Thanks. I think one of my frustrations is with the tactical camera as well, it doesn't seem to control very well, and I find it hard to organize my team in the middle of combat. Maybe it doesn't matter as much on lower difficulty levels, but I feel sometimes that they could have gone more actiony or more tactical/turn based in the gameplay department, it's sort of an awkward balance.
Yep, for the next one they really need to figure out what they want to do. I wouldn't mind Dragon Age: Dogma's Sequel, or I wouldn't mind Dragon Age: Turn Based Divinity either, but the poor mix of the two is kinda meh. It's not really tactical enough but is also not really action-y enough.
Though I guess eventually it very much plays like an action game. I decided I didn't want to do Hissing Wastes or finish Emprise so I went to do the story quests, I was level appropriate(I mean, enemies were my level, I was in the very end of the level range) and I didn't pause once the entirety of those last few quests, I just mowed down everything by holding left click and sometimes using abilities while my team kinda did whatever they felt like, which was mostly irrelevant. Dorian ended up using a few potions cause he has a knack for aggroing stuff somehow but other than that I didn't heal once either(though obviously ran barriers but still). Once you get tier3 schematics weapons and materials, the game difficulty ends, even on nightmare, at least for melee rogue(and for most other classes, just don't know about 2H wars and non KE mages), you just do way too much damage that stuff evaporates regardless.
They could also cut down on filler content a bit and polish the rest a bit more, I think for example Western Approach, Oasis and Hissing Wastes should have been merged into one zone(with some aspects into others, like puzzle temples splits in other zones and stuff). Hissing Wastes is just terrible, I don't mind the idea of a very large zone but making it this large then making it night time only, which kills all visibility making it a pain to find anything was a terrible idea. Hinterlands should probably have been split into two also, to make it less daunting early on, people feel the need to complete the zone but it's so big. Starting with a smaller zone would have been better, then on to val royeaux, then back to the adventure and stuff. The narrative kinda pushes you to do that, but it's not that obvious either.
Still, much better than DA2 so can't complain too much. The UI though was dreadful, there's so many things wrong with it I wouldn't know where to begin. The game took a lot from PC MMOs, it should have copied MMO UIs more, especially better UIs like WoW's, both in option and design. The inventory is a mess, the minimap is annoying to use if you usually use fixed north, there's no tooltips unless you go in the right tab, you can't put skills from the skill tree onto your bar even though it looks like you can, tactics are way too bare and should have been at the very least slightly more advanced(though full customization would obviously be better), the mouse should have been bindable(duh) and in general mouse support should have been more reliable(like tooltips not popping unless you move the mouse off then back over something when selling or in dialogues), you should be able to select more than one character to give unified orders without having to do it in 2 or 3 actions, you should be able to queue skill usage if you don't have the ressources or the cooldown isn't up, especially for companions, obviously the tactical camera is awful, why it's tied to ground movement is a mystery, and so is the fact it has limited range, as well as the obvious zoom issue. I'm probably forgetting some, but overall that's definitely the weakest point of the entire game, and that's not even too much because of console stuff, a lot of that stuff is annoying even on consoles/with a gamepad.
But even with all these complaints, plus the bugs and glitches and what not, I still think it was a great game, it did a lot of stuff right. I liked the characters for the most part(ugh cole, even though he has the most interesting banters), I liked the story, I liked the world and how it felt a lot bigger than the previous games(including origins), I kinda liked the combat and classes even with the fairly poor balance which is fairly standard in rpg though, I liked the music and the voice acting.
