I'm not invested in a review, anyone on this forum has already played the game; rather, this post is intended mainly as another piece of feedback for Bioware, and also as a way to assuage my own bubbling frustrations with a little cathartic fun. Let's begin:
With the Mass Effect series, Dragon Age Origins, and even the surprisingly compelling tension-building of the Dragon Age II story arc, Dragon Age Inquisition had an extremely high standard to live up to. In the same way that Mass Effect 2 drew heavily from successful cover based shooting games, irrevocably drawing the series from its RPG-esque origin, I fear Bioware's direction for the Dragon Age series is heading further towards Diablo and it's hack/slash ilk. With Origins setting the gameplay standard with auto-attack making hack and slash gameplay unrewarding, putting the focus instead on strategic power use, the 8 hot-key mechanic from Inquisition raises the question: why deliberately limit the player? As we can see from the removal of custom AI tactics, the trend of reducing player control has defined much of the new gameplay. Is the logical final step in this pattern of development a game where, entirely autonomous to the player, your hero saves the world with their Tourette's. Whilst there are a few positive elements in the gameplay, the only really exciting features seem to be the tactical camera and the ability combos (which have been present since Origins). Sadly, these issues are topped by balance like that of an angry rhinoceros on a tightrope, and a difficulty curve that is in besotted with the horizontal axis and just wants to cuddle.
These Bioware games have broken new ground in the RPG world with their dialogue wheels, and in this case Inquisition has done the series proud. Initially there was a frustrating consistency between the early tone in some of the different dialogue options, and both the traditionally peaceful and sardonic responses yielded the feel of soggy toilet paper. However, the options on the dialogue wheel eventually came to feel as though they had the potential to create a unique Inquisitor on each playthrough. Where in DA:II I had often found myself frustrated with Hawke as she presented me with three beautifully versatile ways of saying something that I flat out did not want to say, I have seen the Inquisitor have full blown arguments, where each piece of rhetoric felt like my own opinion. In many cases, the characters are so rich that they could benefit from some post game content, which is the only place where the dialogue in Inquisition really collapses.
Gameplay is the realm of gamers, and not all gamers are role-players with roots in strategic RPGs like Origins. As such, gameplay changes can easily be justified and explained by mercenary game design. No such justification is possible for any lack of story. With only a handful of main quest missions to play with, and a maximum recommended level for each that can be attained with barely any exploration, the story line wafts by like a breeze in a vacuum. The turn in the story occurs before the halfway point, which leaves the majority of the narrative inexorably trudging towards the Inquisition's predictable and inevitable victory, with not even the faintest smell of a plot twist. That the final confrontation Coryphius is unchallenging perfectly suits its narrative redundancy. By then, he is less threatening than a nug in a tutu; all of the sinister mystery extinguished, about the point that the Inquisitor went throne shopping with Vivienne.
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