I know a lot of this has already been said, but I wanted to add my voice to those saying it, because I think it bears saying.
Though this post is mostly negative, I do want to say I really anjoyed DAI. I'm on my third playthrough, and I've gotten over 150 hours of game time easily. But while I enjoyed it, I think it could have been so much better if it had been true to its roots. Basically, I feel like the core foundation changed, the game is less of a Dragon Age game than it is a Skyrim wannabe, bordering on MMO fetch-quest.
Combat
The combat in DAI really took ten steps backwards from DA2. I thought DA2 was a huge improvement. The combat had been solidifed and felt great. With smarts and on easier difficulty, you could direct the AI so that you barely had to use tactical. But if you really wanted the challenge, the tactical play was still there and was solid. Switching between characters, issuing commands and switching back never felt awkward to me in DA2.
But in DAI... what a shift. Not being able to use AI tactics (or gambits... or whatever you call them) really just removed what I thought was rather iconic of the games. Being able to tell my characters to stay in the back, to attack the lowest hp enemies, to only finishers on guys that have been CC'd... control like that was what made DAO and DA2 so amazing to me. I have always love tactic games with "create your own AI", so I was very disappointed that DAI removed this.
On top of that, the AI controlling my party members is terrible. They will constantly do stupid things, like standing in AOE or dragon's fire breath. My ranged characters (Varric, any mages) constantly run into melee range to get hit, and will not leave unless I tell them. My tanks, if I'm not controlling them, will wander off into nowhere, or attack the wrong thing while the ranged guys pelt my mages. I can't tell you how many times I've seen Blackwall use Charging Bull and go careening off the screen.
Basically, the fact that me personally playing a character makes them 1000000x better than the AI playing it is just downright frustrating. I can't play all four characters.
"But you CAN play them!" I hear you saying. "Just go in tactic mode!" Okay well, first off, tactic mode on PC is a nightmare. The top down view is terrible and it's very hard to control where you camera goes. Second, I almost never had to use tactical mode in the previous games (even on hard - maybe not nightmare) because my AI was that good. In this game my characters are getting killed on normal because they do stupid crap before I can manage to pause and tell them not to be stupid. It gets very frustrating, especially when knowing what has been lost compared to previous titles.
Also, the controls just felt so clunky. I hate when games dumb-down controls because they are porting to consoles, and that's exactly what happened here. The mouse isn't nearly as precise as it should be, I am constantly targeting the wrong thing no matter how many times I click at it. Tab-targeting helps, but it's stupid to essentially nullify my mouse for a PC game.
Play Time
My second concern, which might take a little bit of explaining, is about the play time. I like that you made a bigger open world game, it was neat. But honestly I liked the previous games even with how linear they are because I play the game for the story, not for how much of it I can walk through. I feel like the overly loud complaints about DA2 are the root cause of this, which is really too bad.
I don't care if a game is linear if the story is good. It didn't bother me at all that this cave looked like that cave. I play for the story, and for the fun tactical combat.
In DAI, the zones are lovely, but my first play through took me around 90 hours. That's great for any RPG, but what I like about DA games is the replayability. I want to be able to play through again to see how my choices change things. And honestly after my first game, the though of another 90 hours just to see what small changes might happen was really... daunting. I wasn't sure I was going to do it.
Now I did manage to play through again... but it still would have been nice if the game was just a tad bit shorter. Sure, my subsequent play throughs are faster because I know what I'm doing, but I still find it a bit tedious, especially when the payoff (changes in the story) are very minor. Really, really minor. You may think that the scrawl at the end showing mages instead of templars means a lot... and maybe when DA4 comes out it might, but at that point I can just use the Keep to get the choices I want. The point is, in game while I'm playing, it makes very little difference.
This also affected my experience with the romance options, and inner circle quests. It felt like ages between scenes because really it could be 10-20 game hours or more before anything could progress. And as I said, I play for story, so it gets rather dull when I go that long in the game without more story or romance or cut scenes.
Yes, I could rush through the game, focusing only on the love interest I care about and only on the main storyline. But I don't like to play that way - I like to experience the whole story. And doing that meant everything was just too spread out when you have 9 companions, 3 advisors, and huge zones to clear.
Point is, shorter game with MORE replayability would be my preference, instead of a Skyrim-esque sprawling landscape. DA != Skyrim. I like that they are (were) different.
Not enough scenes
Related to above, I just felt there weren't really enough cut scenes/interaction. Maybe it was just because the game was so long and there were too many characters - I think if you compacted the scenes all together yes you have a ton, many dozens of hours. But when playing they felt so spread out. I felt like I didn't get to go very "deep" with any particular companion.
As for the romances - I get that you have 8 different LI in this game, so maybe that's why they all felt a bit thin since it's just too much work for all of those. But each LI only having one scene per main story progress just wasn't satisfying enough. My experience was: Get an awesome cutscene, have some feels, yay! Go out into the world and play a zone for like 4 hours, come back to talk to my LI and their dialog options would be the exact same (usually nothing available) as when I left, boo. Go to another zone and play for more hours, come back, still the same... repeat for about 20 hours until I finally decide to advance the story (of which there are only about 4 major ones). So in a nutshell, you run 10-20 game hours between interactions with the LI, which make it feel very thin.
This to me just really killed it. I wish there were more ways to interact with your LI, and even other party members. I kind of miss the gifts from the previous games, or just... something. For instance if your LI is a party member, maybe being able to chat with them in the field. Or maybe just a couple more LI-only quests would really have helped.
Final complaint
Search function is terrible. I don't mind having a "search" for those hidden items like the Bottles of Thedas, but the fact that I could see ANY loot on the ground without pinging search over and over... just ugh. Please, sparklies or highlights or giant laser beams from the sky for lootable stuff, not a spam button. I think I'm getting carpal tunnel just from hitting the damn button over and over...
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Now I still want to say I did enjoy the game - the writing is spot on, the voice actors nailed it, all of that is great. And even though the zone quests took so long and took me away from the main story, the fact that each zone has its own mini-story, and that it can impact the main one, that's what kept me playing instead of getting bored of the fetch quest nature of it. So I just want to emphasize: you're still doing a great job with the story, don't lose that.
But while I really enjoyed DAI, it doesn't really feel like a perfect Dragon Age game to me. I hope DA4 can maybe reconcile that, bringing the combat back to where it should be, and maybe adding some depth to the LI and party story.
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