And then in the actual game it was ye olde england all over again.
It was pretty much entirely described as such though. Feudal, wet and smells of dog. They even got in a dig at our food. Sigh.
Don't forget the cooking: "put everything into a pot, cook until a uniform grey"
As for characters... I have to agree, with the exception of Varric. Varric is possibly my favourite character from the series. I won't forgive DA2 for what it did to Anders though. I liked him in Awakening and then... yeah. Aveline was ok if bland and Merrill was tolerable if stupid.
...Every character is an unsympathetic cardboard cut-outs. Companions are blatantly designed for the sake of shippers and fetishists. But most importantly: Nothing you do in the game matters. Not only is the game 100% on rails, you're not even the conductor. Your character drives not a single moment of the plot. Nothing important happens because you choose to do something. You're only ever responding two what the real players of the story do....
The characters in DAII were the best written in the series to me, better on average than in Mass Effect I'd go so far as to say, they all have a 'fatal flaw' that undoes them but which they strive to overcome, very Romantic, and unlike in most wish fulfillment rpg stories, not all of them succeed. I wish more games had the guts to do that to you.
I also think that a character like Anders has become much more interesting in our current culture, considering we're all having a national dialogue on the nature of Justice.
I replay DA:O quite a lot. I often just play through each of the origin stories instead of completing the full game. Mini origin runs.
I've now played through DA:I two times. There is a lot of tedium but it's tedium I don't mind. I get the exact same feeling from Mass Effect: Andromeda. It's not great but it keeps me occupied and I can find some enjoyment in it.
Inquisition I liked but it did suffer from the same thing as ME did from ME2 onwards, it was a bit too actiony and having to go through the various boss' shields and biotics and what-not was a tedious grind. Andromeda was okay, it just lacked some polish and it was obvious it'd been abandoned before it'd even launched.
Andromeda and Inquisition both feel like first drafts to me, Andromeda much more so, but in both they seem to have taken the first idea and because of time constraints just run with it without refining it, or linking it thematically with everyone's story.
