Well I finally finished it. Took me several months to do so, with long breaks inbetween. I'd like to say it was entirely due to other games being terribly compelling, but truth be told DA:I lost me repeatedly because it was so god damned tedious.
I'm honestly shocked at the acclaim it has gotten. The calls of a "return to form" for the studio, or that it is their best RPG in years. One writer even said it eclipsed Telltale in terms of high impact decision making and moral quandaries. I'd like some of what that writer was smoking when he wrote that. As much as I disliked KOTOR and raged at DA2's reused environments and ME3's shaggy dog of an ending, this feels like the worst calamity yet. A hapless stew pot of contradictory features and ideas held together by a ridiculously substandard central narrative and dogged by a host of questionable game design decisions.
Shall I substantiate?
MECHANICS
1. How anyone could play this game for 5 minutes and not immediately divine the need for a "loot all" function is beyond my wildest imagination. Manually scooting between tiny ground colored loot pouches, one for each of the half dozen enemies you just killed, is extraordinarily tedious. And the tiny inventory size ensures you'll want to be selective about what you loot, too, meaning you'll constantly be re-pinging the same pouch you just went over a minute ago.
2. On the subject of manually scooting, the inability to move-to-target with a click doesn't just make looting a chore, it makes melee combat a calamity. One the developers very evidently realized and tried to compensate for by including a variety of leap-to/charge-to target skills, or the ability to pull your target to you. It feels lousy.
3. Combat in general stinks. DA:O had good combat, DA2 had a mixed bag of combat, DA:I has almost entirely worthless combat. Difficulty scaling is accomplished through the tried and true "bag of hitpoints" method, made truly ridiculous when armor and barriers are added in. On normal difficulty your party of trans-dimensional demon slayers could easily spend upwards of two minutes whittling down the average bear. The "tactical" view is a cruel joke and almost entirely without merit.
4. The loot is lackluster, suffering from the same illness that dogged Diablo 3 at launch. There is little to no character to loot, it's all a bunch of generic gear with similar looking skins and bland stats. Rare or epic items are the same as regular items, just "more stats".
5. Crafting requires a ridiculous amount of resources, and resource gathering is an inexplicable chore (this, at least, is a time honored Bioware tradition). The might of the Inquisition can rattle nations, but can only manage to bring back 3 bits of stone, and you need 15 to make a pommel.
6. The War Table was an interesting idea with an absolutely dreadful implementation. World of Warcraft is a time sink MMO designed to be played for hundreds of hours, and its "follower" missions are both quicker/easier to run and infinitely more rewarding. What developer thought it was a good idea to dispatch a follower on a 10 hour mission, only to have them return with 30 influence and a grey item?
7. The game delights in shoehorning idiotic jumping puzzles into a game that absolutely cannot handle it. The terrible jumping and frictionless terrain make it an exercise in frustration and futility.
8. The vast open world areas can be traversed with a mount, but you can't interact with anything from it, it barely moves faster than your run when it canters, and if you move it to a gallop it will break stride the second it comes into contact with a pebble or protruding root.
STORY
1. Absolutely lame-duck central narrative, somehow eclipsing the first game's generic "A dread evil stalks the land" retread. The primary antagonist is lackluster, and the pacing is completely shot to hell. Even if you want to accelerate the central story you can't, because you have to "buy power" by doing pointless grub work out in the wilds.
2. A host of characters, some very good, some quite awful, none of which ever get to fully establish themselves because the usual spate of character building side quests has been abandoned in favor of bilious assloads of filler. You'll find nothing like ME2's companion quests here, instead you'll be returning Farmer Winterbutt's lost Druffalo or collecting bits of sparkly rock.
3. A lot of established factions acting very out of character for reasons that are never properly established in-game. There is no flow from story element to story element, just big story set pieces that frequently arrive out of nowhere, book-ended by some of the most dreary content ever to populate an RPG.
BUGS/ERRATA
1. The load times are the worst I've seen since the 90's. That the game delights in spiriting you to a separate location for a 30 second scene, with full load times in-between, only compounds the issue.
2. Lots of flickering textures and assorted weirdness in cut-scenes.
3. The inexplicable "drop to 30 FPS" or lower during cut-scenes, regardless of PC power.
4. War Table had a lot of visual bugs and issues. Hilariously cluttered, quest pegs staying on the board even once the quest was completed, one quest populating itself four times and actually overlapping with other quest pegs, making them impossible to click.
5. A handful of annoying crash to desktop incidences.
Some things work. The environments are absolutely gorgeous, and a ton of work went into them. The music was beautiful, the voice acting was top-notch. There are occasional stand out moments, most particularly the Orlesian Ball mission, which was so off the beaten path it actually served to highlight how lackluster most of the other content was. There were some genuinely funny moments, especially in banter, although they felt few and far between.
Ultimately the game seemed to validate the very worst fears one might have had at the concept of Bioware attempting to shoehorn a "Skyrim style" open world RPG into their series. Their "open world" was composed of a bunch of hilariously mazey, invisible-wall ridden areas packed to the absolute gills with dreadful, tedious questing. And it utterly decimated what would ordinarily be a point of strength...the central narrative, and the cast of companions. This game does not play to the studio's strengths. ME3's Citadel DLC showed that Bioware realized...too late for ME3...that what people really loved was their characters. It seemed promising, like they'd had an epiphany and would be returning to their roots. Instead, we get this lumbering abomination of a game, pulling itself in seventy different directions at once, and succeeding virtually nowhere as a result.
DA2 was an ambitious failure undone by a lack of development time and resources. ME3 was a dramatic finale that was derailed by an eleventh hour artistic coup. DA:I feels like a game that collapsed under the weight of feature creep, its merits obscured by one's inability to play a half hour without banging into a half dozen different wrongheaded decisions, bugs, or lousy mechanics.
I'm super annoyed with it, because it could have been so much better.
