So a friend who knows I like RPGs but apparently isn't aware what kind of RPGs bought this for me for Christmas, and I finally got around to playing through it.
First of all, the keep. I actually really like this idea - it feels like a natural extension of the save import system Bioware has been building up since Mass Effect. It's also a great convenience because I don't have any DA1 or 2 saves anymore. I feel like the keep could have been implemented into the game itself, though.
The story is a paint-by-numbers 3 act Bioware plot that they've used in just about every game but ME2, complete with the destruction of your home in act 1, an ancient evil you must defeat, and you being the chosen one. It's only lacking a betrayal at the end of act 2 and the death of your mentor to hit every cliche in their playbook. Despite how archetypal it is, I did find it charming. At least your status as the chosen one is sort of explained - you're an exceptional individual who lucked into a position of leadership. The plot beats feel natural for the most part.
Corypheus is an utterly bland villain. I was completely disinterested in him from the start. He might as well have been the archdemon from DAO or the babby reaper from ME2 for how much characterization he receives. Fortunately he doesn't show up very often. And I was disappointed with how Skyhold is never attacked despite them making a big deal about how much of a fortress it is when you first arrive there. Not doing so seems like a huge missed opportunity; it would have given more meaning to strengthening the inquisition if your actions had a direct effect on how the seige played out. Even the NWN2 OC pulled that off. I really wouldn't be surprised if the designers originally intended the climax of the game to involve a siege of Skyhold, but it was cut for time.
The end of the game feels incredibly rushed. You go from the last story mission, where you foil the villain's backup plan, to the final battle with him. No buildup, no fighting through an army, not even a cutscene framing how you got there. You just start the mission, and you're in the middle of an abandoned castle with the villain. There had to have been more planned for that confrontation, because as it is it was incredibly anticlimactic.
The vast majority of the game is spent running around large open areas mashing the v key, sometimes getting into fights with bears. I imagine this is what took up the majority of development time - building these large open areas and populating them with stuff to explore. And I can definitely see why they did it; Bethesda has shown that the theme park RPG is potentially very lucrative. The execution is a bit botched, though. First of all, you need to collect resources to do just about anything - upgrade your potions, craft gear, upgrade Skyhold, and more. And collecting resources is fucking boring. I got enough of that when I used to play WoW. Around halfway through the game I just gave up collecting things, and then I found myself completely unprepared for the specialization quest, which of course required running a fetch quest as well as collecting a shitload of herbs for no reason.
While the environments are for the most part varied and some of the areas did seem to have interesting quest lines, I quickly grew bored with exploring them, and after a while only did quests so I'd have enough power to finish the main story. I'm usually a strict completionist (I even did every side-quest and explored every planet in ME1), but when I finished Inquisition I had done probably less than 50% of the side content. I just couldn't force myself to do more.
As for the story missions themselves, those were much stronger. Definitely an improvement over ME3's story missions, which basically involved bouncing all over the galaxy with little rhyme or reason to shoot at TIM's endless supply of Cerberus troops. The first two missions are mutually exclusive - side with the mages or the templars, which seems like a refreshing bit of C&C. I haven't played through the templar mission yet to see the consequences, but while I doubt it impacts the main plot very much beyond having you fight mages instead of templars, there did at least seem to be a decent amount of dialog that would need to change.
The other missions were nicely varied. While assaulting the Gray Warden stronghold you end up dumped in the fade, which I was completely unprepared for. Unlike the fade missions in DAO, this plays out more like a traditional dungeon. I'm not sure if that's a good thing; the fade in DAO was botched in execution but it's also one of the more interesting areas of that game. Then there's the mission to save the empress, which involves almost no combat and is mostly about political intrigue and uncovering a murder plot. And a good amount of running around mashing the v key, that is still the game's staple gameplay mechanic. The last mission, though, is where the game starts to feel rushed. What should be an epic struggle of breaking through Corypheus's army is instead just a pleasant jog up a hill through maybe 10 packs of enemies. And the ancient temple just has the same incredibly easy puzzle three or four times with a slight increase in complexity each time.
