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[RinpocheSchnozberry]

Last night I finished my first play through as an elf-chick mage.  I played on easy for 129 hours, on PC, completing all available quests and regions and almost every collection quest, skipping only a couple region or landmark quests.  I had a damn blast.  Excellent game!  I will be starting in on a qunari-dude warrior later today.  It is an excellent game and I would buy the collector's edition again right now...  Of course, like everything else in life, the game isn't perfect.

 

Loves:

• The graphics are fantastic.  My R9 280x stomped the graphics flat, even turned up to the max.  I bought the card specifically for DAI, so I was quite pleased.  The only time I had any issue was the opening scene, when I got a tiny bit of chop, but I was also doing something for work in the background, so that might have had something to do with it.
• The magic looked great.  Fire, storm, and the rift magic effects were great and very kinetic which made magic feel like something that happened, rather than something that just got painted onto the landscape.  This is one of the things DA2 did well, and I'm glad to see it continued here. 
• I loved that late in the game, my mage could utterly dominate small and medium sized groups by herself.  Rift Pull, then Fireball, then Stonefist with explody bits, then chain lightening.  Boom!  Most mobs were gone after that.  That was reminicent of my favorite aspect of magic in DAO... when I could pile four or five AOE spells on a group of enemies and watch them crumble.
• Combat in general was great.  Animations were smooth and there was only a single place where I saw the AI get stuck (the big chateau in the southwest Hinterlands), which is unusual for games like this.  The hacking and chopping was great too, and I loved the Behemoths with their huge club hands.  The detail on the faces of the horrors' faces was awesome.  Huge bummer we never met a talking one, that would have made for some creepy moments.
• DAI's dragons beat Skyrim's dragons hands down because of the animations, the sound, and the sheer variety.  Very well done there.  I liked that they fought like dragons... Flying and strafing and such.  The big blue in the Emerald Graves was my favorite, followed closely by the red striped one in the frozen hills.  Of course, the faux archdemon was also pretty damn cool.  He was like a flying mouth full of fangs.  Awesome looking and sounding.
• The advisors were great, and almost all of the companions were great and well written, acted, and done in general.  I loved taking out the "elf patrol" of my Inquisitor, Solas, and Sera.  I usually paired them with Blackwall, because he was hairy and stout and I could pretend that the elves were pretending that he was a halla.  The banter between Sera and Solas amused the hell out of out me.  Sera in general was fun and got the best burn of the game from Blackwall.  "I like you, Blackwall, you don't ask me about elfy stuff."  "Like you'd know."  I lol'd.  Varric was just as good as in DA2, and...  Laura Bailey as Bianca!  My favorite Boss from Saint's Row and one of my favorites from DA2 together kicked ass.  Nice!  Bull was unexpectedly great, and that we could make him tal-vashoth was excellent.  I was considering him as the LI for my elf-chick, but Solas was so interesting and pro-elf on the walk to Skyhold that I changed my mind.  Cassie was another one I didn't expect to like, thanks to DA2, but by the end of DAI I very much did like her, enough so I expect my qunari-dude is going to end up with her, if at all possible.  My mage was all for the freedom of mages, so putting me at odds with Indira Varma's character was evil of you in the best possible way.  She is awesome, so I was damn pleased to get to have my Inquisitor argue with her.
• The new way you handle armor and loot is excellent.  No longer do I get stuck with dumb as **** looking characters, instead I get cool looking companions regardless of what kind of gear I slap on them.  Very nice!  All of the "Of The Dragon" stuff looked great, and the Dalish armor was great too.  I love that mages wear pants now, you might have heard.  No one is going to miss the robes.
• The big, sprawling regions rock.  Riding across the Hissing Wastes and seeing my war-nug or halla's shadow drawn across the dunes below is an image I'll take with me for a long time.  Excellent work there... and in the Emerald Graves... and the Empris du Lion... and the Elven temples... and the Winter Palace... and on and on.  Great graphics, great design, great almost everything.  Back when there was talk about how people wanted to go places randomly, I was dead set against it because I wanted a more story driven, focused game with a few well detailed areas over a sprawling diluted game, but I'm glad you somehow managed to create sprawling regions with tons of details.  When I go some place and see something in the distance, if I ride or walk there, there is something to see there.  That's excellent and a big win in my opinion.
• Skyhold.  More Skyhold!  I loved it, but only wish I could have customized it more.
• We learned more about the Qun and the kossith and how their world works from Bull.  I love that!  I've said it many times, I love the Qun as an aspect of the Thedas setting, but I fully despise the "I need a grown up to tell me who I am and what I'm good at" mentality of the Qun.  I hope very, very much DA4 or DA5 gives us the opportunity to rip that crap to pieces.
• I loved that the regions changed as I claimed them.  Seeing the world change like that really gave me a sense that the Inquisition was accomplishing something.  Well done!  I would have liked more keeps and holds, but maybe I'm being greedy.
• The operations were great, and at their best when they were changing the regions.  I wish there had been a little more clarity that which advisor you choose to accomplish something impacts the outcome.  I think I kind of insulted my clan by sending Cullen to them early on, reasoning that they'd be thrilled to hear from me and not need an ambassador or a spy...  Only to realize after Cullen's report that I might have got better results using Leliana or Josie.  Still, they were a neat twist and a really good way to add a little bit of a strategy layer to the game.
• I loved that there was acknowledgement of my character's race, and that some people didn't like her for being a "rabbit" or knife-ears.  I like the whispers and gossip at the ball when people were scandalized by the elf-quisitor.  Great stuff!  I really like when the world reacts to my choices, not just in dialogue, but in character design.  Watching Solas offer to remove my elf's tattoos was a kick ass moment.  That very much made me feel like the Inquisitor was really part of the game world.  Excellent and a very good... grounding?  Connecting? of my character to the game world.
• Cutscenes were great.  Loved all of them.  Corpy's fist appearance was awesome, as was the whole of the final Haven sequence and the walk through the cold that followed.  Very well done

