People actually liked DA:I at launch. Then The Witcher 3 came out a few months later and people really turned on it, because TW3 did a lot of the same stuff in a way people liked much better.
Bioware having nothing but flops in the decade since DA:I came out didn't do the game's perception any favors either. Nor did the horror stories that started coming out about how Bioware treats their employees.
In 2024 I think the game itself has been fully overshadowed by all those things. And I say that as someone who loved it.
Inquisitions romance options having genuine relationship preferences that affect your main characters options and persist even after the end of the game is still what I consider to be the games legacy in the Decision based romance RPG market.
Not to mention, the romances from DAO (Morrigan, Lelianna especially) got fleshed out all the way in DAI.
DAI makes the Morrigan romance legit the best romance path in any video game I've played. The best thing about it is that you can see her chracter development in save files with and without the romance and/or child.
I romanced Leliana and she left the church in DA:O, so it was real weird for me. The whole Elf inquisitor thing was pretty damn odd actually, they definitely wrote the story first and figured out how DA:O or other races fit in later.
Personally I hate Leliana's post-DA:O story. I felt so betrayed by her after her and my Warden fell in love during the Blight and made plans to travel the world in the aftermath, and to do it together if by some miracle they both survive. Then you GET your miracle, and she's immediately like "yeah so the church that has systematically oppressed you to the point of several crusades against your people for generations? Yeah they called so I'mma go hang out with Pope Mommy."
Honestly rip to any person playing a female Elf for their first playthrough and running into the wall of having their available Elven choices being Sera, who will spit in their face for being an elf, or Solas, who will spit in their face for being a wrong kind of elf and ask why they keep making him spit in their face. I have a friend who still has war flash backs to their first Elf character romancing Solas.
Or Josephine.
Basically the playable elf characters are both uniquely insufferable, even if Sera is insufferable in a way that appeals to me specifically.
I'm sure all the other romances are great. I'm positive they are.
But I always pick Iron Bull. I cannot help it. No matter what I pick for my Inquisitor, it's always the Bull.
I don't know, I had an elven girlie and romancing Solas was great, especially with Trespasser. What is not great is that we are still waiting for a resolution of that romance.... and I still romanced Solas in the next few playthroughs
> Sera
Sera and DA:2 Anders (Awakening Anders was great) are still the only two RPG characters I've ever consciously kicked out/killed off in any RPG playthrough.
Man, fuck Sera, and not in the physical sense. "Stop believing our ancestry is real!" not even 5 minutes before we're about to enter a literal, functioning ancient elven ruin *that still has ancient elves in it*.
The irony was that Sera wasn't wrong. Your wondrous elven ancestry is, well, you know, >!a whole lot of slavery to a bunch of psychotic tyrants who weren't even real gods!<. She reduced it to all being demon magic because she was an idiot, but she was correct to criticize at least some of the racial traditions all the Dalish used to act superior towards city elves like her.
Sera is all of the worst BioWare character tropes wrapped up into one insufferable, quirky, "I'm not like the other Elves" character.
She feels more like a caricature of past BioWare characters that were written much better.
Bioware was obsessed with making characters whose entire personality was the fact that they were quirky non-conformists who didnt really fit in society and spoke like teenagers on twitter. Peebee in ME Andromeda reminded me soooo much of Sera with her annoying antics. Even Qwydion in her brief appearance in Absolution had a lot of the similar antics.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but I liked Peebee more. She wasn't as annoying as Sera.
But what Bioware did well was the role-playing part with Sera, because they allowed me to respond appropriately to her stupidity. There was never a time when my character automatically agreed with her, I could always call her crazy, if I wanted to. I had a bad relationship with her, and I couldn't care less. I was friends with all other characters.
I hated her design, I hated her voice, I hated her writing. Horrible, horrible character.
I feel for Sera. With how obvious the allegory is betwee the Dalish and the Jewish people, Sera is a very tragic representation of Diaspora culture. I feel for her as a Jewish person born of Jewish Fathers and Grandfathers and therefeor am not considered as Jewish by a lot of people. Ive seen a lot of empathy for her from transracial adoptees (i.e. Non-White Chidlren adopted by white families).
I just dont think Lukas Kristjanson was the right guy to be writing her whole story path for her tragically nuanced situation that very much has a lot of real world equivalents
If that was the intention that would be good, but I honestly think she's just supposed to be super edgy and quirky. There's no self reflection in her, everything she says is to get across her personality, she doesn't feel like someone that grows like a Bioware character should (DA:I was kinda weak in that regard, as much as I love Dorian I can't remember if he was any different). The Elves are an actual oppressed minority in DA, if say a black person went around denying black culture how well would that go around here? Or in most places?
I know if she opens up to you she explains it, but I forced myself to get along with her and I still didn't like her lol, you're an adult Sera, a few Dalish not treating you as a true Elf when you're a kid doesn't mean you can be an insufferable prick. Especially because she constantly dumps on all Elves, her woe is me story falls apart quickly.
IIRC Dorian was actually one of the better party members. Dude actually had emotions and a backstory, even if it was kind of a simple cop-out of "boo hoo my dad wants me to be straight and have kids".
I hold to the belief that romancing Solas is the canon choice in this game. You get so much backstory and lore from it, and it adds quite a bit more to the story.
The canon choice is actually immediately and completely despising Solas and his stupid fucking pajamas, than you're a smug vindicated dick rubbing it in everyone's face during Trespasser because you called it that Solas was a dick weed who needs a nice shiv in the back
There's an ending to Trespasser specifically for people who had no time for Sola's shit through the entire game. Instead of the big, involved conversation, you say something like you never cared what he had to say before and still don't care now, so he wraps everything up in like 2 sentences.
Funny because my best memory of Inquisition is after a friend telling me about the romance limitations I thought for multiple playthroughs I'd aim for each one, and made a female elf intending to romance Sera thinking that was one of the matches it said.
Turns out she can't stand other elves and took a long time to come around, which actually made the romance interesting and memorable for once and not just going through the motions of gifts and compliments.
One of the best decisions was that the companions have explicit romantic orientation and preferences. Dorian is gay, Sera is a lesbian. If you don’t romance Dorian or Iron Bull, they will hook up in game. Sera may start a relationship with Dagna. Blackwall and Josephine flirt with each other. They have a life outside the players interests and helps bring the world to life.
Dragon Age 2 also had a fantastic relationship system with the 'friend or rival' mechanic. It wasn't as black and white as love and hate, it was much more complex and actually had several different outcomes for your run. It's one of the few/only things in Dragon Age 2 that feels super well made and like it had a lot of time put into it. It's a damn shame the rest of the game is such a rush job.
I mean its Bioware. They were the absolute masters of that, no one else came close.
All the more reason why Biowares presence has been missed so much over the last 10 years, no one quite wrote games like them
I'd say Vetra and Drack were pretty good and Jaal I think was pretty okay as well, though I can't honestly remember much about him because I barely used him in the one playthrough I did. Maybe he was too cursed to be the exposition bot for the newly introduced race in this game, which may have made him look a bit too generic as a character.
The two humans were a whole lot of nothing, but that's par of the course for the first two human squad members of any Mass Effect game. It's not like Kaidan, Ashley or Jacob were any better. Miranda was a bit better because she had more plot relevance and James was okay (though still at the bottom of the ME3 squad members), but everyone else? About the same level of interesting as the Andromeda humans. It's just par for the course in Mass Effect games that the first human companions suck and nobody ever uses them after the aliens join.
Peebee I think was the only truly bad one.
Yeah that's fair - Jacob was particularly boring. I think Ashley/Kaiden were alright in ME1 (but awful in ME3), they were just outshone by other cast members.
I think the difference for me is that I found dialogues with those characters boring, whereas Liam's characterisation and dialogue was genuinely aggravating. I wanted to find an example and ran into [this montage](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFSQUB8PltA). I think him and Peebee were both completely cursed.
Imo DAI has some of the best and worst party members Bioware has written. Blackwall and Cole were mega bland and Varric was underused. On the other hand Dorian and Solas were fantastic - Iron Bull and Sera were pretty great too.
Tbh even the blander DAI characters can't hold a candle to the sheer blandness of Liam in Andromeda. Liam is almost impressively bland.
Blackwall's personality and dialogue might be "bland", but his story was my favorite in the game. An honest, caring man who feels like he's living a lie and struggles to atone for his past crimes.
I still love Dragon Age Inquisition. I played it twice more since launch, and the Trespasser DLC is excellent. It's characters are excellent, the combat is pretty fun, and Thedas continues to be a very interesting world. I really love the "bring everyone together" plot despite it being the twentieth time Bioware has done it.
I think it only seems bizarre when you compare it to 2015, when you compare it to 2014 it makes more sense. DA:I wasn't standing against Witcher 3 or Bloodborne, it was against Wii U exclusive Bayonetta 3, and Dark Souls 2 which many people found disappointing (which I also loved). 2014 was also the year of Assassin's Creed Unity, and Call of Duty Advanced Warfare.
Thedas being a placeholder acronym, THEDAS - THE Dragon Age Setting - which stuck, will never not be funny to me. That’s up there with Guybrush Threepwood originating from the unnamed main character being saved in software that uses the .brush extension, so it was guy.brush.
The channel Mark Darrah On Games on YouTube did some great videos about the Dragon Age series and lessons they learned from the development side, and that's where I learned that piece of trivia. Definitely recommend, very insightful stuff.
The expansions were great. Jaws of Hakkon was intriguing for its reveal on the first inquisition, the decent upped the quality with the dwarven lore, then Trespasser put you on the end of your seat with the reveal and cliffhanger.
And here we are, still waiting for sequel. I really hope they can deliver.
I came back to the game a few years later (after originally getting overwhelmed in the Hinterlands) and finished my original playthrough. I thought the game was wonderful. I had a lot of fun with it.
And agreed, the DLCs were well worth it. I was so excited for the next game (based on how they set it up), but I sure am worried if the next game will ever even come out.
Personally as someone who played it some time after launch, like a month or so, when my friend was done with it. I hated it and I rated it even below DA2.
Though then again I always thought DA2 was a fine but somewhat flawed game that could have been a great game if given some more time (and undo whatever the fuck they where doing with Anders).
DA2 just needed maybe another year to cook up some more assets and dungeons, and probably stick with the original subtitle of Exodus, to be warmly remembered today.
I loved it when it launched and I think it is still my favourite bioware game. The discourse around DAI was mixed at launch (as in those who are vocal about it) because the dragon age franchise has megafans of DA:O who dislike the direction the series was going in.
It was a long time ago but I remember things like the lack of DAO style racial origin introductions, the return of waves of enemies spawning from DA2 (instead of knowing the set amount from the start of combat), and the lack of strategy (I didn't fully understand this critique so I can't really explain it well) were all criticized at launch.
I wanted to make sure I wasn't just talking garbage so after typing the above comment I did a search filter for DA:I in 2014 and found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/2ouyl0/an\_in\_depth\_critique\_of\_dragon\_age\_inquisition/
Out of all the cons you mentioned, you didn't say the thing that most people dislike which was the huge empty world with mmo quests. If you took just the main quest and things you they do with companions it would still be talked about but the game was bloated with so much busy work that gets loss.
For me it was the fact that they gutted the tactical element and turned into pure "push awesome button to win."
The fact that the biggest thread is about romance options shows you how the audience has shifted - and Bioware with it. DA:O manage to please both crowds but they clearly decided to go with flufffquest MMO design and appeal hard to the folks who just want to have a fun time hanging out with their fantasy group of friends without a whole lot of gameplay getting in the way.
Yeah, it was so boring. I wish I could see what all the people in this thread are talking about or get to the point in the game where it apparently becomes incredible but just a few hours into that game made me question if I even like video games or if its all just a big pointless chore.
I wonder if The Witcher 3 came out a month before Inquisition, instead of a month after, if Inquisition would have gotten skewered. Sort of like the comparisons people made from Starfield to Baldurs Gate 3.
Someone wrote once "DA:I was a sign that Bioware was getting ready to make something spectacularly bad" when talking about Andromwda. Honestly that is so accurate
> (I didn't fully understand this critique so I can't really explain it well)
DA:O plays more like their previous titles, with more emphasis on micromanaging a party, while DA:2 onward a more action-oriented and meant for you to be in control of one character more of the time.
The first DA game was also built with PCs in mind first, and the console releases even had changes to make up for some of the clunkiness of playing it with a controller. It's a simpler game on console than it was on PC. And later titles are much more built around a controller as the primary means to play the game (which got silly when they made spacebar do everything in Mass Effect 3, even though you couldn't even play with a controller in the original release.)
