very last installment. It ends with Morrigan giving some mysterious speech about change that will set us free - probably foreshadowing the coming mage-templar war, saying that Flemeth is not a mage or abomination, and leaves through a portal that takes her into a world beyond this world and also beyond the Fade. Strangely enough, the plot never hinted at the existence of any world aside from Thedas and the Fade - kind of late to bring up an important plot point for the first time. In my playthrough, I never took part in Morrigan's sex ritual, because my character never had any reason to trust the witch with having the power of a god, even though Bioware will undoubtedly turns this around in DAI and reveal that giving Morrigan the god-child was the right thing because she will use it to fight Flemeth or whatever. So she leaves me some sort of a gift - a book, and what that book contains is never revealed. Great. Who wants to start taking bets that when we do find out what the book was, it will be something completely unimportant and out-of-context?
