it's simple, actually.
Pre-release, I made a character concept for a human mage. DAI let me play her.
Then I made another one for a Dalish mage. DAI let me play her too.
And now I have a third one for a dwarf rogue, and I already know DAI will also let me play her.
Let me play her and not attempt to chain me to one ideology, a small set of defined personalities or a specific morality, that is.
Explicit support for some of the characters traits I imagined was sometimes there, sometimes it wasn't, but nowhere but in minor cases did the game throw a wrench into my plans and told me no. Also, those situations where I could express my character's character - if you stop to count them, there are quite a lot of those - were important, and some of the lines I got there were spot on like little else I've seen in any Bioware game.
The result: between the things I could express in interactive scenes and the many, many decisions I could make, my Inquisitors feel more like my own creation than in any other of Bioware's games with voiced protagonists. Even DAO's Wardens can only compete because I had so much time refining them in my imagination.
I've heard some people say they find the Inquisitor's personality bland compared to Hawke. Well, this may be a matter of preference but the lack of a strong personality in most of the standard lines is GOOD! Why? Well, because having a set of strong personalities limits you to those. Hawke was pretty good at being sarcastic, but if you wanted to be clever without being sarcastic, you found you couldn't. At the other extreme, you have characters like DXHR's Adam Jensen who always speaks in a deadpan voice in order to not prescribe an interpretation. DAI attempts a compromise: The Inquisitor sounds more real than Jensen but less defined that Hawke, which imposes some limits but leaves a pretty big range of personalities you can play. Most of all, it leaves me free to make subtle distinctions, resulting in conversations feeling different even when I choose the same option.
I feel....unchained in my roleplaying for the first time since DAO. I have no words to express how much of a relief that is after ME3 where I was always banging my head against the writers' preferences. I often thought playing the leader of an organization whose power rests so much in faith wouldn't work for me, but Bioware made it work. My characters may not be able to escape their role, but they can pretty much shape it, and make the Inquisition theirs.
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