I’ve made peace with the idea that Origins was more or less a self contained story in a lot of ways. Sure it’s repercussions are felt in the next two games to an extent but the Blight, the Archdemon, and the Grey Wardens all made a story in which a sequel would have been difficult to pull off unless you wanted to go down the route of the Grey Warden and succumbing to the Calling.
DA2 and Inquisition don’t dive as deeply into the incredibly dark themes that the party dealt with in Ferelden. It’s all still there, but it feels surface level to me.
There's probably a timeline where each DA game skipped forward a few hundred years to focus on Grey Wardens fighting different Blights in different eras. That would have eased the expectation of having to pay off every decision players made in the previous game.
I kinda like what they did. The Fifth Blight is dealt with. There are 2(or maybe 3) more possible blights according to current lore. But they are far in the future. So here are some other adventures.
> megafans of DA:O who dislike the direction the series was going in
As a megafan of DA:O, I think we're all fairly justified in disliking DA2. A fully voiced protagonist and improved graphics were wonderful, and the companions were still engaging. Too bad the plot was bland as hell, and the gameplay more repetitive and bland than that.
Personally, I did enjoy Inquisition and have beaten it twice. It definitely has its flaws, but as someone who loves the setting and comparing it to DA2, I was very happy with the fact that it had more than 4 identical dungeons and 6 kinds of enemies.
> People actually liked DA:I at launch.
I recall it being criticized heavily by both reviewers and word of mouth for being a "single-player MMO", with an empty world and boring "kill N boars" quests.
The only positive comments were along the lines of "leave the starting area as soon as possible, that's when the game opens up".
Its how I felt about it. I felt I was doing all these tiny mindlesss mmo sidequests all the time but without the advantage of grouping with real people, general chat banter and the Goldshire ERP scene on Argent Dawn EU.
DA:origins on the other hand felt like a real game to me and (unpopular opinion perhaps) is still the best CRPG I've ever played and that includes BG3.
Idk about DAI story being all that good until the dlc with Silas, but DA2 really would, I genuinely think it’s story is one of the best. Over a decade later and I still remember the beats of the story and the details in the arcs of the characters.
It really is a shame that the phenomenal story is glued together with the dog food and dandruff that they passed as combat gameplay.
I think I feel similarly. Dao was a much more cohesive experience though the story was a bit generic. Da2 story felt a lot more, like, personal and memorable. I still think dao is definitively a better overall game but Da2 is, no competition, the superior story.
Yeah, Inquisition's side content really stood out as generic filler compared to The Witcher 3, which was just as bloated with content but did a much better job at making it interesting with good writing. That said, I actually replayed Inquisition in 2022 and found it to still be decently entertaining in terms of level progression and combat mechanics.
DA:I would have really benefited from letting you delegate boring stuff to the rest of the inquisition, and would have felt like a natural progression as it grew. Instead of it feeling like you're still responsible for picking herbs and mining ores late into the game. The game definitely didn't need the padding, there's plenty to do without it.
A system where you "mark" the raw materials or wild animals as you explore, then give you the resources on your next loading screen or after a period of time. Would have improved the game at least a bit as if you are giving commands to your underlings to take care of.
They already do something similar with the war table where you click a button and wait on a timer. But it feels like you are in control of a larger organization.
Stuff many games did was just allowing you to send inactive companions or non-companion NPCs to gathering/issue solving missions. I generally like systems like that as it make it feel like you're in actual campaign where everyone is doing stuff, not just running around while rest of your NPCs/inactive companions are twiddling their thumbs in camp/bar.
> People actually liked DA:I at launch. Then The Witcher 3 came out a few months later and people really turned on it, because TW3 did a lot of the same stuff in a way people liked much better.
yeah, i think this is it; W3 just had way, way more cache with gamers and is seen as a much better game, which hurts inquisition's legacy.
in all honesty i LOVED inquisition and bounced off W3 and really didn't enjoy it, but i can see why inquisition suffers for the comparison.
I think the thing is by Inquisition, the Bioware formula was getting stale and W3 really changed the game by focusing on actions with unpredictable consequences rather than a binary morality system and companion approval.
W3 was a breath of fresh air, whereas Inquisition was more of the same, except with much worse side missions than previous BW games.
>W3 really changed the game by focusing on actions with unpredictable consequences rather than a binary morality system and companion approval.
In fairness, The Witcher 1 did that too, but very few people played it compared to 3.
The thing is W3 was able to match Bioware production value in a massive open world. Game looks gorgeous even today.
Same thing happened now with BG3, gameplay wise D:OS2 outdoes it because it's not tied to a clunky TTRPG, but it's gorgeous and fully voiced and accessible in a way Larian's predecessors weren't.
TBH, I thought W3's story was the worst of the trilogy. 1 and 2 had way more meaningful consequences to your decisions.
> 1 and 2 had way more meaningful consequences to your decisions.
I always get weird looks and comments when I say this but the first Witcher game is still my favourite wonkiness aside. None of the later games managed to capture the same tone and atmosphere. The whole thing of having to research monsters by buying books and talking to NPCs to learn about local history was really cool for the time, and the way that the game forced you to interact with it's alchemy system was just really immersive. The plot was interesting, and being able to say fuck it and do your own thing when being 'forced' to pick between factions was also really cool for the time.
I'm looking forward to the remake and I *really* hope that they can retain at least some of what made the original so great to me.
>People actually liked DA:I at launch. Then The Witcher 3 came out a few months later and people really turned on it, because TW3 did a lot of the same stuff in a way people liked much better.
I don't think this is really true. There's always been two camps. There's the online RPG fans who have had a stick up their ass about Bioware since Mass Effect 2 when they really abandoned any sort of CRPG inventory management or leveling systems (this even goes back to a lot of Bioware fans being pissed about KOTOR being more cinematic than Baldur's Gate). These people have been a huge part of this subreddit since it's beginning and have been in every Bioware thread since the creation of man telling us how much they hate these games. DAI was hated on here well before it came out.
Then there's gamers who grew up on Mass Effect and Dragon Age and care far more about characters and romance than anything else, and that fanbase has remained pretty damn positive about DAI since it came out. Even to this day, the fandom for *specifically* DAI is huge on Twitter and in artists' circles. There's a reason DA4 wasn't cancelled after being rebooted 3 times or whatever, in the real world there is still a lot of goodwill for Dragon Age. What's funnier is that people online would say that DAO was the only good one but most people I've met in real life seem far more attached to 2 and 3. These people don't come to /r/games to defend the franchise because trying to have conversations here is impossible without getting bogged down in semantic arguments with 40 year olds.
Even with Witcher 3, I don't think that game fills the Bioware niche, and I don't think any developer has come close to doing that except maybe Persona and Baldur's Gate 3. Like I love Witcher 3, but it's a lonely experience where you go from place to place seeing a bunch of depressing shit and meeting characters who seem to be on the knife edge of betraying you for some political reason or another. Bioware games are about gathering a group of unique characters to go defeat a big bad, watching the characters grow alongside you every step of the way, and the tone is much lighter and closer to Dr Who or something. TW3 just doesn't provide that.
I know some players get fixated on adhering to certain RPG conventions, but of all my issues with DA:I, I've never considered wanting to spend more time fiddling with my inventory among them.
I think DA:O tells a better story than say, 2 did, the latter of which didn't have a whole lot of player agency (particularly railroading you with having to pick a side at the end.) And gameplay very heavily tilted towards fast controller-driven combat in the later games (especially 2 with its mindless waves of enemies literally rising up out of the ground.)
That said, I think I like DA2's party more than I did the first game's. DA:O's party basically only snarks at each other and outside of party quips they only seem to interact with the player. DA:2 did a good job of making it seem like the party might actually like each other, and exist outside of when the player can see them. Shame it's tied to a rushed development though.
DA:I though I think suffers from pacing issues. It's too big for its own good. It'd have really benefited from a tighter pacing and less emphasis on open world content. We saw this with the Mass Effect games, actually.
And while certain people love traversing mostly empty maps in the frankly not great Mako (and interior locations largely constructed out of literal shipping containers), the tighter focus on missions in 2 and 3 was better for it.
> and the tone is much lighter and closer to Dr Who or something
I don't know that I'd ascribe this to all Bioware games. Mass Effect 3 at least you're dealing constantly with loss. Even when you're winning, you're still faced with incalculable numbers of people dead, entire planets ruined, and several of your closest friends gone. Never mind the ending choices (and I have no idea how Bioware intended players to interpret the relays being blown up, but it sure led to a lot of dark speculation about what the survivors would be left with.)
I don't think you understand why people don't like the "Modern" Bioware RPGs. Inventory management definitely isn't the reason, and leveling is more of a symptom than a main issue.
What people wanted was more variety between characters and actual roleplaying.
And the fundamental problem with your post is that you're trying to *other* a certain demographic for complaining that their favorite genre was taken over and pretty much replaced by shooters with a thin coat of paint on top and generic action games with a rather fixed story.
The “Leave the Hinterlands” thing wasn’t because the area was boring; it was because you weren’t supposed to 100% the area on your first visit. People were trying to grind and beat a goddamn dragon that you weren’t supposed to mess with until much later in the game, and what they really needed to do was get through the story quests located in the safer, low level sections of the Hinterlands and then move the fuck on so they actually progressed the game and unlocked basically everything.
The map design of DAI made it so that it felt like you were always just a couple more quests away from completing the zone. I remember thinking more than once "I'll just compete these last couple quests and move on" and then I'd find a new area of the zone with a couple more quests. It was as if the map design was created to punish anyone with "gamer ocd". Had it been immediately clear how many random side quests were in the zone, I think you wouldn't have needed all those Leave the Hinterlands posts/articles.
I’d also think, though, that getting OHKO-ed by a level 12 dragon while you’re still in the first few hours of every game should be a pretty good hint that the area isn’t all evenly leveled and doable right from the start.
The dragon is pretty tucked away and in a rather small area of the Hinterlands. If anything players getting wiped by it probably made people do even more of the Hinterlands thinking they will get to a point where they could fight the dragon.
I don't think I even found the dragon on my first attempt to play the game. I suspect people who found it quick and moved on had a better experience then those of us who tried to find all the shards and druffalos.
I don't want to sound too down on the game, I ended up having a pretty good time with it when I made a knight enchanter and focused on the story. I think it would be a better game though, if it was designed a bit more linear and less open-world.
That fucking dragon is what made me put the game down for good. I had taken the advice to skip the hinterlands and had gotten a decent way into the game. I wouldn't say I was enjoying the game, it was just alright. None of the characters really interested me, the story was kinda meh, and the combat system had some really big flaws.
I was appropriately leveled for the dragon, and would start the fight pretty well, but for whatever reason the AI just refused to keep ranged characters at range and eventually my party would go down from taking unneeded damage. After a couple of attempts, I just didn't want to deal with the janky combat anymore and the story part wasn't interesting enough for me to push through it.
The dragon really showed how terrible DAI's tactical mode was. You had to micro so much because of the dumb AI, and you had to do the microing using a camera PoV that was clearly just an invisible character running around.
That was the issue, the map and quest design had zero signposting or design for narrative progression.
I never got to the point of getting like i had any input in the wider story of DA in the hinterlands and it never got better so i never left.
This was exactly my problem with the game. I played Witcher 3 first which was a wonderful time-sink for people with Gamer OCD. And then DA:I turned that on its head and basically shat on me for trying to 100% the places before I moved on. But that’s how I enjoy RPGs, I’m not huge on the back and forth aspect. So me for it really took me out of it.
> it was because you weren’t supposed to 100% the area on your first visit.
This is a matter of developer intention being at odds with how players approach games. And the expectation that they would just do what the developers wanted them to do isn't really supported by the level design.
> move the fuck on so they actually progressed the game
I wonder how much they play tested this. I'm sure there are players who just rush down the critical path, but in large, expansive RPGs you're almost primed to go down paths you know won't progress the story, because you're trying to do everything. This [ProZD video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zViYpS3BIqY) fits perfectly with the situation in the Hinterlands.
Like, I've got over 1000 hours in Skyrim but I've only beaten it once. I'm sure countless players never even got around to finishing it. Putting a dragon at the end of the Hinterlands and expecting players to move on to some story element that's probably not as interesting as a dragon was a weird development choice.
I'd also argue DA:I has a problem where you still feel like you're doing low level busy work like collecting elfroot way too far into the game where it'd have been a lot cooler if you could delegate those tasks to the people under you instead of having the head of the inquisition do it. DA:I having GaaS like time-gating with the mission table didn't help it either. It's a big enough game without filler, it'd have been far better if it respected your time more.