 

Nits to pick:

• Looting needs a "Take All" button bound to it.
• Looting in general is more difficult than it used to be.  In DAO or DA2, I could pause the game, select companions, and send them to loot a target while I looted another one.  Then I could get all the goodies without having to manually and tediously click on every enemy we killed to get trash loot.  I can't do that here, and that is a major annoyance.
• Trash loot.  Let it go.
• Eight slots for powers and spells?  Come on!  You give my mage three or four schools of magic, plus combos, plus Focus, then you don't give me enough slots to use some of the cool stuff.  Why even bother to give us cool powers if we can't use them when we want to use them?
• Why is elfroot always one elfroot per harvest?  Elfroot is probably the most commonly used material, yet I only get one per click and that sucks, doubly so since I get get like eight obsidian per click sometimes.  Please change that!  And, please change the garden in Skyhold.  I'd like about twice as many pots and plants once that section is upgraded.  I only got like eight, which is crazy few I feel.
• Sending advisors out to get materials should result in much more and much better quality materials.  I think I sent Cullens hardened soldiers out to get metals once and Leliana's well trained scouts, and got like three iron and four spindleweed back.  That heck is that all about?  The Inquisitor could gather that without leaving sight of the camp.
• I miss click and go... I got used to it being gone... but I still miss being able to click some place and the character moving there.

 

The Bad:

 

