It takes me a long time to form impressions.
Overall, quite good. There are some significant issues, but Inquisition has also made some significant improvements, not only over DA2, but even DAO.
It's not all good news, but there is good news.
First, the bad news:
The Tac Cam is... not a disaster. It's not good, but it's not a disaster. Overall, it works pretty well - move the characters and the camera separately - auto-attack. I like it. But, a few changes would make it much better. I think it needs a proper free roam. Right now, the camera appears to be tied to an invisible character who can get stuck on the terrain. If you send your character climbing up a ladder, the Tac Cam cannot follow. If it is the case that there's an invisible character wandering around, I'd suggest having that character walk through terrain (perhaps on the floor of the level) and have the player control the camera's height manually.
I'd tie the height of the camera to the mouse wheel, and have the camera-swap button be somewhere else (which would also reduce the number of times I accidentally leave tactical mode and wonder why my character isn't auto-attacking),
Incidentally, Mike has already mentioned that the snap to character behaviour of the Tac Cam is a bug, and they're going to patch it. But currently, that snap to character feature is the only way to get the camera past obstacles the invisible character cannot pass.
The camera also needs the ability to look up. The action mode camera can look up, but the Tac Cam can't, and that's a serious problem when trying to close rifts. Rifts are sometimes above the camera, which means the relevant UI element is also above the camera. You can't click on something that never appears on screen, nor can you tell whether you're close enough to use it.
Speaking of which, why can't we Activate Things at Range? If I see loot in the distance, or a door, I'd like to click on it now and have the character move to it to use it. Right now, in Tac Cam, you have to click the ground near the loot before you're allowed to click on the loot. It's needlessly complicated.
The Documentation. What documentation? They haven't made any effort at all to tell us how things work. It's driving me mental. I still have very little idea how the combat works, and I have little interest in figuring it out. This stuff should all be in a book somewhere. They should release that book. For this reason, I'm not yet willing to judge the Combat Mechanics, because I don't know enough about them.
The Friendly Fire is difficult to use, and fails to achieve the primary reason I like friendly fire - verisimilitude. That enemies are exempt is simply unacceptable. Still, better documented abilities would make FF better as well.
The Key Binds need to be fully remappable, including to and from mouse buttons.
The Loot Ping shoudn't be a ping. It should either be a Hold or a Toggle. Not a ping.
Honestly, that's all I really feel the need to fix at this point. And the most important one is probably the documentation. Without that, I will continue to find the combat dull, no matter how the camera works.
The good news:
The Dialogue is vastly improved over DA2's. I'm finding it much easier to choose options based on the paraphrase, and the full line is less likely to be contradictory. That I've disabled the tone icons might be a big part of this, but the literal text seems to fit a lot better. Good job writers.
The Level Design is perhaps BioWare's best. It's a bit liinear during the tutorial - too many invisible walls and carefully placed obstacles to keep me on the path, but past that there's suddenly evidence of their more open-world direction. There are places you can walk that don't go anywhere. They don't exist for any game-replated reason; they're just extra patches of ground. And that's wonderful. Now, if you choose the follow the path into town, you actually choose it, rather than there being no other option. That the other path doesn't actually go anywhere doesn't bother me, but it does bother me when that path isn't even there.
The Visuals are just... Wow. I don't think I've ever been impressed by graphics before, but now they're good enough to make a real difference to other parts of the game. Like...
The Character Creator is also BioWare's best. It's not perfect, and (like most others) it would benefit from modding, but the level of detail offered to us isn't something we're used to seeing. And there are good options for older Inquisitors. My standard first playthrough character is a 51 year old human, and this is the first game I can recall that let me make him look 51 rather than 31 (or 21).
It's a good game. It's the best voiced protagonist game I've played.
I feel like I left something out. If you have any specific questions, ask.
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