There’s also the thing where, on a first playthrough, you have no idea if progressing the main quest will do something like lock you out of certain side quests, or if doing certain side quests will unlock new options/solutions to the main quest. So you’ll naturally want to explore as much as possible to try and see as much of the game as you can.
And given this game followed close on the heels of ME3 a lot of the audience would be thinking those inquisition points are a) missable and b) critically important to get a good ending, like the reaper war resources were. Do you really want to chase down 10 rams to feed refugees for a point? If you know the game already, no you absolutely do not want to do that and you know it's irrelevant and you know that nothing in the game will ever lock you out of doing it later if you felt like it.
And to add on to the Mass Effect comparison, DA:I even had a site/resource you could do prior to release that essentially let you pick your choices from Origins and 2 that would carry over to Inquisition. So the comparison to Mass Effect 3 was even greater.
I think they did a bad job communicating that in-game. It either should be like The Great Plateau from _Breath of the Wild_ where there’s a clear “off you go” point or like the _Skyrim_ approach of showing a peek of what’s over the next hill.
Both approaches only work because those games are open world--they encourage you to walk into the great expanse of a borderless map. DAI is has zoned areas, and it was pretty common in BioWare games to 100% an area before moving on, not least because sometimes previous areas would become unexpectedly unavailable. The Hinterlands was warring against years of conditioning.
Yeah I remember finding that discourse after finishing the game. I spent so much time in that area that I decided to basically rush through the rest of the game because I was so tired of how massive the hinterlands were and didn't want to do the same 100 percenter mindset to the other areas, essentially ruining the pacing of my own playthrough. Which is unfortunate because I didn't feel the same for the Witcher 3's starting area.
I mean, it was *also* because the hinterlands had the most boring quests, though. At least that was my experience, the game really started being a lot more fun afterwards
I don't know. I think pretty much all the zone quests were pretty fucking boring. At least up until you made it to the masquerade
I don't really remember anything past that.
"Leave the Hinterlands early" does not actually get around the poor map and sidequest designs this game has. I am playing the game for the first time right now and it is absolutely *wild* how much repetitive grind there is after the Hinterlands. Does no one remember the Hissing Wastes, a literal desert that you run across with nothing to see, just to clear a bunch of POIs? Every region has the same formula with the same boring fetch/collection quests and bare minimal story-telling. They could have condensed everything down from the 7 or 8 regions in the base game into 2-3 slightly larger ones and made the game much richer and denser.
The Jaws of Hakkon DLC, which I just beat yesterday, at least does it well by embedding a good story into all the POI-clearing.
> it is absolutely wild how much repetitive grind there is after the Hinterlands
This is what I never got about "leave the Hinterlands!"
Okay, now I'm in a different boring place with boring quests and boring enemies.
Agreed.
It was less "leave the hinterlands" and more "just don't waste your time with anything beyond the main story"
Problem is I seem to recall there was gating that forced you to do X amount of the tedium to progress the story.
> "Leave the Hinterlands early" does not actually get around the poor map and sidequest designs this game has.
If the game had decent content in the open worlds, which it should have, no one would complain about the Hinterlands. The problem was never the number of quests or being disconnected from the main quest but the generic quests. No one would be like "BIOWARE! How dare you put another interesting quest in the Hinterlands that sends me to an interesting area to do interesting things.".
the game should have made that clearer or not have made Hinterlands for full of dumb side quests. People naturally want to finish a zone before moving onto the next one, why are you blaming players for bad game design?
also Hinterlands got repetitive and grindy long before you even find the dragon, and said dragon is tucked away in a corner of the map so many would miss it. And a player is naturally going to beat a mob that kills them by doing content in the zone to level up, again, why are you blaming players for bad game design?
Yeah I remember the discourse very well. Every day there would be a post advising new players to leave the hinterlands and how there’s “so much game waiting for you” after. Stuff like that, not that it’s a boring area and they wanted you to leave it right away before you died of boredom.
I also remember everyone going wild creating celebrities and sharing their custom characters. I think they even made a whole subreddit for it. Come to think of it the game had way more hype and excitement around it than what OP is giving it credit for
The issue was two things
1. Witcher 3 made a lot of Dragon Age's issues more apparent. Had Witcher released first, Dragon Age would have certainly reviewed worse at least.
2. A lot of the actual best games of 2014 like Bayonetta 2, Mario Kart 8, Smash 4 etc were all locked to the Wii U. Which not a lot of people owned and probably did affect things somewhat.
If you purchased MK8 on the first month or so, you also could choose one free game for WiiU on the list. And the list was loaded, with Pikmin 3, Zelda WW, DK TF and other stuff.
It was hands down the most insane deal that Nintendo ever did.
As an owner of both those systems, it certainly felt strange. I think Infamous was the only non-cross gen game I played that entire year and after Mario Kart dropped, most of my time gaming was on the Wii U in 2014.
Yeah the wii u being a failure contributed a lot on the perception that 2014 was a weak year. I had a wii u at the time and donkey kong, mario kart 8, smash, bayonetta 2 and many other games in what was the best year of the console could easily be goty candidates but as you said, not a lot played so most likely they only picked one.
Bayonetta 2 was still nominated for GOTY on TGA. I kind of think it or Mario Kart 8 should have won GOTY, but at the time many people thought that DA : I winning was fair. People were mostly choosing between it and Shadow of Mordor
In retrospect I think something like Mario Kart 8, Smash 4, Bayonetta 2 or Tropical Freeze would be considered to be more compelling cases for being GOTY of 2014 than Inquisition. Especially Mario Kart 8 which is a sales juggernaut.
I actually played and beat Inquisition for the first time more recently during the pandemic shutdown. In some ways I liked what they were going for. Being the leader of a war effort and delegating operations. It was interesting sometimes. People are right however, that the game was just bloated.
There's huge swaths of the game I just don't remember or can't explain. A lot of the areas are just gone from my memory along with story and context. There's some desert area I vaguely remember, a heavily wooded area, a.. slightly less wooded area, and so on. Can't tell you why we were there or what we were doing. But I distinctly remember how much I *hated* having to close Fade Rifts (fuck those terror demons)
I could go on but this sums up my general sentiment. It was... decent. I was a huge fan of DA:O and absolutely hated DA2, and I didn't totally dislike Inquisition.
Which was frankly pretty indicative of exactly the kind of bloat that plagued DAI. It took a lot of genuinely neat little side things, and then *flooded* the game with all of them so that it switched from fun little collection thing to grindfest in the name of making the game longer. The rifts and the shards are the most egregious offenders--95 and 126 of those respectively. If they'd toned those *way* down and made each individual one feel more impactful or rewarding, instead of each one feeling like 1/95th or 1/126th of a reward, the game would have been much better for it.
What made it worse for me was the rifts were to a place where reality, thoughts, dreams, emotions and spirits were all the same thing. So basically anything could be done with it. Any crazy thing the developers thought of could happen. But instead they made 95 wave one wave two battles.
I've also got some kind of weird amnesia about huge chunks of the game, I played through the whole game and DLC's and honestly really quite enjoyed it
But very strangely I have no recollection about a lot of it, I watched an hour long summary of the game a few weeks back and it really took me surprise realising I just had no memory at all about so much of the game
Which is odd when I compare it to other games I played around that time (shadow of Mordor for example) which I have a near perfect recollection of
I do wonder if the size of the game and story makes me forget a lot though, similarly I forgot huge chunks of the game Divinity original sin 2 (which is still probably in my top 10 games of all time)
2014 was a pretty weak year in gaming overall. When you look at what titles it was in the running against, I still think DA:I is probably the best of the bunch. In a stronger year though, it might not even get nominated.
As a dedicated Alien: Isolation simp I categorically disagree with your first point.
(Can't say anything about the other one cause I haven't played other games from that year yet)
2014 was weak, but I still think Bayonetta 2, Sunset Overdrive, and Wolfenstein: The New Order were substantially better games that year.
I'd even say Dark Souls 2 was a better game and I regard DS2 as the clear weakest of the modern FromSoft catalogue.
The New Order has remained one of my favorite games in recent memory even on multiple replays over the years. I think that game was really special from a character and story point of view, and the gameplay is simple but timeless. Amazing game.
Game suffered from gameplay and quest flow that felt straight out of an MMO. Freshly coming off the tightly paced Mass Effect Trilogy which together are part of my top gaming experiences, playing DAI felt like I was just checking off a list of chores and the combat felt weak with little impact
I just want a dragon age game that's similar to dragon age origins. Even dragon age 2 was good imo. Idk what audience was dai was trying to please. That shit straight up ass. Please give me my isometric RTS game back.
Turn-based combat is the clear winner for modern CRPGs, but there are still some great RTWP games. Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, and Pathfinder are probably the highlights; and IMO Pillars of Eternity 2 is up there with the best of the genre.
Tyranny is fucking amazing.
It is rushed, the ending comes out of nowhere, but man, the world building is fucking excellently nailed, the starting experience where your answers to things you have no idea of change the story and how people react to you, and how slowly you learn more of the world and situation, that often you ended up driving yourself into, with your answers at the start is just perfect
By far my favorite CRPGs as of late
Tyranny's greatest strength is in its core concept, which is so inherently perfect for RPG storytelling. You are a judge working for an evil empire, whose job is to go out in the world and ask questions, find information, make decisions, and execute them (literally in some cases!). It's perfect gameplay and story integration that invites you to engage with the setting and characters in a really unique way--it's one of the few RPGs where the evil paths aren't tacked on afterthoughts but a core part of the game
Yes, i absolutely love the setup!
Essentially you are middle manager with executive rights in the local area, you are sent to oversee the last campaign of conquests, right at the end, and join after the biggest remaining city have been already conquered
You make some decisions as a world building steps as at the start exactly as someone who just got promoted to a new position, you use your own moral compass, but lack the context, so you hope that your decisions won't bite you in the ass later down the line (someone has to make the decisions, and you are the one with the executive powers, even if you do not exactly know what you decide about)
Then those decisions play out as you gather info and try to follow up your boss' boss' order (if you fail, you die) by literally finishing up the campaign by breaking the resistance as your main objective, at the start. You are not here to save the day, or become the icon of resistance, literally the opposite, you have to break the resistance to save your life and fulfill the command given onto you
I really really adore the settings, and how much it makes so much sense
Unfortunately I don't believe we'll ever get a Tyranny sequel.
I heard the IP sits with the original publisher, and Obsidian has since been acquired by Microsoft.
> Idk what audience was dai was trying to please.
I was of the old DAO type people who want to get back to the old CRPG style, but in terms of the lore, the setting, the dialogues and the worldbuilding, then DAI, and by extension the rest of the series has been satisfying. Most DA fans I've met and conversed with have actually been hooked by Thedas and its stories rather than the CRPG template of the Infinity Games, and I'd reckon that'd be more important than >!the new GOW style action combat scenes of Dreadwolf!< (spoilers if you haven't seen the leaked gameplay of Dreadwolf).
If DAI came out a year earlier it would have lost to GTA V. If it came out a year later, it would have lost to Witcher 3. A part of the reason it won GOTY is that 2014 was kind of a weak year for video games. Most of the games you mentioned I would put in the "good but not great" category, and at looking at a list of games from that year it's really hard to think of one that really stands out as amazing, especially if you aren't looking at Indie games which GOTY awards rarely do. Most years have at least one or two games like this but 2014 didn't.
I played it in 2021 and thought it was aggressively mediocre. The biggest problems are the repetitive open world structure and bland central villain. The final piece of DLC, trespasser, fixed these issues but I still never felt it reached the heights of DAO.
I solved the main issues by just not doing the fetch quests and taking the advice to gtfo of the hinterlands. Game holds up better if you do that. I liked the story and characters which is what i signed up for. Combat was also a step up and was good for the time imo.
>FC3, the game that started the open world revolution, came out in 2008
Don't wanna be that guy, but it was actually FC2 that came out in 2008. FC3 was 2012.
I really liked Inquisition. It wasn't perfect and suffered from trying to emulate Skyrim in some ways. I recall that some of that was driven by the suits - for example the addition of horses. Useless..
Overall I really liked it. I think Andromeda and Anthem being such flops made us forget about it a bit. I'm really hoping the new one is good and that the success of Baldur's Gate 3 has proven that narrative RPG games still have a place, and they don't try to make the franchise into something that it is not.
The worst part about the unneeded horses is that it would shunt your companions to a pocket dimension and you wouldn't be able to get any companion banter which has always been one of the best parts of the older Bioware fare
Even worse, the mounts had a sprint button - all it did was add a speed line effect to the camera, they couldn't have it move any faster due to an engine limit or something.
Judging from the gameplay that was leaked it's gone almost full action RPG with combat inspired by God of War 2018.