• The game is shaded by the MMO model of "waste player time, keep them playing, keep getting monthly/micro  payments."  The Notes on the Wastes quest made me turn off the game and walk away from it for a couple hours.  I questioned if I was still an RPG fan because of that quest.  That was a poorly done quest.  Items were hidden randomly and in places without reason.  The entire point of that quest was to keep me playing the game, riding randomly back and forth all over the place hoping to get lucky with the search key.  I don't know if you expected my to read some codex or something, but I don't read those until I get a call from work and I have to serve as a safety blanket for idiots babbling on a conference call.  Vivianne's quest for the white wyvern was similar, but at least that thing showed up after five or six gurgut kills.  That was tolerable, though not particularly pleasent.  I play on easy because I want story, dramatic character moments, and quick, fun combat full of explosions and slow-mo kills and awesome fun.  I'm an adult.  When I want to be frustrated and challenged, I go to work, I don't play video games.
• Cole.  Worst companion you've ever created.  From his fake as ****, contrived "inner pain" to his ugly face and stupid hair and dumb hat, I hated Cole like I have never hated a playable companion in a BioWare/Black Isle/SSI Gold Box game ever.  Compare Cole's inner turmoil to Blackwall's.  Cole's is made up junk ("Boo-hoo, I'm a spirit that's too stupid to know I'm a spirit") while Blackwall's "sickness" is grounded and real and could (and probably has) happened to a real human being.  Cole only became tolerable to me when I made him fully a spirit, which I only did because he was like "What if I stop being me" and I was like "I might ****** like you, that's what."  But even then, I only spoke to him to see the cut scenes, and I used space as often as possible and scanned his lines.  I took him with me on a quest once, and that was by accident.  When I realized I had taken him, I'm not kidding you, I slapped myself in the face.  If there is a Cole DLC, or a DLC where he plays a large part, I will skip it.  I will give whoever wrote him one thing- the quick little emotional snippets he speaks in sometimes are really well done.  Honestly, they're even kickass.  Nice job!  I just wish you had maybe done something else instead of Cole.
• The damned shard quests.  These are another time waster, seemingly designed to inflate the number of hours I played the game.  I will never do these quests again, and only did them on my first play through to see what the pay off was.  The Occularis things need to show up on the map in the same way that camp tents show up.  That might make it more tolerable.  Also, cut half the number of shards out of the Hinterlands and the canyon where you redeem the shards.  I hated finding shards in that canyon map.  Getting to those shards was an exercise in repetitious hunt and peck.  Bad, bad, bad.  I hated that region, it was my second least favorite.
• The Hissing Wastes.  My least favorite.  I loved the idea of it... I loved the night-time dragon fight.  I loved the shadows on the dunes.  None of it makes up for the Notes on the Wastes quest, or the Tomb Of Blahblah quest chain.  I found all of the key parts, except the final one.  I went through the tombs over and over and over again and rode all over that region again and again and I could not find the last part... until I cheated and saw that the last part was in a tomb, through a door that was hidden in shadow.  That sucked, and combined with having to cheat to finish the Notes quest...  I quit RPGs for the night.  I also had to cheat to find one of the occularis things.  Everything looked the same, it was hard to find the stupid viewer.
• Masterwork crafting seems shaded by MMOs too. This is broken.  I've read that the game requires you to waste regular materials and masterwork materials until you get a hit on generating a worthwhile masterwork.  That is garbage and useless and just about ruins crafting for me.  I paid the same $80 for this game as someone who can run around grinding up materials over and over and over again, so I feel like I deserve the same items.  However, the way it is now, once my vacation ends, if I have to craft a set of armor two or three (or six or seven) times, I'm going to waste a ton of materials (and therefor the time spent to gather them) gambling on an eventual hit.  That straight up sucks.  If it wasn't for the essence of perfection, I would have ignored the masterwork crafting totally and ended up having less fun.

 

 

Wishlist!

• I need a DLC/expansion pack schedule!  More Xpacks, please!  If there was more available now, I wouldn't be typing this, I would be playing more.
• My Inquisitor is a Dalish elf in good standing with the tribe.  I really want to be able to offer Dalish clans shelter on Inquisition lands, and the chance to try and rebuild their own nation again.  If anyone gets angry, they would have to face the Inquisitions army.  Of course, we know not all of the clans are good folks... so there could be plenty of story there.
• Expand on the game's strategy layer.  I'm not saying go Crusader Kings 2 on us (but if you were to go Crusader Kings 2 on us, I would not complain), but I would love to see more of the strategy aspect impact the storytelling or at least the regions the characters travel through.  Things like maybe once we do an operation to clean out a mine, when we return to the region, we see carts loaded with goods and guarded by Inquisition troops shuffling about.
• More.  Just straight up, in general, more!  take_my_money.jpg

 

Anyway, long winded rant over.  On the whole, I loved the game.  It has a few rough spots, but then again every game does.  Great job!