I found Inquisition's story and world, a bit bland in the end, without a lot of the depth of its previous installments (in fact, jettisoning the build up of those two games in the first act), but thanks to Dorian's insights into the Magisterium, I had fully expected DA:4 to deal in depth with Tevinter politics and the clash between the empire and the Qunari. of course if DA:4 was set mainly in the Captial of a Fantasy Byzantium that would press all my buttons. But I have a lot of experience being disappointed in this regard (Cyrodill anyone?), I can only hope they've learned to revel in their own world building instead of stymieing to set things to zero so as to not scare off newbies, in my experience feeling out of my depth in a fantasy setting is half the fun.
I suppose Inquisition is sort of typical of Dragon Age: really compelling characters, technically complete lore, enough side-quests, potentially nice-looking world (thinking specifically of the Hinterlands in DAI) but ultimately it's just missing something. I can't say what it is but the world is lacking immersion somehow, it feels quite ephemeral.
I suppose I felt the same way about Oblivion's portrayal of Cyrodiil: I liked it a lot, actually, and contrary to what a lot of people claimed, there was enormous variation in its terrain, from the snow-covered mountains in the north to the tropical swampland in the south, the sandy beaches in the west to the rolling green hills in the east, sprawling forests in the middle, mountain passes, more (albeit cookie-cutter, somewhat) forts and caves and so on than you could shake a stick at. But while it had all of those things it was just a bit... bland. It's hard to say exactly why because it
should have worked but didn't. Same with the characters, so many really individual people, more complex relationships than you might expect, actually quite detailed personality traits, schedules and so on. I think it set the bar high and then missed it, and while it was actually pretty well done in a lot of areas it didn't excel in any. Fortunately when running it on the PC nearly all of it is fixable with a huge array of mods to sort out the economy, scaling, to make the cities actually
interesting, the Unique Landscapes mods to make those unique areas actually unique. Maybe that was the problem: the scope was too big so the creativity was spread too thin. And there's only so much that can be accomplished with world-builder software to fill in the gaps.