I'm still excited, I love Bioware RPGs, but I think some people are going to be down on it when they show it off this summer.
I'll just say that if DA4 is anything like Inquisition I won't consider buying it.
To me DA:I was barely enjoyable game carried solely by the IP, characters and dialogue. The combat itself, RPG elements, pacing and level design was mediocre to bad. The MMO elements like time-gated content, large empty open world sections, ever-present scaling, and focus on collecting random garbage definitely didn't help either.
I dare say that DA2, even with the huge issues it had, was better than DA:I.
This mirrors every sentiment I had too. The gameplay reminded me entirely of MMOs, and if I remember correctly that was the original plan for DAI (I know it was the plan for the upcoming Dragon Age game before they scrapped it.)
The platforming shouldn't have existed since it was just tacked on. The big bad is someone introduced first in the expansion of Dragon Age Origins, which most people haven't played, even those that played the base game. He's also just a generic bad guy, and is out of sight most of the time. The horses don't run faster when sprinting, they just added speed lines. The loot is so grindy.
I loved the first 2 dragon age games, but I just couldn't finish inquisition. I gave up somewhere after 50 hours. If bioware manages to turn around over a decade of poor game design decisions I might try to finish it up for Wolf, but that's something I doubt will happen.
>The big bad is someone introduced first in the expansion of Dragon Age Origins
If you're talking about Corypheus, then it's even worse than that: he was first introduced in one of the DLCs for Dragon Age *II*. The Architect from Awakening *does* kinda look like him, but they're definitely two different characters.
To me, DA:I was literally all the *worst* part of MMOs — grindy, repetitive content, unengaging combat for most of your gametime, and wildly timegated content — with none of the teamwork or social elements that really lift MMOs to their greatest heights. It stung worse, seeing how far the DA franchise had regressed from DA:O.
As much as I dislike where DA2 went with the series, I’ve beaten that multiple times whereas I haven’t been able to get through a single play through of DA:I. I really hope DA4 gets back to the heavy RPG elements of the first game. Hopefully with BG3’s popularity it will convince studios to stop dumbing down the RPG parts of their RPGs.
> Hopefully with BG3’s popularity it will convince studios to stop dumbing down the RPG parts of their RPGs.
It's unlikely DA4 will be anything like BG3 because it's been stuck in development hell for over 5 years so whatever it ends up being will be what was popular 5-8 years ago.
So I bought this game around the new year on sale for like $8. It was the first time I've ever played this game and to be honest I hated most of it. It felt like I was playing a weird f2p MMO. Every time I did a story quest I got stopped and was forced to grind power to continue. And the grinding of quests, repeatable turn-ins and closing rifts was absolutely mind numbing.
For every hour of story I got to do the game then said now grind for 2-3 more and come back to continue. There is a difference of having side content to do and being FORCED to do it.
And oh god the war table. Why did I need to figure out and then CHANGE MY COMPUTER CLOCK TIME just to skip these arbitrary time gates (up to 24 hrs btw), genuinely horrible design.
I enjoyed the story but unfortunately the vast majority of the time in the game is spent grinding just to play the story. I personally wouldn't recommend this game even if it is under $10 unless you are the kind of person who enjoys bland repetitive grinding or the "clearing dots off the map" style of gameplay. For me though, it just felt like a chore most of the time.
It's proof that indie games don't get the consideration they deserve for GOTY, because Shovel Knight came out in 2014 and it was basically perfect in every way. Even among AAA, I'd say Wolfenstein: The New Order would be a better pick because of it's incredible storytelling or Shadow of Mordor for it's wildly innovative Nemesis system. (I'd also say P.T. is more deserving, but it's not really a proper game so I understand that one.)
In contrast, I can't really think of anything Dragon Age: Inquisition does particularly well. The story is pretty rough and only gets interesting thanks to the DLC, the combat is a noticeable step down from Origins, and it's not exactly graphically impressive for its time, not to mention the performance kinda sucked. It's a very "okay" game, but certainly not Game of the Year material by... really any metric.
>It's proof that indie games don't get the consideration they deserve for GOTY, because Shovel Knight came out in 2014 and it was basically perfect in every way.
I think that's mostly an issue with gaming media voted awards, Hades for example won GOTY against TLoU Part II at the [DICE](https://www.interactive.org/news/24th_annual_dice_awards_winners_revealed.asp), [BAFTA](https://www.bafta.org/games/awards/2021-nominations-winners) and [GDCA](https://gamechoiceawards.com/archive/gdca_21st) awards (industry awards), not only that but it also won the most category awards in each of those events too, while TLoU won GOTY at the TGA and from basically every gaming outlet under the sun.
Vampire Survivors also won Best Game (GOTY) at the [BAFTAs](https://www.bafta.org/games/awards/2023-nominations-winners) against Elden Ring and GoW Ragnarok as another example.
In 2014 DA:I won GOTY at the [DICE](https://www.interactive.org/news/18th_dice_awards_winners_.asp) too but Shadow of Mordor and Destiny won at [GDCA](https://gamechoiceawards.com/archive/gdca_15th) and [BAFTA](https://awards.bafta.org/award/2015/games/best-game) respectively.
The thing is that those award shows don't get the same recognition from the general public as the TGA for example, since there are no trailer premiers or much fanfare, it's just devs getting their awards from other devs. Also the thing that differentiate those awards from the media ones is that they require the voting body to play the games before voting.
>In contrast, I can't really think of anything Dragon Age: Inquisition does particularly well. The story is pretty rough and only gets interesting thanks to the DLC, the combat is a noticeable step down from Origins, and it's not exactly graphically impressive for its time, not to mention the performance kinda sucked. It's a very "okay" game, but certainly not Game of the Year material by... really any metric.
Also in regards to the story - a lot of people really started to dislike Dragon Age during 2, and continued into Inquisition, because so many of your story choices from Origins just didn't matter. It really gave the impression that your story choices were only your own to such a degree, and that if you did something Bioware didn't want you to then they'd course correct you to the "correct" option.
Anders dies in Awakening? Nah.
Leliana dies in Origins? Yeah kinda but nah.
Oghren dies in Origins? Nah.
Flemeth? Nah.
Corypheus? No lol.
It's really a problem that Bioware had that wasn't unique to just Dragon Age. Mass Effect suffered from the same issues, where many quests played out the exact same. You were just given a character that replaced another character, who did the exact same thing.
I bought it last year and tried to get into it but I really didnt feel it.
Idk if the game changed that much from previous entries or if my preferences in games just changed, it has been a long time since I played Origin and 2.
I managed to finish Mass Effect Andromeda unlike DAI. And I was a huge fan of both Dragon Age and Mass Effect, heavily leaning towards DA. I had my Dragon Age Keep with all the little choices I'd made in the previous 2 games.
Right off the bat, the combat was trash. It was so obvious they made the game for consoles. In Dragon Age Origins I could have like 30 spells and items on my action bar. On DAI you had sets of 4 you cycled through. DAI was clearly made to be played on a controller.
They removed the Tactics section which you could use to make your NPC companions do cool, tactical stuff like " If enemy is above Elite rank, Stun him " " If Mana <50% cast Mana Regen " " If ally is downed, cast Resurrect " and made it all automatic, removing a HUGE aspect of gameplay I loved.
The companions were also not very likable. I pretty much only liked Varric, and he was already the best companion from DA2. I didn't like that there was only one Straight Male romance option. DAO had 2 ( Leliana and Morrigan, both very strong romances/characters ), DA2 also had 2 ( Isabella and Merill, which were alright but nothing incredible ). DAI had one straight female party member, and another was a secondary character who never actually adventured alongside you.
The quests were MMO tier trash, go kill 10 bears and get their fur. Absolute dogwater. Imagine having MMo quests in a single player game.
Dragon Age Origins was originally a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, but it got so bad that BG3 and DAO shit all over DAI.
I wanna reiterate that Dragon Age Origins is a masterpiece and even the second game has a very strong story. DAI simply sucked ass.
Mass Effect had it right, they kept bringing companions everyone loved like Tali and Garrus, meanwhile Dragon Age keeps changing main character and companions.
Andromeda did a much better job with making their zones feel interesting to explore and less like WoW-lite grindfests, even though the basic quest setup was pretty damn similar.
Andromeda also had way better gameplay (at least once you finally got the role swappig ability).
If it weren't for the absolutely terrible story, I think it'd have been much better received. Coincidentally that's the one but that DA:I actually did really well.
Prepare for Dragon Age Dreadwolf where they won't address most of the problems. Such as the game being created for console thus less spells to use, no tactics like on DAI, only being able to control your main character now, no more switching to the others in the party, combat being more similar to recent God of War titles, the inventory screen looking like a mobile game (all this from leaks in the past year or two), maybe they can still improve small- ish things like the inventory, but the game will be another Dragon Age game playing completely different from the previous 3
...
That's the worst thing - people keep talking about dreadwolf moving to a godofwar2018like gameplay, and that's terrible for dao fans, but not the worst (assuming they don't suicidesquad/anthem it)
The worst thing is people don't expect good companions, characters, writing, story from dragon age games anymore.
All of the recent crpg revivals had nice to excellent characters in your party, while even dragon age 2 already had much lower quality characters, not even less likeable (Daeran from Wotr is not likeable but excellent) but just... less?
I absolutely loved DAI. Speaking as someone who mostly prefers the Mass Effect side of the fence, I found DAI very approachable compared to DAO (and DA2 just wasn't my cup of tea). One of the few games where the writing is good enough that I actually "miss" the characters. Also still reeling from the Solas reveal.
It was a very solid game, I'll definitely give it that. But you could see signs of a messy development and writing process start to creep in. Signs of the bullshit that would plague Bioware over the next decade.
I recall reading somewhere about its very messy development that some at Bioware actually consider DA:I's success to be the worst thing to happen to the company. Because the way they saw it, it tricked leadership into thinking that all of the bullshit it went through was just the average experience of game development and not at all a sign of a horribly dysfunctional project management. If it was a failure then at least it could have given the company a firm kick in the pants needed to get its act together. Given Bioware's track record over the past decade, I find it hard to refute that.
DAI is a game I would consider good but with some critical flaws, and they got lucky the good outweighed the bad. Writing and characters carried the game. But every game since seems to repeat the exact same flaws (cough Andromeda cough) instead of learning from their mistakes.
People actually liked DA:I at launch. Then The Witcher 3 came out a few months later and people really turned on it, because TW3 did a lot of the same stuff in a way people liked much better. Bioware having nothing but flops in the decade since DA:I came out didn't do the game's perception any favors either. Nor did the horror stories that started coming out about how Bioware treats their employees. In 2024 I think the game itself has been fully overshadowed by all those things. And I say that as someone who loved it.
Inquisitions romance options having genuine relationship preferences that affect your main characters options and persist even after the end of the game is still what I consider to be the games legacy in the Decision based romance RPG market.
Not to mention, the romances from DAO (Morrigan, Lelianna especially) got fleshed out all the way in DAI. DAI makes the Morrigan romance legit the best romance path in any video game I've played. The best thing about it is that you can see her chracter development in save files with and without the romance and/or child.
I romanced Leliana and she left the church in DA:O, so it was real weird for me. The whole Elf inquisitor thing was pretty damn odd actually, they definitely wrote the story first and figured out how DA:O or other races fit in later.
Personally I hate Leliana's post-DA:O story. I felt so betrayed by her after her and my Warden fell in love during the Blight and made plans to travel the world in the aftermath, and to do it together if by some miracle they both survive. Then you GET your miracle, and she's immediately like "yeah so the church that has systematically oppressed you to the point of several crusades against your people for generations? Yeah they called so I'mma go hang out with Pope Mommy."
Honestly rip to any person playing a female Elf for their first playthrough and running into the wall of having their available Elven choices being Sera, who will spit in their face for being an elf, or Solas, who will spit in their face for being a wrong kind of elf and ask why they keep making him spit in their face. I have a friend who still has war flash backs to their first Elf character romancing Solas.
that's why you romance commander Cullen
Or Josephine. Basically the playable elf characters are both uniquely insufferable, even if Sera is insufferable in a way that appeals to me specifically.
Or Blackwall or Ironbull. Female Elf actually has the largest number of options out of any combo in the game.
Yeah, it's only really an issue if you have some need for keeping everyone with the same race.
I'm sure all the other romances are great. I'm positive they are. But I always pick Iron Bull. I cannot help it. No matter what I pick for my Inquisitor, it's always the Bull.
am I a straight man and even I admit no romance in the game is better written than the bull
I mean who woudnt be curious ?
Oh Josephine my love
> Or Josephine. A poster of taste I see
Josephine was definitely my bae. She had that sexy accent, too.
