If you ever wanted confirmation that Bioware are now no more than a pretty label that EA sticks on a box to stir up feelings of nostalgia then DA:I is it. Bioware used to be all about the journey. Great characters, great dialogue and great story. In short, great games that defined a genre.
My first hour with the game was problematic with crash after crash and various bugs crawling from the woodwork; which again just clarified that this was afterall an EA game. 30 to 40 minutes of trawling the internet and another 30 or so minutes implementing various workarounds and I was finally able to play with the game reasonably stable.
Now, the game comes on no less than 4 DVD's so that means a crap-ton of content all played out against some of the best scenery yet seen in a video game. The actual main story though ( which is where Bioware usually shines ) can be completed in under 20 hours if all the side quests are ignored, and trust me, you will want to ignore a lot of them. I will say though that if you love the run of the miill MMO and you love skyrim then you will likely love this game as well because it tries to be both. Of course the reverse is also true so if you don't like MMO's or Skyrim then avoid this like the plague and you can probably tell by those two statements that EA/BW have missed the boat somewhat.
The first hour or so is quite linear but that's okay as it serves as a tutorial for the game's main aspects. After this it opens up into a not quite openworld experience. Not quite as the map consists of a number of areas that can be unlocked. Each of these areas though is large enough to satisfy the explorer in you with the first area ( The Hinterlands ) being larger than the gameworlds of DA 1 + 2 combined. It is a shame then that with such a huge arena they chose to fill it with fed-ex & kill quests aka just about every mmo in the past 15 years. Not only that but the devs actually thought that it would be a good idea to throw in some collection quests as well, along with the obligatory jump puzzles /facepalm
I'm going to be blunt here and say that it feels more like an Ubisoft game than a Bioware one. In all the time I have spent on the game so far I have felt no real connection to any of the characters, the story hasn't hooked me and dragged me in and I have no eager anticipation for my next game session; you know, all the things that BW games used to give you, which is very sad. Even the art is different. It's like watching a sequel to your favourite movie but one that has been made15 years after the original with a different cast of actors and a half-baked script. A movie made simply to generate money. What I'm trying to say is that DA:I feels like it has no soul, no identity of it's own and to be honest, with the lack of mod support no real future. Bioware used to make games that were an event and In that DA:I is a non starter.
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The above was written after 15 or so hours of gameplay which normally is more than enough to give a game a fair shake. However. I read a couple of reviews that stated the game only really gets started after 20 hours ( which is bad bloody design to start with ) so I stuck with it. True enough, after just over 20 hours ( 22 for me ) the game did improve as the story elements started to kick in and I wondered if I had been too unfair in what I had written. The next 20 hours of gameplay raised the score in my mind to about a 7 ( without the first 20 hours it would have been an 8 ). But then after 40 - 50 hours I had an epiphany that sent the score spiralling down to a 5. The epiphany was this: The gameworld as a whole is huge and some have said that there is about 150 hours of content. Most of those 150 hours though are spent banging your head against jump or pathing puzzles until you just want to smash the game disks and never hear the words inquisition again. Honestly, it isn't just a few here and there, they are bloody everywhere, and if there is the slightest chance that you could get up to an area using a route other than the one intended by the devs there is an invisible wall placed to stop you, it's infuriating. For me 60 hours was enough. The game has now been thrown onto the proverbial dusty shelf and a final score of 5. I will say simply that if I want to play an MMO then I will buy and play an MMO. If I want to play a platformer then I will turn to Mario or one of it's offshoots. What I did want to play was the next instalment of a Bioware epic and instead I got a phantom of bioware trying in vain to claw it's way out of a steaming pile of EA crap.