Me and a friend were talking about this the other day. Suffice it to say he's not a big fan of the series for a few reasons. They include Dragon Age being fairly generic in it's approach to fantasy, a lot of material seems to have been taken either directly or indirectly from Tolkein. The world of Thedas, he said, was not very compelling compared to other fictional universes, most notably TES; he feels that TES has a unique universe with a unique take on traditional fantasy (elves for example), where as Dragon Age just has average or generic elves, average dwarves, and so on.
What he suggested was a rebooting of the series that would allow Bioware to wipe the slate clean and really do something unique with this IP. If he had asked me about this prior to me playing Inquisition I may have been reluctant or even against the idea altogether. However, what really swayed me in this direction was Inquisition; I wasn't able to complete the game for various reasons, such as it feeling the most generic of all the games, the ludicrous amount of fetch quests, the uninteresting story and setting, and uninteresting characters, to name a few.
My disappointment with Inquisition had got me thinking about the previous games as well. What was unique or interesting about them? What made them worth playing over other games in the genre? It would be unfair to suggest that Origins and DA2 didn't suffer from some of the same problems that plagued Inquisition. So what made them special? It all came down to the characters. The story and setting of those games were nothing special. The darkspawn horde? Yawn. What about the templars and mages? That might have worked if the two factions themselves weren't so dull and uninteresting.
Gameplay doesn't fare much better, it's actually getting worse with each new entry. By worse I mean the games feel more bipolar/schizophrenic than ever with Inquisition. This could very well be a problem with Bioware in general though, as I think there has been a noticeable drop in quality across the board since EA brought them into their fold. But it seems to be getting worse. For example, before the release of Inquisition, Bioware had talked up how they were bringing back the isometric tactical camera and admittedly did an admirable job of marketing the game to both groups of players; those who were interested in a more tactical approach to gameplay were made to feel at home in Inquisition. This however turned out to be false advertising.
The tactical camera is there, but they took away all the tactics. The "tactical" menu is devoid of most mechanics that give the player the ability to setup tactics, and the tactical camera is clunky and unwieldy. So I either have to accept that Bioware just doesn't really know what they're doing, or these features were just sort of tacked on to make one side of the player base feel that they were also included in the development process. To be honest, I don't feel really comfortable with either of these options.
Would a reboot really help here? I don't know, What I do know is what they're doing right now... just kinda feels sub-par. The biggest issue this IP has is it's identity crisis. It starred out as an alleged throwback to old school Bioware RPG's. Well, that's not really an issue if you're old Bioware. But it's little more difficult when you're AAA Bioware and expected to make games that appeal to people who don't even play RPG's. So they made that adjustment in DA2 and it's been a mess ever since. And like I said, Origins wasn't all that either; it had it's own set of issues of being generic in terms of it's art style and a few other things. But at least it seemed to have some sort of vision behind it.
Those are just some of my thoughts on this. I'd like to hear what you all think.
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