I actually like elves being very thin and long-limbed, with angular features. Makes them, you know... like elves, not humans.
That said, I didn't like the DA2 design at all; I thought they were too freakishly exaggerated caricatures of waifish elves. I thought they looked freakish, buggish, and too alien. I feel DAI has found a nice middle ground between "lithe, pointy-eared people" in DAO (which I actually liked from the beginning, btw) and the obscenely exaggerated goat people of DA2.
That said, have you ever noticed that since DA2, the standard body shapes and features BioWare bestows on elves don't apply to elven companions? Fans of DA2 designs often pointed to Fenris and Merrill looking good, but that's because they looked the most human. Fenris actually had muscle, and Merrill had more streamlined features. For DAI, elves have tiny torsos and matchstick limbs (which I actually like), while Solas and Sera are much taller and have much more meat and muscle on their bones. I guess it makes sense story-wise, since Solas is one of the ancient elves from before millennia of slavery and diaspora (notice he looks more like Abelas and the ancient elves than any modern elves), and Sera is basically a human who just happened to have been born with pointy ears. She rejects everything elven with her mind and soul, and so from a design perspective her human-like body reflects it.
Still, it's funny how BioWare does that. They act so proud of their stylized elf designs, yet they don't use it on their elven companions. (The elven characters that most PCs will see and interact with through most of the game, btw.)
I get what they were trying to do with the elf design in DA2, that is, trying to make them not look like humans with pointy ears. Like you and other people have said, Fenris and Merrill look great (and I personally think Orsino looks pretty good too). But the other elves look just look... weird.
I do like how they look in DA:I. It's a pity we never get to see a lot of them up close since talking to NPCs no longer goes to a "cut-scene" like in DA:O and DA2 and instead, re-adjusts the camera angle to zoom in only a little bit to the person you're talking to. I wanted to see the Dalish NPCs with their vallaslin up close.
Oh! And the one thing I'll never get over is how skinny my Lavellan's arms are. I don't mind her being lithe, but dang those arms look so odd during that balcony scene with Solas and when she lifted that giant sword when they declared her to be the Inquisitor. I thought she was going to fall over during the latter. D:
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