Hello,
I did make one or two threads as I played through the game but now that I've finished, I felt maybe, just maybe the devs (and the community) might feel this is helpful. I'll try and think of everything I can in as honest a way as possible.
I'll start with the good.
THE GOOD
The first 20 hours or so of the game are epic!
The graphics are a real upgrade (which I guess was to be expected but it's still impressive when you move on from the other DAs).
In particular the world is beautiful and immersive, I loved the "blue" animals running around and even seemed that the more I killed aggressive npcs or animals the more I encountered "innocent" animals as I explored the zones.
The core story is all right, it's the usual bad guy, but it still has coherence.
I loved the idea of having a base of operations, something I could take ownership of. It was also great to see it evolve, even if subtely, the main hall where the throne sits in particular.
I thought the character creation was pretty good except maybe for a lack of hair styles and voices, I was pleased with the hero I created.
I really liked the crafting even though I usually never craft in games, what you could make was definetly better than what you could loot.
I liked that there were lots of people to talk to in the base/keep, it meant a welcome change of pace.
And that's in fact a great thing about the game, I found there were different kinds of missions, the diversity from the playing cards with Varic and the rest of the team to exploring the world and side quests made it very interesting.
I absolutely totally LOVED the dragon fights although I do have one or two negative things to say about them, the first dragon I fought was in Hinterlands and was the most difficult experience I've had in a long time, I literaly spent hours, more than 10 hours on that dragon and when he went down it was extremely rewarding.
I also loved the animation of the dragons in particular, like when you at one point hurt them and they react very realistically as a wounded animal.
I did appreciate that the language was a bit more mature, it made the game a bit more realistic. After all, battle worn soldiers do swear. It made the rest of the communications sound natural.
I think it's good that the first 3 choices in a communication were labeled the same (even though I got a feeling that they were more or less similar to other bioware games (ie top for good, middle for funny and bottom for negative).
I liked that in the whole inquisition set up, the hero actually did get a chance to say he did not consider himself to be Andraste's Herald, that he was not religious. After this was actually proved when he met the divine in the fade, it's a shame there was less opportunity for him to nail that through.
I really enjoyed the fact that the game had a lot of gameplay hours, not only does it give me more value for money, but it also allows me to feel more immersed and implicated in the game. I hate those games which you buy for the same price but finish after 4 hours, they feel like total rip offs, and even though the main quest was very short (much too short if you ask me), at least the rest of the zones and side quests gave me the opportunity to sink some time and enjoy what I consider as good art.
I appreciate that Bioware / EA came through with one or two patches pretty fast after release.
I thought the AI was much improved than the previous 2 DA games, I know some may disagree, but I personally enjoy not having to pause the game every 2 seconds to control every action of every member. It could still be improved but it was (imo) a good step forward.
Speaking of which, contrary to what I see on the forums, the game was almost entirely bug free for me, except for one major one (gender issue) and a few small ones like the occasional crash or going into zones I wasn't supposed to and being teleported back during a fight (ie the enemy went there and I followed him). Or, when fighting despair demons when closing rifts, they would bounce around sometimes so far that the rift would reset and I'd have to start over if I chased them.
I loved how so many things in the game felt real, that walking into a village felt real, that the sound of people talking to each other came and went as I moved on and things like that.
I loved the actual gameplay, I mean in particular for the fighting, I was swinging a big two hander and it felt very real doing so as opposed to DA 2 where it felt more like some japanese anime arcade game.
The fighting was great for me (except for the controls, for which I did make a post complaining about it). After a few hours of fighting I got used to the controls and really enjoyed the fights. (just one thing, when pausing the game and switching to another character, for example to give him a potion, the game would often unpause which was a bit annoying).
I liked that there were different styles, I didn't try them all but enjoyed being able to pick, I know that fighting with a 2 hander or as a mage felt radically different for example.
I appreciated the possibility of fast travel and really liked the way it was implemented.
I loved the mykeep idea, and I thought it showed one of the aspects that the devs got right in previous games.
I thought the class and specialising was ok, not particularly exceptional but nice nevertheless.
I loved how the noble Orlesians had a french accent, I'm half french myself and found this very funny. By the way, I think there's a song sang by a bard somewhere in french which is very badly translated. It was a nice touch.
I thought a lot of the voice acting was very well done and some of the conversations really made me laugh.
All in all, it was much more than playing just a game, it was a very good game. However, with the attention that it received, with the fact that it got game of the year award and that the game was made by Bioware which for me is a company I've been following for a long time since I've played and loved many of their games, I would have expected nothing less. In fact, there are many things that did not meet up to my expectations and indeed did infuriate me, a lot of things which left me dissapointed, annoyed, and even a little sad.
Many gamers feel there was a golden age of games, more than 10 years ago, a time which was ground breaking, a time which was creative, where stories were deep, a time which set the standards for what an RPG is today. It makes me sad to think that today's games, including this one, do not push those limits any further, indeed, it often feels like they even take a few steps back in some aspects.
Take away the technicological advances which have to do with graphics, sound, immersion and such and what have you got? Take away those improvements due to technological advance and how would this game compare to any other back in the days when those technological advances didn't exist?
Which brings me to the bad.
THE BAD
As I said the story was ok, but it could have been so much better. I felt it was much too short and didn't allow time for the events to unfold properly.
Truth be told, it was also your standard "bad guy wants to destroy or rule the world and a hero must emerge to stop him" them which has been used again and again a million time in games and other media.