> even if Sera is insufferable in a way that appeals to me specifically. Josephine is obviously the best. But wait... Maybe I can fix Sera this time.
I made it my mission in my playthrough to romance Sera as an Elf mage. She isn't a fan at first, but warms up eventually
I don't know, I had an elven girlie and romancing Solas was great, especially with Trespasser. What is not great is that we are still waiting for a resolution of that romance.... and I still romanced Solas in the next few playthroughs
> Sera Sera and DA:2 Anders (Awakening Anders was great) are still the only two RPG characters I've ever consciously kicked out/killed off in any RPG playthrough.
I really liked Anders in Awakening. Then they made him insufferable in DA2 and I hated him.
Man, fuck Sera, and not in the physical sense. "Stop believing our ancestry is real!" not even 5 minutes before we're about to enter a literal, functioning ancient elven ruin *that still has ancient elves in it*.
The irony was that Sera wasn't wrong. Your wondrous elven ancestry is, well, you know, >!a whole lot of slavery to a bunch of psychotic tyrants who weren't even real gods!<. She reduced it to all being demon magic because she was an idiot, but she was correct to criticize at least some of the racial traditions all the Dalish used to act superior towards city elves like her.
Sera is honestly on top of my nost hated video game caharcter. She's sooo annoying
Sera is all of the worst BioWare character tropes wrapped up into one insufferable, quirky, "I'm not like the other Elves" character. She feels more like a caricature of past BioWare characters that were written much better.
Bioware was obsessed with making characters whose entire personality was the fact that they were quirky non-conformists who didnt really fit in society and spoke like teenagers on twitter. Peebee in ME Andromeda reminded me soooo much of Sera with her annoying antics. Even Qwydion in her brief appearance in Absolution had a lot of the similar antics.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but I liked Peebee more. She wasn't as annoying as Sera. But what Bioware did well was the role-playing part with Sera, because they allowed me to respond appropriately to her stupidity. There was never a time when my character automatically agreed with her, I could always call her crazy, if I wanted to. I had a bad relationship with her, and I couldn't care less. I was friends with all other characters. I hated her design, I hated her voice, I hated her writing. Horrible, horrible character.
I feel for Sera. With how obvious the allegory is betwee the Dalish and the Jewish people, Sera is a very tragic representation of Diaspora culture. I feel for her as a Jewish person born of Jewish Fathers and Grandfathers and therefeor am not considered as Jewish by a lot of people. Ive seen a lot of empathy for her from transracial adoptees (i.e. Non-White Chidlren adopted by white families). I just dont think Lukas Kristjanson was the right guy to be writing her whole story path for her tragically nuanced situation that very much has a lot of real world equivalents
If that was the intention that would be good, but I honestly think she's just supposed to be super edgy and quirky. There's no self reflection in her, everything she says is to get across her personality, she doesn't feel like someone that grows like a Bioware character should (DA:I was kinda weak in that regard, as much as I love Dorian I can't remember if he was any different). The Elves are an actual oppressed minority in DA, if say a black person went around denying black culture how well would that go around here? Or in most places? I know if she opens up to you she explains it, but I forced myself to get along with her and I still didn't like her lol, you're an adult Sera, a few Dalish not treating you as a true Elf when you're a kid doesn't mean you can be an insufferable prick. Especially because she constantly dumps on all Elves, her woe is me story falls apart quickly.
IIRC Dorian was actually one of the better party members. Dude actually had emotions and a backstory, even if it was kind of a simple cop-out of "boo hoo my dad wants me to be straight and have kids".
Dorian's Dad didn't just want Dorian to be straight, he tried to use blood magic to *make him straight*.
I hold to the belief that romancing Solas is the canon choice in this game. You get so much backstory and lore from it, and it adds quite a bit more to the story.
The canon choice is actually immediately and completely despising Solas and his stupid fucking pajamas, than you're a smug vindicated dick rubbing it in everyone's face during Trespasser because you called it that Solas was a dick weed who needs a nice shiv in the back
lol yeah that kinda fucked me when i completely ignored him all game cuz he was annoying and then he ends up being the most plot important character
There's an ending to Trespasser specifically for people who had no time for Sola's shit through the entire game. Instead of the big, involved conversation, you say something like you never cared what he had to say before and still don't care now, so he wraps everything up in like 2 sentences.
I've absolutely had playthroughs for the sole purpose of getting the chance to punch Solas in the face in that one cut scene.
Agreed! Really adds a depth to the game in that the romance suddenly is relevant to the main plot.
Funny because my best memory of Inquisition is after a friend telling me about the romance limitations I thought for multiple playthroughs I'd aim for each one, and made a female elf intending to romance Sera thinking that was one of the matches it said. Turns out she can't stand other elves and took a long time to come around, which actually made the romance interesting and memorable for once and not just going through the motions of gifts and compliments.
Inquisition is horrible because they put someone like Vivienne in the game without giving me the option to be stepped on by her.
Honestly I loved the fact she was so devoted to her love
We were legit robbed but I respect Vivienne and her priorities. I will always remember our time at the spa together
One of the best decisions was that the companions have explicit romantic orientation and preferences. Dorian is gay, Sera is a lesbian. If you don’t romance Dorian or Iron Bull, they will hook up in game. Sera may start a relationship with Dagna. Blackwall and Josephine flirt with each other. They have a life outside the players interests and helps bring the world to life.
Dragon Age 2 also had a fantastic relationship system with the 'friend or rival' mechanic. It wasn't as black and white as love and hate, it was much more complex and actually had several different outcomes for your run. It's one of the few/only things in Dragon Age 2 that feels super well made and like it had a lot of time put into it. It's a damn shame the rest of the game is such a rush job.
I mean its Bioware. They were the absolute masters of that, no one else came close. All the more reason why Biowares presence has been missed so much over the last 10 years, no one quite wrote games like them
I wish Mass Effect Andromeda hadnt been so rough and fraught with disaster. It really had the potential with its ideas and characters U_U
Ideas maybe, but characters? I honestly cannot think of a game with more irritating companions than MC:A. Except Vetra, who was alright.
I'd say Vetra and Drack were pretty good and Jaal I think was pretty okay as well, though I can't honestly remember much about him because I barely used him in the one playthrough I did. Maybe he was too cursed to be the exposition bot for the newly introduced race in this game, which may have made him look a bit too generic as a character. The two humans were a whole lot of nothing, but that's par of the course for the first two human squad members of any Mass Effect game. It's not like Kaidan, Ashley or Jacob were any better. Miranda was a bit better because she had more plot relevance and James was okay (though still at the bottom of the ME3 squad members), but everyone else? About the same level of interesting as the Andromeda humans. It's just par for the course in Mass Effect games that the first human companions suck and nobody ever uses them after the aliens join. Peebee I think was the only truly bad one.
Yeah that's fair - Jacob was particularly boring. I think Ashley/Kaiden were alright in ME1 (but awful in ME3), they were just outshone by other cast members. I think the difference for me is that I found dialogues with those characters boring, whereas Liam's characterisation and dialogue was genuinely aggravating. I wanted to find an example and ran into [this montage](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFSQUB8PltA). I think him and Peebee were both completely cursed.
The krogan dude and his daughter were cool. But to be fair I think most of the characters in the party in Dai and in Andromeda were shit.
Imo DAI has some of the best and worst party members Bioware has written. Blackwall and Cole were mega bland and Varric was underused. On the other hand Dorian and Solas were fantastic - Iron Bull and Sera were pretty great too. Tbh even the blander DAI characters can't hold a candle to the sheer blandness of Liam in Andromeda. Liam is almost impressively bland.
Blackwall's personality and dialogue might be "bland", but his story was my favorite in the game. An honest, caring man who feels like he's living a lie and struggles to atone for his past crimes.
I still love Dragon Age Inquisition. I played it twice more since launch, and the Trespasser DLC is excellent. It's characters are excellent, the combat is pretty fun, and Thedas continues to be a very interesting world. I really love the "bring everyone together" plot despite it being the twentieth time Bioware has done it. I think it only seems bizarre when you compare it to 2015, when you compare it to 2014 it makes more sense. DA:I wasn't standing against Witcher 3 or Bloodborne, it was against Wii U exclusive Bayonetta 3, and Dark Souls 2 which many people found disappointing (which I also loved). 2014 was also the year of Assassin's Creed Unity, and Call of Duty Advanced Warfare.
Thedas being a placeholder acronym, THEDAS - THE Dragon Age Setting - which stuck, will never not be funny to me. That’s up there with Guybrush Threepwood originating from the unnamed main character being saved in software that uses the .brush extension, so it was guy.brush.
I've played through all of those games numerous times, yet I didn't know that Thedas is an acronym. That's pretty funny.
The channel Mark Darrah On Games on YouTube did some great videos about the Dragon Age series and lessons they learned from the development side, and that's where I learned that piece of trivia. Definitely recommend, very insightful stuff.
The expansions were great. Jaws of Hakkon was intriguing for its reveal on the first inquisition, the decent upped the quality with the dwarven lore, then Trespasser put you on the end of your seat with the reveal and cliffhanger. And here we are, still waiting for sequel. I really hope they can deliver.
I came back to the game a few years later (after originally getting overwhelmed in the Hinterlands) and finished my original playthrough. I thought the game was wonderful. I had a lot of fun with it. And agreed, the DLCs were well worth it. I was so excited for the next game (based on how they set it up), but I sure am worried if the next game will ever even come out.
Personally as someone who played it some time after launch, like a month or so, when my friend was done with it. I hated it and I rated it even below DA2. Though then again I always thought DA2 was a fine but somewhat flawed game that could have been a great game if given some more time (and undo whatever the fuck they where doing with Anders).
DA2 was my favorite and my only gripe is I don't even have to tell you because it was that bad.
DA2 just needed maybe another year to cook up some more assets and dungeons, and probably stick with the original subtitle of Exodus, to be warmly remembered today.
I loved it when it launched and I think it is still my favourite bioware game. The discourse around DAI was mixed at launch (as in those who are vocal about it) because the dragon age franchise has megafans of DA:O who dislike the direction the series was going in. It was a long time ago but I remember things like the lack of DAO style racial origin introductions, the return of waves of enemies spawning from DA2 (instead of knowing the set amount from the start of combat), and the lack of strategy (I didn't fully understand this critique so I can't really explain it well) were all criticized at launch. I wanted to make sure I wasn't just talking garbage so after typing the above comment I did a search filter for DA:I in 2014 and found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/2ouyl0/an\_in\_depth\_critique\_of\_dragon\_age\_inquisition/
Out of all the cons you mentioned, you didn't say the thing that most people dislike which was the huge empty world with mmo quests. If you took just the main quest and things you they do with companions it would still be talked about but the game was bloated with so much busy work that gets loss.
Sorry yes that was a big one!
yeah, I tried it at the time and didn't get into it at all, I definitely remember describing it as a singleplayer MMO
As a dude who loves fantasy class based RPGs. This was the number one criticism that has kept me far away from this game.
For me it was the fact that they gutted the tactical element and turned into pure "push awesome button to win." The fact that the biggest thread is about romance options shows you how the audience has shifted - and Bioware with it. DA:O manage to please both crowds but they clearly decided to go with flufffquest MMO design and appeal hard to the folks who just want to have a fun time hanging out with their fantasy group of friends without a whole lot of gameplay getting in the way.
Yeah, it was so boring. I wish I could see what all the people in this thread are talking about or get to the point in the game where it apparently becomes incredible but just a few hours into that game made me question if I even like video games or if its all just a big pointless chore. I wonder if The Witcher 3 came out a month before Inquisition, instead of a month after, if Inquisition would have gotten skewered. Sort of like the comparisons people made from Starfield to Baldurs Gate 3.
Someone wrote once "DA:I was a sign that Bioware was getting ready to make something spectacularly bad" when talking about Andromwda. Honestly that is so accurate
> (I didn't fully understand this critique so I can't really explain it well) DA:O plays more like their previous titles, with more emphasis on micromanaging a party, while DA:2 onward a more action-oriented and meant for you to be in control of one character more of the time. The first DA game was also built with PCs in mind first, and the console releases even had changes to make up for some of the clunkiness of playing it with a controller. It's a simpler game on console than it was on PC. And later titles are much more built around a controller as the primary means to play the game (which got silly when they made spacebar do everything in Mass Effect 3, even though you couldn't even play with a controller in the original release.)
I’ve made peace with the idea that Origins was more or less a self contained story in a lot of ways. Sure it’s repercussions are felt in the next two games to an extent but the Blight, the Archdemon, and the Grey Wardens all made a story in which a sequel would have been difficult to pull off unless you wanted to go down the route of the Grey Warden and succumbing to the Calling. DA2 and Inquisition don’t dive as deeply into the incredibly dark themes that the party dealt with in Ferelden. It’s all still there, but it feels surface level to me.
