So overall, I'd say that Dragon Age: Inquisition is a good, if not great, game that is a step-up from it's disastrous predecessor. Obviously it comes nowhere near the heights of Dragon Age: Origins but that game is a masterpiece. Dragon Age: Inquisition, on the other hand, is a solid roleplaying game with some puzzling design choices: like how it forces me to awkwardly platform at times (this isn't Super Mario Bros.) or how most of the side-quests outright suck.
The best part about Dragon Age: Inquisition is the companions and the lore. It does characters so well that it becomes frustrating how weak and two-dimensional the villain, Corypheus is. I seriously wonder how this darkspawn villain who looks like he's from Dragonball Z was able to get any followers in the first place. He has no charisma and nothing about him would want anyone, no matter what he promised them, for him to be a God. It's no wonder he had to resort to a demon army, tricking people into following him, or outright brainwashing them.
It's not like this series isn't capable of having good antagonists. There's a few in this game: the guy who joined Corypheus might not be the most original villain but at least he had a great motive: to save his son at any cost. What's Corypheus' motive? He saw the throne of the Maker, it was empty, so someone should sit on it. Wow, what a bore.
The inquisition in Dragon Age: Inquisition is not really an inquisition but rather a holy army with nebulous goals (stability in a chaotic goal) but how great would it have been if the game had actually asked you to be an inquisition? If you were made Inquisitor to hunt down people who you believe are perverting the Chant of Light (heretics)? That's much more complicated and your decisions could affect the Chantry that way...how lenient are you?
As you go through the maps and hunt down heretics, you learn about the Venatori Cult. Now in my version of Corypheus, he wasn't one of the Tevinter magisters who broke into the Black City. He was actually a contender to be a Black Divine. He lost the election and he took his most faithful followers. During his research, he discovered an Elven artifact that revealed to him that the throne is empty. So he decides that the world would be better with an active God than an absent one. His followers convince him to be that God.
Now before you discover who Corypheus is, you actually meet him several times. You present him not as a cold villain but rather define him through his compassion. He's always helping people, trying to make people's lives better in some way. In other words, he's a Mother Teresa figure. He's also charismatic. In real life, he could easily be one of those televengalists that convince Christians to send him millions of dollars. This is a man you could easily want to have power and that people might want to see as a God. He doesn't need to brainwash anyone: they would follow him because he's such a great guy.
Eventually you learn of his plan to break into the fade and you have to stop him. At this point, the plot you have can mostly play out but instead of having a two-dimensional villain, you have a multilayered one. Heck the player might actually think that Corypheus might make a better God until you see a future where you see that to fix the world's problems, he's taken away free will (if Iron Bull is in the party he can say that even the Qunari would think this is taking it too far away) and that people's lives might be technically better but devoid of meaning.
As a writer, I feel like the best antagonists are written as protagonists whose goals oppose the protagonists. In other words, they feel like they are the good guys and that the main hero is actually the bad guy.
I feel like this story would have been improved with this version of Corypheus.
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