Hello! before I begin I would like to make it very clear that I think this is a VERY good game and that it did PLENTY of things more than just right, emphasis on the world design and open world mechanics, that for the first time in Bioware gaming history I played a game I can actually compare and in many regards claim superior to all other games, the world is just plainly gorgeous, natural feeling and immersive, and I was happy to be the poor storyletting/writing that plagued DAII is far from the Inquisition experience.
Now having that said, there are aspects that make this game still inferior to Dragon Age: Origins, despite Inquisition doing almost EVERYTHING right, and better than Origins one of the more important aspects, meaning combat (this is a game after all and aesthetics/effects and even story come second to gameplay aspects), Did a few things horribly wrong;
1- Tactical Camera, is just something that has no real purpose and it was clearly designed for console players.
Origins was acclaimed as a strategy rpg, because combat tactics/strategy was a key point to its gameplay, I got the impression from previews and announcements that Inquisition wanted to restore the bits of that aspect that were lost from DAII, but they are actually almost completely gone now, and I weep for it.
the camera doesnt extent back enough for you to have a clear grasp of the battlefield or be able to issue clear orders, the AI also often disregards the orders that you are able to give, and the hold ground/attack my target commands, are best issued while you play your char in 3rd person under the increasingly button mashing-twitch gameplay way more so than using the pause/tactical camera.
the camera panning/angles and targetting is also frustrating at times, making it harder to create target priorities/lists.
sure you still have to worry about positioning character roles and builds in general, but once that is done, in combat strategy or tactics based of tactical camera style strategy game gameplay, is all but gone, and that saddens me.
2-The game is generally dumbed down, combat is getting much closer to a mass effect type, action rpg experience, where you are focusing on your main character with automated npcs enjoying fast paced action way more than it is about carefully choice of tactics and issuing orders/plans to your combat party, also some mechanics were removed, unreasonably so:
-removal of healing (well reavers can still selfheal but not mages?! wth were you thinking) and the strong turn around for potions, is something I simply dont get... is it to appease the foolish crowd that says "lol trinity is old and not fun" or something? they dont know what they want, they are just vocal for stigmas they got from online gaming gripes (MMO's) and has nothing to do with the trinity system itself, how is relying on mass pot'ing more fun than having healer? how is the boring proactive shielding more fun than healing?! fun being relative, how is removing mechanics rather than adding to them better? people who didnt like having healers could just heavily use tanks and guard or mages with barriers, those that did prefer a full supporting mage build could still have both.. removing healing was a VERY bad move.
-removal of stat allocation WHY, dear god, why, what ever were you thinking? you now have stats in abilities -.- yet another feature that was central in rpg mechanics character building, removed... why?
at least you do get some chances with the gear and crafting system, which is awesome I might add 
and way better than Origins and DAII, actually better than almost all rpgs I know, so props for that.
-Friendly fire is an option, not a difficulty feature, I play all my rpgs in the highest difficulties because for me fun doesnt come only from what the gameplay mechanics are, but the extend of how you can use them or perfect them, and to test that you need to test them in the more challenging scenarios, in Dragon Age origins and DAII both this meant having to manage something that was VERY powerful (AoE) and allowed to drastically reduce combat times (and thus put less stress on your healing and tanking capacity of your party) with the limitations and dangers of affecting your own party in them, meaning theses abilities were a powerful boon to your combat strength but had to be used tactfully, with the proper setup to do so.
In Inquisition its an option, not a feature, I didnt understand why, until I played nightmare (as I always do) with it turned on, the reduced tactical aspect of combat in this game made this completely unusable, as your control over characters decreases and the AI is worse, having aoe abilities will cause complete chaos and frustrating deaths, I just had to turn it off... its very bad result of the dumbing down of the game.
3- removal of tactics (the ability to create something resembling an AI for companions)
this one is prly the most important, and I cant for the life of me understand why it was removed, I mean a problem that never even existed on the very first game...
tactics allowed you to customize how each character would act in predefined situations, use certain abilities in certain conditions, target certain types in certain conditions etc, this was completely removed and replaced with AWFUL generic AI and the ability to set preferred or disabled abilities and pot'ing thresholds ?! WTH-were you thinking.
this was a CRUCIAL feature, hell even more crucial in Inquisition than Origins even considering how unreliable tactical cam is...
now those 3 aspects GREATLY diminish the Dragon Age Inquisition combat experience and the overall game quality tbh, I mean I guess that dumbing down the game and making it more console-like, more action-like makes sense from a pure commercial point of view, simpler, flashier and action paced game have a much wider appeal to the gaming population (younglings) and sells alot more copies, and I'm sure EA is more than happy with that (money grubbing bast... cof), but the Bioware fans? the DRAGON AGE fans? I dont think so.
anyway, great game, if these 3 issues were not such a let down, this would easily be a 9.9/10 game to me tbh, but with these issues it would never be more than 8.5-9 (Origins to me is 9.5)
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