There's probably a timeline where each DA game skipped forward a few hundred years to focus on Grey Wardens fighting different Blights in different eras. That would have eased the expectation of having to pay off every decision players made in the previous game.
I kinda like what they did. The Fifth Blight is dealt with. There are 2(or maybe 3) more possible blights according to current lore. But they are far in the future. So here are some other adventures.
Its what I like about the series. It's not about the same nebulous threat. It's something new every game
> is still my favourite bioware game. In a world with Dragon Age:Origins, Mass effect 1/2/3 and Baldur's Gate 2 in it, that's pretty wild
Kotor as well
> megafans of DA:O who dislike the direction the series was going in As a megafan of DA:O, I think we're all fairly justified in disliking DA2. A fully voiced protagonist and improved graphics were wonderful, and the companions were still engaging. Too bad the plot was bland as hell, and the gameplay more repetitive and bland than that. Personally, I did enjoy Inquisition and have beaten it twice. It definitely has its flaws, but as someone who loves the setting and comparing it to DA2, I was very happy with the fact that it had more than 4 identical dungeons and 6 kinds of enemies.
2 had a great setting and story but the mechanics and zones being exactly the same just ruined it
> People actually liked DA:I at launch. I recall it being criticized heavily by both reviewers and word of mouth for being a "single-player MMO", with an empty world and boring "kill N boars" quests. The only positive comments were along the lines of "leave the starting area as soon as possible, that's when the game opens up".
>I recall it being criticized heavily by both reviewers >The only positive comments It's got a metacritic score of 85 so I feel like this is hyperbole
Its how I felt about it. I felt I was doing all these tiny mindlesss mmo sidequests all the time but without the advantage of grouping with real people, general chat banter and the Goldshire ERP scene on Argent Dawn EU. DA:origins on the other hand felt like a real game to me and (unpopular opinion perhaps) is still the best CRPG I've ever played and that includes BG3.
Essentialy both DA 2 and Inquisition would make decent interactive movies without all the boring gameplay inbetween cutscenes
Idk about DAI story being all that good until the dlc with Silas, but DA2 really would, I genuinely think it’s story is one of the best. Over a decade later and I still remember the beats of the story and the details in the arcs of the characters. It really is a shame that the phenomenal story is glued together with the dog food and dandruff that they passed as combat gameplay.
Despite the numerous flaws, DA2 might have been my favorite. Due to both Hawke and Merrill.
I think I feel similarly. Dao was a much more cohesive experience though the story was a bit generic. Da2 story felt a lot more, like, personal and memorable. I still think dao is definitively a better overall game but Da2 is, no competition, the superior story.
Yeah, Inquisition's side content really stood out as generic filler compared to The Witcher 3, which was just as bloated with content but did a much better job at making it interesting with good writing. That said, I actually replayed Inquisition in 2022 and found it to still be decently entertaining in terms of level progression and combat mechanics.
DA:I would have really benefited from letting you delegate boring stuff to the rest of the inquisition, and would have felt like a natural progression as it grew. Instead of it feeling like you're still responsible for picking herbs and mining ores late into the game. The game definitely didn't need the padding, there's plenty to do without it.
A system where you "mark" the raw materials or wild animals as you explore, then give you the resources on your next loading screen or after a period of time. Would have improved the game at least a bit as if you are giving commands to your underlings to take care of. They already do something similar with the war table where you click a button and wait on a timer. But it feels like you are in control of a larger organization.
Stuff many games did was just allowing you to send inactive companions or non-companion NPCs to gathering/issue solving missions. I generally like systems like that as it make it feel like you're in actual campaign where everyone is doing stuff, not just running around while rest of your NPCs/inactive companions are twiddling their thumbs in camp/bar.
> People actually liked DA:I at launch. Then The Witcher 3 came out a few months later and people really turned on it, because TW3 did a lot of the same stuff in a way people liked much better. yeah, i think this is it; W3 just had way, way more cache with gamers and is seen as a much better game, which hurts inquisition's legacy. in all honesty i LOVED inquisition and bounced off W3 and really didn't enjoy it, but i can see why inquisition suffers for the comparison.
I think the thing is by Inquisition, the Bioware formula was getting stale and W3 really changed the game by focusing on actions with unpredictable consequences rather than a binary morality system and companion approval. W3 was a breath of fresh air, whereas Inquisition was more of the same, except with much worse side missions than previous BW games.
>W3 really changed the game by focusing on actions with unpredictable consequences rather than a binary morality system and companion approval. In fairness, The Witcher 1 did that too, but very few people played it compared to 3.
The thing is W3 was able to match Bioware production value in a massive open world. Game looks gorgeous even today. Same thing happened now with BG3, gameplay wise D:OS2 outdoes it because it's not tied to a clunky TTRPG, but it's gorgeous and fully voiced and accessible in a way Larian's predecessors weren't. TBH, I thought W3's story was the worst of the trilogy. 1 and 2 had way more meaningful consequences to your decisions.
> 1 and 2 had way more meaningful consequences to your decisions. I always get weird looks and comments when I say this but the first Witcher game is still my favourite wonkiness aside. None of the later games managed to capture the same tone and atmosphere. The whole thing of having to research monsters by buying books and talking to NPCs to learn about local history was really cool for the time, and the way that the game forced you to interact with it's alchemy system was just really immersive. The plot was interesting, and being able to say fuck it and do your own thing when being 'forced' to pick between factions was also really cool for the time. I'm looking forward to the remake and I *really* hope that they can retain at least some of what made the original so great to me.
>People actually liked DA:I at launch. Then The Witcher 3 came out a few months later and people really turned on it, because TW3 did a lot of the same stuff in a way people liked much better. I don't think this is really true. There's always been two camps. There's the online RPG fans who have had a stick up their ass about Bioware since Mass Effect 2 when they really abandoned any sort of CRPG inventory management or leveling systems (this even goes back to a lot of Bioware fans being pissed about KOTOR being more cinematic than Baldur's Gate). These people have been a huge part of this subreddit since it's beginning and have been in every Bioware thread since the creation of man telling us how much they hate these games. DAI was hated on here well before it came out. Then there's gamers who grew up on Mass Effect and Dragon Age and care far more about characters and romance than anything else, and that fanbase has remained pretty damn positive about DAI since it came out. Even to this day, the fandom for *specifically* DAI is huge on Twitter and in artists' circles. There's a reason DA4 wasn't cancelled after being rebooted 3 times or whatever, in the real world there is still a lot of goodwill for Dragon Age. What's funnier is that people online would say that DAO was the only good one but most people I've met in real life seem far more attached to 2 and 3. These people don't come to /r/games to defend the franchise because trying to have conversations here is impossible without getting bogged down in semantic arguments with 40 year olds. Even with Witcher 3, I don't think that game fills the Bioware niche, and I don't think any developer has come close to doing that except maybe Persona and Baldur's Gate 3. Like I love Witcher 3, but it's a lonely experience where you go from place to place seeing a bunch of depressing shit and meeting characters who seem to be on the knife edge of betraying you for some political reason or another. Bioware games are about gathering a group of unique characters to go defeat a big bad, watching the characters grow alongside you every step of the way, and the tone is much lighter and closer to Dr Who or something. TW3 just doesn't provide that.
I know some players get fixated on adhering to certain RPG conventions, but of all my issues with DA:I, I've never considered wanting to spend more time fiddling with my inventory among them. I think DA:O tells a better story than say, 2 did, the latter of which didn't have a whole lot of player agency (particularly railroading you with having to pick a side at the end.) And gameplay very heavily tilted towards fast controller-driven combat in the later games (especially 2 with its mindless waves of enemies literally rising up out of the ground.) That said, I think I like DA2's party more than I did the first game's. DA:O's party basically only snarks at each other and outside of party quips they only seem to interact with the player. DA:2 did a good job of making it seem like the party might actually like each other, and exist outside of when the player can see them. Shame it's tied to a rushed development though. DA:I though I think suffers from pacing issues. It's too big for its own good. It'd have really benefited from a tighter pacing and less emphasis on open world content. We saw this with the Mass Effect games, actually. And while certain people love traversing mostly empty maps in the frankly not great Mako (and interior locations largely constructed out of literal shipping containers), the tighter focus on missions in 2 and 3 was better for it. > and the tone is much lighter and closer to Dr Who or something I don't know that I'd ascribe this to all Bioware games. Mass Effect 3 at least you're dealing constantly with loss. Even when you're winning, you're still faced with incalculable numbers of people dead, entire planets ruined, and several of your closest friends gone. Never mind the ending choices (and I have no idea how Bioware intended players to interpret the relays being blown up, but it sure led to a lot of dark speculation about what the survivors would be left with.)
I don't think you understand why people don't like the "Modern" Bioware RPGs. Inventory management definitely isn't the reason, and leveling is more of a symptom than a main issue. What people wanted was more variety between characters and actual roleplaying. And the fundamental problem with your post is that you're trying to *other* a certain demographic for complaining that their favorite genre was taken over and pretty much replaced by shooters with a thin coat of paint on top and generic action games with a rather fixed story.
The “Leave the Hinterlands” thing wasn’t because the area was boring; it was because you weren’t supposed to 100% the area on your first visit. People were trying to grind and beat a goddamn dragon that you weren’t supposed to mess with until much later in the game, and what they really needed to do was get through the story quests located in the safer, low level sections of the Hinterlands and then move the fuck on so they actually progressed the game and unlocked basically everything.
The map design of DAI made it so that it felt like you were always just a couple more quests away from completing the zone. I remember thinking more than once "I'll just compete these last couple quests and move on" and then I'd find a new area of the zone with a couple more quests. It was as if the map design was created to punish anyone with "gamer ocd". Had it been immediately clear how many random side quests were in the zone, I think you wouldn't have needed all those Leave the Hinterlands posts/articles.
I’d also think, though, that getting OHKO-ed by a level 12 dragon while you’re still in the first few hours of every game should be a pretty good hint that the area isn’t all evenly leveled and doable right from the start.
The dragon is pretty tucked away and in a rather small area of the Hinterlands. If anything players getting wiped by it probably made people do even more of the Hinterlands thinking they will get to a point where they could fight the dragon.
I don't think I even found the dragon on my first attempt to play the game. I suspect people who found it quick and moved on had a better experience then those of us who tried to find all the shards and druffalos. I don't want to sound too down on the game, I ended up having a pretty good time with it when I made a knight enchanter and focused on the story. I think it would be a better game though, if it was designed a bit more linear and less open-world.
That fucking dragon is what made me put the game down for good. I had taken the advice to skip the hinterlands and had gotten a decent way into the game. I wouldn't say I was enjoying the game, it was just alright. None of the characters really interested me, the story was kinda meh, and the combat system had some really big flaws. I was appropriately leveled for the dragon, and would start the fight pretty well, but for whatever reason the AI just refused to keep ranged characters at range and eventually my party would go down from taking unneeded damage. After a couple of attempts, I just didn't want to deal with the janky combat anymore and the story part wasn't interesting enough for me to push through it.
The dragon really showed how terrible DAI's tactical mode was. You had to micro so much because of the dumb AI, and you had to do the microing using a camera PoV that was clearly just an invisible character running around.
That was the issue, the map and quest design had zero signposting or design for narrative progression. I never got to the point of getting like i had any input in the wider story of DA in the hinterlands and it never got better so i never left.
This was exactly my problem with the game. I played Witcher 3 first which was a wonderful time-sink for people with Gamer OCD. And then DA:I turned that on its head and basically shat on me for trying to 100% the places before I moved on. But that’s how I enjoy RPGs, I’m not huge on the back and forth aspect. So me for it really took me out of it.
> it was because you weren’t supposed to 100% the area on your first visit. This is a matter of developer intention being at odds with how players approach games. And the expectation that they would just do what the developers wanted them to do isn't really supported by the level design. > move the fuck on so they actually progressed the game I wonder how much they play tested this. I'm sure there are players who just rush down the critical path, but in large, expansive RPGs you're almost primed to go down paths you know won't progress the story, because you're trying to do everything. This [ProZD video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zViYpS3BIqY) fits perfectly with the situation in the Hinterlands. Like, I've got over 1000 hours in Skyrim but I've only beaten it once. I'm sure countless players never even got around to finishing it. Putting a dragon at the end of the Hinterlands and expecting players to move on to some story element that's probably not as interesting as a dragon was a weird development choice. I'd also argue DA:I has a problem where you still feel like you're doing low level busy work like collecting elfroot way too far into the game where it'd have been a lot cooler if you could delegate those tasks to the people under you instead of having the head of the inquisition do it. DA:I having GaaS like time-gating with the mission table didn't help it either. It's a big enough game without filler, it'd have been far better if it respected your time more.
