TL;DR: Bioware somehow became Ubisoft. This game needed some hyphenation in the title. It should be named Drag-on age : Infinite grinds.
I feel like I missed a few things in my "review" (rant) ^ against this game that I didn't hit upon. Some of these things I find people are using as positives for this game but my mind boggles at that notion. So consider this the sequel rant or something, if you haven't read the original read it because I doubt I'll be reiterating much on what I said there.
I keep seeing people say that you should increase the combat difficulty, but I did, in fact I finished the game on Nightmare difficulty(because I'm an achievement whore), and t'was indeed a nightmare but not for reasons of combat difficulty. In fact the hardest encounter in the game comes really early into your playtime. The Haven fight where you're introduced to corypheus is pretty much the end of difficulty spikes in this game. You've probably found enough crafting materials that by the time you get to skyhold you'll be able to craft some truly overpowered shit in the skyforge. My tanks had weapons and armor that generated guard on hit which meant they never actually took damage. The same goes for the rogue I was controlling who had it on his armor so every time he hit an enemy his guard went up making him virtually unstoppable for everything besides enemies way above his level of which there are very little if you follow the recommended levels they give you in the map screen. I didn't even mention his stupidly overpowered swords which gave a 10% chance to cast a one shot kill ability on every single swing, 20% because I stacked different ones on each of his two weapons. Even without those enchantments though the combat was easy - not to mention boring and obnoxiously annoying to control.
It's true that you could theoretically set up combo's on specific enemies to increase your damage output but that'd be reliant on the retards you call squad mates in this game to not blow their combo-able spell on the goddamn irrelevant wraith sitting somewhere at the edge of the battlefield not doing shit. So you'd need to first of all disable them from casting it through the clusterfuck of a tactics screen which has been severely downgraded from DA:O since you can't assign conditionals and can only set an ability as preferred, allowed for use or disabled. Then you'd need to either switch in real-time to cast the spell which turns your main character into one of the retards which means he's going to blow all of his useful cooldowns doing nothing of particular use, or you'd have to use the tactical camera. If you used the tactical camera the odds of them actually casting the spell you selected are somewhere in the region of 50/50 because for some reason the A.I will cancel your selected spell to do some other shit the second you switch back to your now dumbfuck of a main character. So you'd have to babysit that character for a while until he decides to actually cast the combo-able spell, switch back and hope the character you wanted to set off the combo with hasn't actually blown that cooldown. Luckily the game is so badly balanced that the amount of situations that require that much micromanagement are exceedingly rare and you can pretty much tank your way through the game holding RT and pressing the occasional face button to awesome. At best the combo's are an afterthought and I rarely bother purposefully setting one up.
Onto the exploration -- I keep seeing this argument that you should get out of the Hinterlands but that's a bullshit ass argument because every single zone is the Hinterlands with a pallete swap at best. Atleast the hinterlands are reasonably easy to navigate, some of the zones are a clusterfuck of hills and un-traversable terrain designed by someone with a hard-on for invisible barriers, and exceedingly hard to find ladders designed to get you to the top of said hill. It'd be better if the map was of any goddamn use whatsoever but since it shows you no landmarks and no terrain features you're stuck hoping that you're actually going in the right direction more often than not. Some of the sidequest collectables are specifically placed in areas that are impossible to reach in any sane manner and require you to use the shitty, badly animated jump to climb some terrain feature some asshole decided it was good to place a shard on. It doesn't help that the jump had a delay on it as well meaning your timing had to be goddamn impeccable to make some of these jumps.
If the zone isn't obtuse to navigate it's usually a straight forward, utterly barren but unbelievably giant mess. The hissing wastes, for example, is just a giant desert, and while it does feature some of the awful hill design on the sides the majority of it is just a giant flat plane with a sand texture. Crossing it takes several minutes on horseback and there is nothing appreciable to be found here. In fact if you're one of those I only play 10% of my game people you'd probably find little to no reason to ever visit here. Oh and since this game is so huge and the collectables are strewn about by what appears to be some sort of procedural generation you end up having to spam L3 every half a second so you can find some more elfroot to bend over for. I'd imagine someone in Bioware is really into butts and figured I'd enjoy bending the fuck over every 10 seconds.
You can upgrade your fortress too but aside from one upgrade all of them are cosmetic, so it's literally just a case of bend the fuck over to pick up more items required to upgrade your fort so you can spend half a minute looking at a new building which serves no functional purpose, and at best might unlock another boring as text box to read.
Which brings me to my next point, why play it if you don't have too? I might be an old school completionist here but it's utterly mindboggling to imagine a world where they designed 95% of their videogame to just be there for no reason other than to fill diskspace. While it's not as avoidable as some people make it out to be, you can get by doing only a smaller portion of the terrible sidequests, I'd honestly say you still have to do far too many of them to gather the power required for the 10 main quests that the game has. I'm not even understating the case when I say the game only has 10 main quests to offset the 1000's of empty ass go here and press square quests. It really only has 10. Of those 10: 1 is a tutorial, 4 are the equivalent of a cutscene, and 5 of them contain actual gameplay, which includes the final 5 minute boss fight. If they did not lock these behind a ridiculous grind for power the game would barely average a playtime of 3 to 4 hours.
So when people say I played this game for 180 hours what they really mean is: I ran around pressing square on shit for 150 hours, I spent another 20 hours pressing square to pick up flowers, I spent like 5 hours fast travelling for companion quests and I spent 5 hours on the main quest. That seems like a really broken balance to strike for me. Even if you don't go all OCD on the map diarrhea, you're still going to spend the dominant portion of your time picking up shitty items to unlock the power required to start the next main quest.
I also notice a lot of people like the companions a lot, and while I thought what little writing was there wasn't terribly bad it's spread way too thin. Their dialogue only updates when you progress the main quest so for large swaths of time in between they just stand there, static, without anything new to say because there's honestly nothing for them to comment on. Once you complete their companion quests they have even less to say and tend to not even comment on main quest progression outside of a few throwaway one liners. Iron Bull who a lot of people hail as one of the best companions spent 95% of my gametime sitting on a chair in Skyhold with nothing at all to say. I checked back every once in a while, he was still sitting there, still had nothing to say. You also never know when they do have something new to say, so you end up running around Skyhold a lot to talk to the companions which are spread all over that map, like thinly spread jelly on stale toast, only to realize nobody had anything new to say.
In closing I'd like to say I would gladly forfeit any attempt Bioware makes at these giant sprawling maps with nothing to do for a tightly paced corridor action set with an interesting evolving story that goes beyond the one note, you've got mystery green shit on your hand and there's a bad guy you need to kill.
TL;DR: Don't believe the lies, dragon age is still Drag-on age: nothing to do here.