At least you didn't go the amnesic unknown nobody who becomes a hero route....
I was very dissapointed in the game by expectations.
But I don't only mean the expectations that I had from past bioware games, or from the media reviews, or community feedback. I mean in particular expectations that were founded and grew as I started to play.
For a start, the mykeep, by allowing me time to configure the world in detail made me expect that my actions would have consequences in this game too, perhaps, I was hoping, even more so.
That wasn't the case, in fact far from it..
As the story set in and I learned about the world, the setting and the story I grew increasing excited already imagining what could unfold, the building of an army, the fight for influence and recognition as I strived to fight this enemy so dangerous that he might destroy the world as a whole.
That was not to be either, well, to be precise, it was, but not by me. I did not experience any of it. It was so abstract and intangible, though present in the story itself that I felt that whatever I did, had no influence on anything.
I would have though, for example, that power was to be a crucial part of the whole compaign, but if you only needed 50 or less per important mission, by the end of the game, I still had around 400 left and nothing to spend it on.
And this brings me to my main and most important critic, the trolling. I'll use the same example, indeed the game makes you, at the start, understand, feel, expect, that the amount of power you have is important. It makes you feel glad when you increase it. But once you have it, you have nothing to spend it on, no way to use it, so whether you go through the game with a lot of power or just enough to do the main quests makes absolutely no difference at all.
This type of trolling is present in many other aspects of the game.
For a start, in the decision making process, in the choices, which have often (in good games) been central. Again, the only effect (in most cases) is simply a case of one party member approving or not.
In the quests, mainly the side quests, you are led to do important things which may have a significant impact on the world, or at least the two zones of the continent. But it's not the case either
For example, even if you do absolutely everything there is to do in the Hinterlands, and I mean every little side quest, every little thing, you'll still find after having finished other zones that it has made no difference, that the chantry woman still says that the refugees are dire need of help. There's no visiual consequence in the keep, there's hardly any impact on the story, or even the war room missions.
Here's another example (I could keep going all night). You complete the requesition quest, get rewarded with +1 power only to find another is available. Fine, you think, there's a lot of effort to be made so you go on and complete that one too, only to find there's another. Except that this new one is exactly the same as the first!!
Once again, you are led to believe one thing, when in reality (so to speak lol) the truth is that it is entirely without consequence.
I hated each and every time I felt that, and believe me, I felt that a lot, I don't have time and I doubt I have space to exaustively go through each and every example, but I'm sure players who have finished the game would agree.
To summarise this little rant, whether it be the war room, the keep, the side quests, the missions you do, the efforts you make, the time you spend, the influence you gain, the power you earn or the choices you make in conversations, the people you speak to or ignore has absolutely no consequence, no meaning, nothing, so even if the game pushes and incites you to make the effort I at least ended up feeling completely cheated and trolled.
For the rest :
I didn't like the controls, it (sadly, like so many games these days) felt like it was geared for the console players without taking PC ergonomics into consideration.. Still, unlike many members of the community here I got used to them in the end and don't really find them to be such a problem.
When I said I loved the dragons, it's true, the fights with the dragons were amazing, I don't think I've had this kind of experience in any other game before. However, on the negative side, after killing the first one, the others became indredibly easy. Not only that but (unlike the first Hinterlands dragon) they also all had more or less the same behaviour and actions.
Which brings me to repetitiveness, I understand that it's important to have a time sink, but in my opinon too much of it was relied on copy pasting the exact same thing from one zone to the other.
Not only that, but it's been said and I totally agree that after having done the Hinterlands (which was amazing, even though you could still hear the sign of battle and people suffering days after everything had been resolved) discovering the other zones made me feel more in a generic MMO than an acutal first person RPG.
I was dissapointed that there was no towns, that's not such a big issue at all, but having at least one or two towns you could evolve in would have added properly to the immersion and realism.
And if some consider Val Roeyaux to be a town, I'd have to admit that though it indeed is officially a town, the player only has access to one zone with a few merchants....
Using a 2 hander in fights, the "block" function (or riposte, I can't remember the name) was great, it gave a small element of skill in the battles (if you don't know what I mean, I'm on about when the hero holds up is sword in a guard and automatically hits back when hit, very usefull when a dragon lifts one of its paws for example). However, I didn't like how it felt that fighting was not skill based at all.
Except for the first dragon in the hinterlands, never was I really challenged, and if I was, it was mostly to do with with level, stats or gear than actual skill.
I would have appreciated a fighting mechanic that gave space for skill to develop, and I mean player skill.
The gender issue bug was very very annoying, and even though the patch fixed it in the sense that it wouldn't happen again, I was dissapointed that by the time I finished the game, there was no solution for those who had already invested many hours and did not want to restart the campaign from scratch..
I touched on the subject already, but just to summarise it, I was dissapointed that a huge number of features in the game were just for show, a superficial esthetic thing and nothing more, from the war table to the keep, to the missions, to the conversations choices, it seems to me that the entire game was simply a show of esthetics. It was polished, very nice to the eyes, nice to the ears, nice to the touch (if I may say so in a game, I mean the gameplay 
) inf act it was pretty much "very nice" in its entirety, but that's it, it stops there. There was no depth, there was no meaning, there was no reason to do anything, no consequences to choices, to reward for time invested (apart from increased XP and maybe access to better loot).
It's a very well polished game which shines as do most things when polished. But dig a little underneath and you find but the
bare skeletal structure of what could have been an amazing RPG. Take the emperor's clothes off and you will see all the ugly that is covered in illusion.
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