I don't understand the hate for Dragon Age: Inquisition. It was an advancement on what the other two games did in almost every way. There are a ton of sidequests to do, or not do based on how you choose to play... The story is good. I don't get it.
I'm more excited for Andromeda based on my enjoyment of DA:I.
In gameplay, the system which one interacts with on a constant basis when playing the game, is not similar to the first two games. I would argue it's not even unambiguously better than the second game. The skill trees are much smaller, not just in terms of like how ME1 had a lot of rubbish points to invest that did nothing, but they actually cut out a huge amount of stuff that was there, active and passive abilities. The use of shield management instead of health management is of debatable value. It's different, but it's not really better. The game is designed to be mostly played in real time, instead of with frequent pauses for tactical considerations, they removed or great simplified the custom tactics stuff they had in the first game, and they replaced the top down view with this monstrosity of a "tactical camera" that puts you like 1 meter above the player's head.
Dragon Age Inquisition was only an advancement in gameplay if you happened to love the changes made and didn't like the original mechanics. Drawing another comparison with ME1/ME2, you could always tell that Mass Effect 1 really wanted to have good shooter mechanics, it just failed miserably. And ME2 played more similarly to the first game than Dragon Age Inquisition does to Dragon Age Origins or Dragon Age 2.
In terms of how the world behaves, DA:O was a large world map that connected both level hubs and small mission areas. The game was fairly focused once you arrived in an area, with a lot of content created for that area. In Dragon Age: Inquisition, the map connects massive wilderness areas that are extremely loosely focused and features primarily filler content, which is in some cases autogenerated. Despite superficial similarities in how the two games are structured, as a series of maps acting like islands in the sea of the strategic world view, the differences in actually playing it are quite stark.
A lot of Dragon Age: Inquisition's bad content is optional. That's true. But it certainly takes a long time to warm up top the fact that most quest markers are, frankly, trash quests that have no good reason to exist in the game. By the time you've learned this, you've wasted maybe 3-4 hours of your life collecting herbs and setting up base camps or similarly inane tasks before you realize that no, this doesn't end in the first area before the game gets good, actually the whole game is structured to have these things in most areas. Nor is it necessarily the case that once you realize this, you'll never have to do another one ever again. You have to gather sufficient Power to do certain things. And yes, while it's true that if you play your cards right you can do a bare minimum of these quests and achieve the requisite power, that's not what most people's experiences will be with the game. Usually you'll be like "oh I'm getting bored, why don't I do one of those actually fun story quests again" and then go out and do your camp setups to gather the little bit of power you need to unlock the next thing straight away.
Then there's the crappy metagame layer. It's not very engaging, you just sort of see quests on the map and delegate it to someone. Then there's a real world timer and you get rewards and sometimes flavour text. Every now and again something cool might happen, like a prisoner comes in for you to judge, but interesting things are few and far between.
Ultimately, I came to a point where I said to myself - why am I still playing this game? Why does my quest log feel like a list of chores instead of fun? Why am I navigating a minefield of mediocrity inbetween deciding what to do between the actually interesting parts of the game? So I never finished it. I got ~33 hours into it, according to Origin, and didn't finish the story. I probably could have if I'd beelined it or something, but I was honestly giving the game a chance early on. I can't imagine what this game would be like if I was one of the OCD-completionist gamers. It'd be a circle of hell unto itself.
I don't even want to seem like I'm holding up DA:O as a paragon of videogame design. I think it's shonky and flawed in a lot of areas. If I never see the deep roads again it will be too soon (Fade isn't actually bad, haters step off). People criticize DA:I for being an offline MMO because of a lot of its systems, but the core gameplay of DA:O always felt a bit MMOish in how the combat was structured. It has it's share of shit small quests too (just not on the same scale). What I will say is this, though - DA:I is an extremely different type of game, and I don't think it's improved in as many areas as you do.
