Dragon Age Inquisition is a game with beautiful visuals, an emotionally moving and stunning soundtrack composed by Trevor Morris, some good writing, and some interesting characters, with decent game-play. But Dragon Age Inquisition was very disappointing for me and maybe I should have expected that after finishing Dragon Age 2.
It's a common sentiment that the world of Thedas is full of interesting lore, creatures, characters, and politics. It is a dreadful world. This fantasy world does not have very many moments of reprieve or peace, even when the main threat has mostly been eliminated. It cannot be overstated how interesting and deep the world of Thedas is and it is still just as amazing in Inquisition.
But the story of Inquisition is so fragmented and poorly paced that I spent the VAST MAJORITY of my 80 hour playthrough doing boring side quests and completing objectives that feel like chores.
Dragon Age Inquisition introduced the War Table and Power mechanics, where you gain Power for completing side quests, and exploring the world. You then use this Power as a currency of sorts at the War Table, where you conduct operations that may give slight bits of story or character building, but mostly are just a paragraph of text that you forget about in 5 minutes. However, you can choose to mostly ignore the War Table aside from completing the main quest and unlocking new zones in the "open world".
These two mechanics have two major flaws:
1. In order to progress the main quest, you must gain enough Power to unlock the missions, which means completing boring side-quests which each give you a fraction of the total Power you will need to progress.
2. You have to wait REAL WORLD TIME in order for objectives to finish at the War Table, like it's a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mobile game (or warframe) which is such a waste of your time and it is clear that the developers just wanted to pad the players' game time. The War Table completely disrespects the players' time and its insulting.

The "open world" of DAI is more like a bunch of fragmented levels which are designed in a way that an open world would be. You can think of the world in DAI as one very large map with separated zones and individual loading screens. The zones in DAI are very similar to the zones of many MMORPGS like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV. Which brings me to my next comparison.
The game feels like it was originally designed to be an MMORPG but the developers realized they were supposed to be making a single player RPG and decided to dump all of their interesting content in the Main Story and leaving all of the side-quests and zones to lack depth and be bland:
1. The simple side-quests with minimal information which litter and infest the many zones of the world.
2. The Main Story which is severed completely from the rest of the game.
3. The time consuming collection of crafting materials for making gear or cosmetics.
4. The simple action game-play with tab-targeting and limited hotbars for abilities.


But how is the Main Story?
It's pretty good! And if you are reading this review and wondering why I am recommending this game despite all of my criticisms, it is mostly because of the Main Story, the world of Thedas, and the characters that reside in it and participate as your party members throughout the game. Luckily, if you decide to purchase this game on Steam, you will have the GOTY edition which includes the DLC that was released after the initial release. This is a good thing because the ending of the Main Story campaign in DAI was extremely underwhelming. The DLC: The Trespasser, expands on the ending of the DAI and takes place two years after the ending of the Main Story, which serves as a great conclusion to the story and as a good cliffhanger for the next title in the series and it feels like the proper ending of DAI that should have been in the game to start with, rather than served as DLC for later.
The story isn't perfect, but the dialogue and choices that are made throughout it are decent enough to keep you interested and just might be enough to make you slog through the many terrible side quests. Your "Inner Circle" of companions have interesting stories and their quests are where the other interesting content lays. Your party members will go through personal changes as you complete their missions and you will see them change as you play the game. It's good stuff. My personal favorite character story-lines were Cullen, Cassandra, and The Iron Bull.
However, the most important character, the main character, is written very poorly. Throughout the 80 hour adventure I spent with my character, I felt an extreme disconnect and never once felt as though I was role playing in the world. It felt more like I my mouse was controlling an emotionless sock puppet that just went through the motions and never developed as a character. In Dragon Age 2, you saw development with Hawke. they go through loss, they struggle with their reputation, they grows as a character. In Dragon Age: Origins, your dialogue choices are more varied, and you feel more of a connection with your character because they are just as lost as you and are a silent protagonist that will only say as much or do as much as you. In DAI, the dialogue system suffers from the same thing that many "RPGS" now-a-days are suffering from: the voiced protagonist with a dialogue wheel. There are times where it works, Mass Effect and Dragon Age 2 worked fine, but DAI tries to play both sides of the field. DAI wants you to role play as your character and they want your character to be a representation of you, but they also want a protagonist that fits the story and they will insert dialogue and actions in cutscenes that you did not specifically choose, leaving you feel dissatisfied no matter what kind of character you are looking for. It's disappointing.

The last thing I will discuss is the bugs.
This game has bugs, many bugs. Some, I would argue, are even game breaking. On my first play-through of this game, I was trying to complete a quest that allows you to craft lyrium potions which act as essentially mana potions. These potions are pretty important for mages during combat, as they speed your recovery of lyrium and allow you to cast your spells at a quicker rate. However, when I turned in the quest, the lyrium potion was not available to craft, and crafting them is the only way that you are able to obtain them. The only save that I could load to in order to potentially retry the quest, was 2 hours before. So if I wanted to get lyrium potions, I would have to load back 2 hours of progress and hope the quest works the second time. But the game has many more bugs than that:
-Being unable to pickup a highlighted item.
-Unable to talk to an NPC to finish your quest.
-Mobs despawning in the middle of combat.
-Enemies flying up in the air when using the Whirlwind ability upgrade which pulls enemies to you.
-Your highlighting ring making a sound for an item nearby when there is no item nearby to pick up.
-Herbs and ores glitching inside the ground or walls.
-Your character flying in the air after colliding with terrain.
-Missing textures.
-Music cutting out randomly.
-Sound all together cutting out randomly.
-Mobs standing still and just taking hits in the middle of combat.
-Mobs spawning in the ground.
-Mobs' models still standing even though they are dead.
-Your party staying in combat even though all enemies have been cleared.
etc.

I have heavily criticized this game but I still think it may be worth your time if you are willing to put in that time. If a single player RPG with action combat and a decent main story and companions sounds good to you, give the game a try when it's on sale. But Dragon Age: Origins is a better RPG and a better game. I would recommend the games in order.

Beware of the EA Origin client, there are many people who say it made the game unplayable, I had no issues with it. I also did not try the multiplayer mode.