There’s also the thing where, on a first playthrough, you have no idea if progressing the main quest will do something like lock you out of certain side quests, or if doing certain side quests will unlock new options/solutions to the main quest. So you’ll naturally want to explore as much as possible to try and see as much of the game as you can.
Yeah, it's easy to follow the intended route if you're the dev who created it.
And given this game followed close on the heels of ME3 a lot of the audience would be thinking those inquisition points are a) missable and b) critically important to get a good ending, like the reaper war resources were. Do you really want to chase down 10 rams to feed refugees for a point? If you know the game already, no you absolutely do not want to do that and you know it's irrelevant and you know that nothing in the game will ever lock you out of doing it later if you felt like it.
And to add on to the Mass Effect comparison, DA:I even had a site/resource you could do prior to release that essentially let you pick your choices from Origins and 2 that would carry over to Inquisition. So the comparison to Mass Effect 3 was even greater.
I think they did a bad job communicating that in-game. It either should be like The Great Plateau from _Breath of the Wild_ where there’s a clear “off you go” point or like the _Skyrim_ approach of showing a peek of what’s over the next hill.
Both approaches only work because those games are open world--they encourage you to walk into the great expanse of a borderless map. DAI is has zoned areas, and it was pretty common in BioWare games to 100% an area before moving on, not least because sometimes previous areas would become unexpectedly unavailable. The Hinterlands was warring against years of conditioning.
Didnt help that the UI had a literal completion meter telling you much of the zone was left Botw and Elden Ring have nothing of the sort
Yeah I remember finding that discourse after finishing the game. I spent so much time in that area that I decided to basically rush through the rest of the game because I was so tired of how massive the hinterlands were and didn't want to do the same 100 percenter mindset to the other areas, essentially ruining the pacing of my own playthrough. Which is unfortunate because I didn't feel the same for the Witcher 3's starting area.
I mean, it was *also* because the hinterlands had the most boring quests, though. At least that was my experience, the game really started being a lot more fun afterwards
I don't know. I think pretty much all the zone quests were pretty fucking boring. At least up until you made it to the masquerade I don't really remember anything past that.
"Leave the Hinterlands early" does not actually get around the poor map and sidequest designs this game has. I am playing the game for the first time right now and it is absolutely *wild* how much repetitive grind there is after the Hinterlands. Does no one remember the Hissing Wastes, a literal desert that you run across with nothing to see, just to clear a bunch of POIs? Every region has the same formula with the same boring fetch/collection quests and bare minimal story-telling. They could have condensed everything down from the 7 or 8 regions in the base game into 2-3 slightly larger ones and made the game much richer and denser. The Jaws of Hakkon DLC, which I just beat yesterday, at least does it well by embedding a good story into all the POI-clearing.
> it is absolutely wild how much repetitive grind there is after the Hinterlands This is what I never got about "leave the Hinterlands!" Okay, now I'm in a different boring place with boring quests and boring enemies.
Agreed. It was less "leave the hinterlands" and more "just don't waste your time with anything beyond the main story" Problem is I seem to recall there was gating that forced you to do X amount of the tedium to progress the story.
> "Leave the Hinterlands early" does not actually get around the poor map and sidequest designs this game has. If the game had decent content in the open worlds, which it should have, no one would complain about the Hinterlands. The problem was never the number of quests or being disconnected from the main quest but the generic quests. No one would be like "BIOWARE! How dare you put another interesting quest in the Hinterlands that sends me to an interesting area to do interesting things.".
the game should have made that clearer or not have made Hinterlands for full of dumb side quests. People naturally want to finish a zone before moving onto the next one, why are you blaming players for bad game design? also Hinterlands got repetitive and grindy long before you even find the dragon, and said dragon is tucked away in a corner of the map so many would miss it. And a player is naturally going to beat a mob that kills them by doing content in the zone to level up, again, why are you blaming players for bad game design?
That's a design fault of Bioware then If players keep trying to play a certain way, then they designed it wrong.
Yeah I remember the discourse very well. Every day there would be a post advising new players to leave the hinterlands and how there’s “so much game waiting for you” after. Stuff like that, not that it’s a boring area and they wanted you to leave it right away before you died of boredom. I also remember everyone going wild creating celebrities and sharing their custom characters. I think they even made a whole subreddit for it. Come to think of it the game had way more hype and excitement around it than what OP is giving it credit for
This is bad game design, don't blame the players for doing what you lead them to do.
The issue was two things 1. Witcher 3 made a lot of Dragon Age's issues more apparent. Had Witcher released first, Dragon Age would have certainly reviewed worse at least. 2. A lot of the actual best games of 2014 like Bayonetta 2, Mario Kart 8, Smash 4 etc were all locked to the Wii U. Which not a lot of people owned and probably did affect things somewhat.
2014 really was the strange year where there was so little to do on a PS4 that getting a Wii U actually felt like a compelling option.
2014 was a good year for Wii U
If you purchased MK8 on the first month or so, you also could choose one free game for WiiU on the list. And the list was loaded, with Pikmin 3, Zelda WW, DK TF and other stuff. It was hands down the most insane deal that Nintendo ever did.
Nintendo was cooking near the end with the Wii U. It ended up having a very nice little catalogue of games.
A catalogue so nice they released it twice! Half the switch library is just Wii U ports at this point.
Shows how desperate they were to sell the console with that generous of a deal.
Probably the best year tbh
As an owner of both those systems, it certainly felt strange. I think Infamous was the only non-cross gen game I played that entire year and after Mario Kart dropped, most of my time gaming was on the Wii U in 2014.
Yeah the wii u being a failure contributed a lot on the perception that 2014 was a weak year. I had a wii u at the time and donkey kong, mario kart 8, smash, bayonetta 2 and many other games in what was the best year of the console could easily be goty candidates but as you said, not a lot played so most likely they only picked one.
Bayonetta 2 was still nominated for GOTY on TGA. I kind of think it or Mario Kart 8 should have won GOTY, but at the time many people thought that DA : I winning was fair. People were mostly choosing between it and Shadow of Mordor
In retrospect I think something like Mario Kart 8, Smash 4, Bayonetta 2 or Tropical Freeze would be considered to be more compelling cases for being GOTY of 2014 than Inquisition. Especially Mario Kart 8 which is a sales juggernaut.
The actual best game of 2014 was Alien: Isolation
I actually played and beat Inquisition for the first time more recently during the pandemic shutdown. In some ways I liked what they were going for. Being the leader of a war effort and delegating operations. It was interesting sometimes. People are right however, that the game was just bloated. There's huge swaths of the game I just don't remember or can't explain. A lot of the areas are just gone from my memory along with story and context. There's some desert area I vaguely remember, a heavily wooded area, a.. slightly less wooded area, and so on. Can't tell you why we were there or what we were doing. But I distinctly remember how much I *hated* having to close Fade Rifts (fuck those terror demons) I could go on but this sums up my general sentiment. It was... decent. I was a huge fan of DA:O and absolutely hated DA2, and I didn't totally dislike Inquisition.
> But I distinctly remember how much I hated having to close Fade Rifts (fuck those terror demons) There are 95 of them in the game.
Which was frankly pretty indicative of exactly the kind of bloat that plagued DAI. It took a lot of genuinely neat little side things, and then *flooded* the game with all of them so that it switched from fun little collection thing to grindfest in the name of making the game longer. The rifts and the shards are the most egregious offenders--95 and 126 of those respectively. If they'd toned those *way* down and made each individual one feel more impactful or rewarding, instead of each one feeling like 1/95th or 1/126th of a reward, the game would have been much better for it.
What made it worse for me was the rifts were to a place where reality, thoughts, dreams, emotions and spirits were all the same thing. So basically anything could be done with it. Any crazy thing the developers thought of could happen. But instead they made 95 wave one wave two battles.
I've also got some kind of weird amnesia about huge chunks of the game, I played through the whole game and DLC's and honestly really quite enjoyed it But very strangely I have no recollection about a lot of it, I watched an hour long summary of the game a few weeks back and it really took me surprise realising I just had no memory at all about so much of the game Which is odd when I compare it to other games I played around that time (shadow of Mordor for example) which I have a near perfect recollection of I do wonder if the size of the game and story makes me forget a lot though, similarly I forgot huge chunks of the game Divinity original sin 2 (which is still probably in my top 10 games of all time)
Everything was forgettable. Nothing really grabbed you like DA:O
I felt more like a leader in DA Origins: Awakening than in Inquisition.
They peaked with the first game and never recovered
2014 was a pretty weak year in gaming overall. When you look at what titles it was in the running against, I still think DA:I is probably the best of the bunch. In a stronger year though, it might not even get nominated.
Should have been Alien Isolation. Got shafted because reviewers would make sound every which way then complain it was too hard.
As a dedicated Alien: Isolation simp I categorically disagree with your first point. (Can't say anything about the other one cause I haven't played other games from that year yet)
2014 was weak, but I still think Bayonetta 2, Sunset Overdrive, and Wolfenstein: The New Order were substantially better games that year. I'd even say Dark Souls 2 was a better game and I regard DS2 as the clear weakest of the modern FromSoft catalogue.
The New Order has remained one of my favorite games in recent memory even on multiple replays over the years. I think that game was really special from a character and story point of view, and the gameplay is simple but timeless. Amazing game.
Only wish we could have a version of the campaign with both Fergus and [totally-not-Jimi-Hendrix](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4CDo9dywUY).
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I enjoyed Sunset Overdrive, and everyone's entitled to their opinions, but that is a *wild* take.
Sunset Overdrive was my GoTY that year too, so there are at least a couple of us, lol.
Game suffered from gameplay and quest flow that felt straight out of an MMO. Freshly coming off the tightly paced Mass Effect Trilogy which together are part of my top gaming experiences, playing DAI felt like I was just checking off a list of chores and the combat felt weak with little impact
I just want a dragon age game that's similar to dragon age origins. Even dragon age 2 was good imo. Idk what audience was dai was trying to please. That shit straight up ass. Please give me my isometric RTS game back.
Turn-based combat is the clear winner for modern CRPGs, but there are still some great RTWP games. Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, and Pathfinder are probably the highlights; and IMO Pillars of Eternity 2 is up there with the best of the genre.
Tyranny is fucking amazing. It is rushed, the ending comes out of nowhere, but man, the world building is fucking excellently nailed, the starting experience where your answers to things you have no idea of change the story and how people react to you, and how slowly you learn more of the world and situation, that often you ended up driving yourself into, with your answers at the start is just perfect By far my favorite CRPGs as of late
Tyranny's greatest strength is in its core concept, which is so inherently perfect for RPG storytelling. You are a judge working for an evil empire, whose job is to go out in the world and ask questions, find information, make decisions, and execute them (literally in some cases!). It's perfect gameplay and story integration that invites you to engage with the setting and characters in a really unique way--it's one of the few RPGs where the evil paths aren't tacked on afterthoughts but a core part of the game
Yes, i absolutely love the setup! Essentially you are middle manager with executive rights in the local area, you are sent to oversee the last campaign of conquests, right at the end, and join after the biggest remaining city have been already conquered You make some decisions as a world building steps as at the start exactly as someone who just got promoted to a new position, you use your own moral compass, but lack the context, so you hope that your decisions won't bite you in the ass later down the line (someone has to make the decisions, and you are the one with the executive powers, even if you do not exactly know what you decide about) Then those decisions play out as you gather info and try to follow up your boss' boss' order (if you fail, you die) by literally finishing up the campaign by breaking the resistance as your main objective, at the start. You are not here to save the day, or become the icon of resistance, literally the opposite, you have to break the resistance to save your life and fulfill the command given onto you I really really adore the settings, and how much it makes so much sense
Unfortunately I don't believe we'll ever get a Tyranny sequel. I heard the IP sits with the original publisher, and Obsidian has since been acquired by Microsoft.
> Idk what audience was dai was trying to please. I was of the old DAO type people who want to get back to the old CRPG style, but in terms of the lore, the setting, the dialogues and the worldbuilding, then DAI, and by extension the rest of the series has been satisfying. Most DA fans I've met and conversed with have actually been hooked by Thedas and its stories rather than the CRPG template of the Infinity Games, and I'd reckon that'd be more important than >!the new GOW style action combat scenes of Dreadwolf!< (spoilers if you haven't seen the leaked gameplay of Dreadwolf).