I did notice several instances where my choices from the previous games seemed to be referenced in game. Probably the most notable examples are when you meet Hawke, and when Hawke takes you to meet Loghain. I'm told if you didn't spare Loghain there's a generic Gray Warden in his place, and I'm assuming Alistair might be a candidate as well if he didn't become king and stayed with the Gray Wardens. There were numerous other small changes as well, like the dwarf who wanted to be a mage showing up if you brought her to the circle. Overall a much better effort than with the Mass Effect series, where besides the cameos from ME2 characters in ME3, you'd at most get an email.
The characters are, as ever with Bioware, a mixed bag. And like the story, they tend to fill the same archetypes that Bioware always writes. Iron Bull is the mercenary who loves fighting. Cole wants to learn what it is to be human. Vivienne is the bitch. Sera is the oh-so-quirky one. In spite of that, most of them turn out to have more than one dimension if you make friends with them. Except Sera, who is pretty much exactly as annoying as she seems to be when you first meet her.
Blackwall turns out to not be a Gray Warden at all, but rather an officer guilty of treason who got his men killed and took up the name of a dead man in an effort to atone for his crimes. Cassandra seems like a religious zealot but is really far more reasonable than she seems, she's just desperate. And despite being the token gay, I found Dorian to be much less insufferable than I thought I would. Which is progress of a sort, I guess.
On the other hand, Sera was utterly insufferable and Cole's questioning of what it is to be human bored me. Leliana turning into a sociopathic murderer was also far more over the top than they probably meant it to be.
There isn't much to discuss when it comes to the combat system. It's very similar to DA2, with some polish here and there. Enemies have more health and don't spawn out of nowhere except from fade rifts, where it actually makes sense. Even then you only ever get two waves of enemies from those. There is also limited level scaling, from what I understand - areas have a minimum and maximum level, and things will scale to your party's level based on those caps. Combat difficulty seemed to depend heavily on my build - there were a few points where the game started getting hard and I'd respec my characters, and then it would be easier. Until near the end I found an incredibly broken build with the reaver specialty and suddenly combat became trivial.
I do want to spotlight what they call the tactical camera. It's an excellent idea - the camera zooms out and you're able to give orders to your characters RTS style, with the ability to queue multiple instructions. It's exactly the sort of thing I would love to have in a party based RTWP game. Unfortunately, like with so many other things Bioware has attempted, the execution is horribly botched. You can only zoom out a short way in tactical view, so you can almost never see enough of the battlefield and have to move the camera around. The controls in tactical view are horrible. And sometimes the AI will get bored halfway through executing your instructions and go back to what they were doing. Still, the feature itself is a great idea, so I do have to give them some credit for trying.
There are a few other things I could nitpick, like the inventory system sucking (when will Bioware figure out how to make a decent inventory?), or how the war table missions complete in real time (which was just an utterly stupid design decision), or the occasional glitch. But small annoyances don't really detract from the overall experience.
Overall I saw Inquisition as a game with a lot of potential that it failed to live up to. There are definitely some great ideas in the game, but they're either badly executed or buried under an avalanche of filler content. The game is definitely huge, I can see why it took three years to develop. But pointlessly exploring large areas for quests that will have zero impact on the main story can only get you so far. If they had cut maybe half of those areas and instead focused on expanding the main story, the game would have been far better for it. Perhaps an exploration of Corypheus's past to humanize him, along with the siege I mentioned earlier.
I didn't hate this game nearly as much as I hated ME3, in spite of many small similarities between the two. Part of that probably has to do with Inquisition's introduction and ending not being written by an idiot. But Inquisition also feels like a much more coherent game. It entertained me enough to make me wish it had been more. But that's very often the way I feel with Bioware games - they obviously have people with talent and good ideas. Why can't they produce a better game? Ultimately, however, disappointment is what I've come to expect from Bioware.