So I watched the gameplay and maaan....
The gameplay trailer had the worst elements of modern games, like health sponge enemies, scripted events to the point of absurdity. For example, demons appear on the streets and run next to your party but don’t attack you because it’s a walkin' n talkin' section. Entire scenes are on rails without any player interaction, just with intermissions for combat that consists of pointless dodging, and jumping all over the place and spinning around.
But the most pathetic/funny part was how they decided to highlight how faction choice (your background) affects the story. A character says to the protagonist, who has the Shadow Dragons background, meaning they're from the Tevinter capital: “You belong to the Shadow Dragons, you know Minrathas, you surely know how to help us.” The response you can choose is, “Yeah, but it’s not my neighborhood.” If a background dialogue option has no impact on the story, why even have it there? WTF Bioware.
Also, the voice acting of the enemies (Venatori - blood mages) sounded so bad, like placeholder dialogue (I hope it is), but the release is in the fall.
Furthermore, the new demon design sucks. They made the imposing looking Pride Demon into a floating mass of stuff and lightning. There were also sections like, “Okay, Varric distracts Solas, we need to topple a statue.” So, I thought there would be obstacles along the way, some combat, maybe you need to be careful not to be noticed by Solas. Anything. But nope. It’s a walking simulator section. You just press a button to move forward and press another button to start a cutscene. This whole section could've been a cutscene, then.
I thought the visual clusterfuck was my issue, but my wife also thought there was so much happening on the screen, so many flashes, so much jumping, so many elements that you can’t focus your eyes on anything specific. Plus, the dialogue wheel gives me ME3 Vietnam flashbacks.
VS
Dialogue options? Who needs them?
And then we have those super annoying telegraphed attacks, like when a shooting enemy targets you and a flashing attack trajectory appears. The worst aspects from DAI are back, like the limit of three healing potions. But cooldown arrows were a new one and equally shitty. You have eight arrows in your quiver, but they… regenerate if you stop shooting (God of War style) But hey, with one boss fight they showed, where the boss had three super long health bars, cooldown abilities are a must, I guess.
BTW, I couldn’t put my finger on what bothers me so much about the combat outside of obvious things, but now I get it, it clicked. DA2 has a section that starts the game where everyone jumps all over the place, explosions are everywhere, etc. But later it’s revealed it was actually Varric making things up, and he is forced to tell the actual story, and the combat slows down. It’s still very actiony, but not as ridiculous. DA4 combat looks like that exaggerated opening of Varric’s story.
You either die or live long enough to become a self-parody, or so it seems.