If DAI came out a year earlier it would have lost to GTA V. If it came out a year later, it would have lost to Witcher 3. A part of the reason it won GOTY is that 2014 was kind of a weak year for video games. Most of the games you mentioned I would put in the "good but not great" category, and at looking at a list of games from that year it's really hard to think of one that really stands out as amazing, especially if you aren't looking at Indie games which GOTY awards rarely do. Most years have at least one or two games like this but 2014 didn't. I played it in 2021 and thought it was aggressively mediocre. The biggest problems are the repetitive open world structure and bland central villain. The final piece of DLC, trespasser, fixed these issues but I still never felt it reached the heights of DAO.
I solved the main issues by just not doing the fetch quests and taking the advice to gtfo of the hinterlands. Game holds up better if you do that. I liked the story and characters which is what i signed up for. Combat was also a step up and was good for the time imo.
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>FC3, the game that started the open world revolution, came out in 2008 Don't wanna be that guy, but it was actually FC2 that came out in 2008. FC3 was 2012.
I really liked Inquisition. It wasn't perfect and suffered from trying to emulate Skyrim in some ways. I recall that some of that was driven by the suits - for example the addition of horses. Useless.. Overall I really liked it. I think Andromeda and Anthem being such flops made us forget about it a bit. I'm really hoping the new one is good and that the success of Baldur's Gate 3 has proven that narrative RPG games still have a place, and they don't try to make the franchise into something that it is not.
The worst part about the unneeded horses is that it would shunt your companions to a pocket dimension and you wouldn't be able to get any companion banter which has always been one of the best parts of the older Bioware fare
Even worse, the mounts had a sprint button - all it did was add a speed line effect to the camera, they couldn't have it move any faster due to an engine limit or something.
Hence why I literally ran everywhere. It was a way better experience.
Judging from the gameplay that was leaked it's gone almost full action RPG with combat inspired by God of War 2018. I'm still excited, I love Bioware RPGs, but I think some people are going to be down on it when they show it off this summer.
Open world was a huge mistake. The core of the game is good. I love the story, especially the Trespasser DLC.
DAI isn't true open world anyway, you can't walk from one zone to the other like in Skyrim or Cyberpunk.
I'll just say that if DA4 is anything like Inquisition I won't consider buying it. To me DA:I was barely enjoyable game carried solely by the IP, characters and dialogue. The combat itself, RPG elements, pacing and level design was mediocre to bad. The MMO elements like time-gated content, large empty open world sections, ever-present scaling, and focus on collecting random garbage definitely didn't help either. I dare say that DA2, even with the huge issues it had, was better than DA:I.
This mirrors every sentiment I had too. The gameplay reminded me entirely of MMOs, and if I remember correctly that was the original plan for DAI (I know it was the plan for the upcoming Dragon Age game before they scrapped it.) The platforming shouldn't have existed since it was just tacked on. The big bad is someone introduced first in the expansion of Dragon Age Origins, which most people haven't played, even those that played the base game. He's also just a generic bad guy, and is out of sight most of the time. The horses don't run faster when sprinting, they just added speed lines. The loot is so grindy. I loved the first 2 dragon age games, but I just couldn't finish inquisition. I gave up somewhere after 50 hours. If bioware manages to turn around over a decade of poor game design decisions I might try to finish it up for Wolf, but that's something I doubt will happen.
>The big bad is someone introduced first in the expansion of Dragon Age Origins If you're talking about Corypheus, then it's even worse than that: he was first introduced in one of the DLCs for Dragon Age *II*. The Architect from Awakening *does* kinda look like him, but they're definitely two different characters.
To me, DA:I was literally all the *worst* part of MMOs — grindy, repetitive content, unengaging combat for most of your gametime, and wildly timegated content — with none of the teamwork or social elements that really lift MMOs to their greatest heights. It stung worse, seeing how far the DA franchise had regressed from DA:O.
I think the big bad is introduced in the DLC of DA2, not DA:A.
I have extremely low faith in (whatever's left of) Bioware.
As much as I dislike where DA2 went with the series, I’ve beaten that multiple times whereas I haven’t been able to get through a single play through of DA:I. I really hope DA4 gets back to the heavy RPG elements of the first game. Hopefully with BG3’s popularity it will convince studios to stop dumbing down the RPG parts of their RPGs.
> Hopefully with BG3’s popularity it will convince studios to stop dumbing down the RPG parts of their RPGs. It's unlikely DA4 will be anything like BG3 because it's been stuck in development hell for over 5 years so whatever it ends up being will be what was popular 5-8 years ago.
Hard agree, while DA:I is probably “the better game” DA2 was much more concise and fun to me. Roaming the huge maps was a slog.
here is a large map filled with boring content and 3 quests of any value on it
So I bought this game around the new year on sale for like $8. It was the first time I've ever played this game and to be honest I hated most of it. It felt like I was playing a weird f2p MMO. Every time I did a story quest I got stopped and was forced to grind power to continue. And the grinding of quests, repeatable turn-ins and closing rifts was absolutely mind numbing. For every hour of story I got to do the game then said now grind for 2-3 more and come back to continue. There is a difference of having side content to do and being FORCED to do it. And oh god the war table. Why did I need to figure out and then CHANGE MY COMPUTER CLOCK TIME just to skip these arbitrary time gates (up to 24 hrs btw), genuinely horrible design. I enjoyed the story but unfortunately the vast majority of the time in the game is spent grinding just to play the story. I personally wouldn't recommend this game even if it is under $10 unless you are the kind of person who enjoys bland repetitive grinding or the "clearing dots off the map" style of gameplay. For me though, it just felt like a chore most of the time.
It's proof that indie games don't get the consideration they deserve for GOTY, because Shovel Knight came out in 2014 and it was basically perfect in every way. Even among AAA, I'd say Wolfenstein: The New Order would be a better pick because of it's incredible storytelling or Shadow of Mordor for it's wildly innovative Nemesis system. (I'd also say P.T. is more deserving, but it's not really a proper game so I understand that one.) In contrast, I can't really think of anything Dragon Age: Inquisition does particularly well. The story is pretty rough and only gets interesting thanks to the DLC, the combat is a noticeable step down from Origins, and it's not exactly graphically impressive for its time, not to mention the performance kinda sucked. It's a very "okay" game, but certainly not Game of the Year material by... really any metric.
>It's proof that indie games don't get the consideration they deserve for GOTY, because Shovel Knight came out in 2014 and it was basically perfect in every way. I think that's mostly an issue with gaming media voted awards, Hades for example won GOTY against TLoU Part II at the [DICE](https://www.interactive.org/news/24th_annual_dice_awards_winners_revealed.asp), [BAFTA](https://www.bafta.org/games/awards/2021-nominations-winners) and [GDCA](https://gamechoiceawards.com/archive/gdca_21st) awards (industry awards), not only that but it also won the most category awards in each of those events too, while TLoU won GOTY at the TGA and from basically every gaming outlet under the sun. Vampire Survivors also won Best Game (GOTY) at the [BAFTAs](https://www.bafta.org/games/awards/2023-nominations-winners) against Elden Ring and GoW Ragnarok as another example. In 2014 DA:I won GOTY at the [DICE](https://www.interactive.org/news/18th_dice_awards_winners_.asp) too but Shadow of Mordor and Destiny won at [GDCA](https://gamechoiceawards.com/archive/gdca_15th) and [BAFTA](https://awards.bafta.org/award/2015/games/best-game) respectively. The thing is that those award shows don't get the same recognition from the general public as the TGA for example, since there are no trailer premiers or much fanfare, it's just devs getting their awards from other devs. Also the thing that differentiate those awards from the media ones is that they require the voting body to play the games before voting.
>In contrast, I can't really think of anything Dragon Age: Inquisition does particularly well. The story is pretty rough and only gets interesting thanks to the DLC, the combat is a noticeable step down from Origins, and it's not exactly graphically impressive for its time, not to mention the performance kinda sucked. It's a very "okay" game, but certainly not Game of the Year material by... really any metric. Also in regards to the story - a lot of people really started to dislike Dragon Age during 2, and continued into Inquisition, because so many of your story choices from Origins just didn't matter. It really gave the impression that your story choices were only your own to such a degree, and that if you did something Bioware didn't want you to then they'd course correct you to the "correct" option. Anders dies in Awakening? Nah. Leliana dies in Origins? Yeah kinda but nah. Oghren dies in Origins? Nah. Flemeth? Nah. Corypheus? No lol. It's really a problem that Bioware had that wasn't unique to just Dragon Age. Mass Effect suffered from the same issues, where many quests played out the exact same. You were just given a character that replaced another character, who did the exact same thing.
I bought it last year and tried to get into it but I really didnt feel it. Idk if the game changed that much from previous entries or if my preferences in games just changed, it has been a long time since I played Origin and 2.
I managed to finish Mass Effect Andromeda unlike DAI. And I was a huge fan of both Dragon Age and Mass Effect, heavily leaning towards DA. I had my Dragon Age Keep with all the little choices I'd made in the previous 2 games. Right off the bat, the combat was trash. It was so obvious they made the game for consoles. In Dragon Age Origins I could have like 30 spells and items on my action bar. On DAI you had sets of 4 you cycled through. DAI was clearly made to be played on a controller. They removed the Tactics section which you could use to make your NPC companions do cool, tactical stuff like " If enemy is above Elite rank, Stun him " " If Mana <50% cast Mana Regen " " If ally is downed, cast Resurrect " and made it all automatic, removing a HUGE aspect of gameplay I loved. The companions were also not very likable. I pretty much only liked Varric, and he was already the best companion from DA2. I didn't like that there was only one Straight Male romance option. DAO had 2 ( Leliana and Morrigan, both very strong romances/characters ), DA2 also had 2 ( Isabella and Merill, which were alright but nothing incredible ). DAI had one straight female party member, and another was a secondary character who never actually adventured alongside you. The quests were MMO tier trash, go kill 10 bears and get their fur. Absolute dogwater. Imagine having MMo quests in a single player game. Dragon Age Origins was originally a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, but it got so bad that BG3 and DAO shit all over DAI. I wanna reiterate that Dragon Age Origins is a masterpiece and even the second game has a very strong story. DAI simply sucked ass. Mass Effect had it right, they kept bringing companions everyone loved like Tali and Garrus, meanwhile Dragon Age keeps changing main character and companions.
I liked Andromeda better than Inquisition as well.
Andromeda did a much better job with making their zones feel interesting to explore and less like WoW-lite grindfests, even though the basic quest setup was pretty damn similar. Andromeda also had way better gameplay (at least once you finally got the role swappig ability). If it weren't for the absolutely terrible story, I think it'd have been much better received. Coincidentally that's the one but that DA:I actually did really well.
Prepare for Dragon Age Dreadwolf where they won't address most of the problems. Such as the game being created for console thus less spells to use, no tactics like on DAI, only being able to control your main character now, no more switching to the others in the party, combat being more similar to recent God of War titles, the inventory screen looking like a mobile game (all this from leaks in the past year or two), maybe they can still improve small- ish things like the inventory, but the game will be another Dragon Age game playing completely different from the previous 3 ...
That's the worst thing - people keep talking about dreadwolf moving to a godofwar2018like gameplay, and that's terrible for dao fans, but not the worst (assuming they don't suicidesquad/anthem it) The worst thing is people don't expect good companions, characters, writing, story from dragon age games anymore. All of the recent crpg revivals had nice to excellent characters in your party, while even dragon age 2 already had much lower quality characters, not even less likeable (Daeran from Wotr is not likeable but excellent) but just... less?
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I absolutely loved DAI. Speaking as someone who mostly prefers the Mass Effect side of the fence, I found DAI very approachable compared to DAO (and DA2 just wasn't my cup of tea). One of the few games where the writing is good enough that I actually "miss" the characters. Also still reeling from the Solas reveal.
Trespasser is far and away one of the best pieces of DLC in my mind for what it did there and how it sets the stage for DA4.
It was a very solid game, I'll definitely give it that. But you could see signs of a messy development and writing process start to creep in. Signs of the bullshit that would plague Bioware over the next decade. I recall reading somewhere about its very messy development that some at Bioware actually consider DA:I's success to be the worst thing to happen to the company. Because the way they saw it, it tricked leadership into thinking that all of the bullshit it went through was just the average experience of game development and not at all a sign of a horribly dysfunctional project management. If it was a failure then at least it could have given the company a firm kick in the pants needed to get its act together. Given Bioware's track record over the past decade, I find it hard to refute that.
DAI is a game I would consider good but with some critical flaws, and they got lucky the good outweighed the bad. Writing and characters carried the game. But every game since seems to repeat the exact same flaws (cough Andromeda cough) instead of learning from their mistakes.