Personally I think Bethesda games has their popularity due to being "sandbox" games. They put you in a world, say "You can do anything!" (not true) and then you're free to go in any direction and hack skeletons. The problem I have is that what there is to do is so shallow in terms of quality. Their quests are boring. They never challenge people intellectually or skill wise. Look at Skyrim for example, they have "puzzles" for example in dungeons, but 95% of those puzzles are some bloody "match-the-symbols" puzzle a toddler could do. And they repeat it ad-nauseam. That being said, I will confess I have roughly 400 hours of Skyrim playtime, but I can say that 380 at least of those hours is spent modding the crap out of the game, and playing
Enderal instead of Skyrim. And that's for me what most Bethesda games come down to, they are fun to mod, but never to play on their own. Fallout: New Vegas was the one game I didn't mod and still had a blast with, and the secret to that was that it was competently written and designed.
The core story was the exact reason I hated DA:I, I had no idea who Coryphosexumoslllllll was. I had played DA:O and DA2 but I could never remember ever seeing him before and in DA:I he was suddenly thrust in as this big bad guy I knew and should hate, but I knew jackshit about him. Turns out later I was
supposed to have had played the DA2 DLC in order to know who he was, problem being I disliked DA2 so much I never got around to them. And that is what I call absolutely shitty storytelling. You can't make the main story in the next game based on a DLC most people likely never played. Then apparently Corhpusmaximus was NOT the main antagonist as I was told on this board, it was some other guy and NOW I am supposed to play ANOTHER DLC to get that persons story as well! I think you can guess from here how quickly I've lost interest now in any Dragon Age sequel.
And I disagree heavily with the sentiment about The Witcher 3. I do love The Witcher 2 as well and think they did it excellent. But I think The Witcher 3 held the same quality as well and even made so many things better. The main story was a bit of a letdown, the antagonist not being as amazing, it still held up well in the long run. What the game however excelled in was then stories like the Bloody Baron, the various side-quests around the land that had plot-twists, interesting characters and more. And I personally loved that your actions could have consequences, many down the line by hours so you wouldn't know what you had done until it was too late to go back. Consequences are great, and in a world of many moral grey areas, it shouldn't be easy to know which option to pick to make the "right" one, you just have to go by your own feelings and see what you caused. Not like Bioware games where they just helpfully mark "this is the good guy answer, this is the jerkwad answer."
I consider The Witcher 3 the high bar in big budget RPGs, open world RPGs and just RPGs in general. Many of their characters are imprinted heavily into my skull by how great they were. Olgierd Von Everec, Phillip Strenger, Gaunter O'Dimm (holy shit, this is the most genius fucking antagonist ever created in a videogame) and many more. I think you should play The Witcher 3 again and indulge yourself in their expansions, that unlike Bioware, are all self-standing stories (and are bloody excellent).
