Dragon Age Inquisition is a solid RPG game with an in depth and compelling story-line. Each playable character has a great background story. There is a great deal of opportunity for character conversations and interactions. In fact, I highly recommend players interact often with your allies, you may gain new mission or even perhaps fall in love with someone if you so choose. Leveling up is straight forward and reasonable. I played as a Dalish Elf Mage.
As a magic user I found it nice I could specialize in a variety of magics. One thing though is that specializations start to become somewhat confounded later in the game. You only have 8 slots for magic which sounds like a lot but it's not, I don't want to use spoilers so let's just say you get lots of options of specialization and there's just not enough room for the spells you want to pick from. Potions require way too many ingredients, that is one big complaint I have. It takes forever to collect and even with allies helping collect it seems they rarely came back with what they said they were going to collect making it even harder. Another negative was, no healing spells. I have never seen this in an RPG before and think it was a bit of a mistake. Other spells were great. It look a little bit to get the hang of some of the area effect spells but once I got it it was easy.
For the most part you are free to roam rather than play the game in a completely linear fashion, but be cautious, you may end up in areas too difficult for you if you wander too far from the main missions too fast. The War Table is an interesting addition to the game. You can choose in what way you wish to complete mission, by stealth, with forces, or with your ambassador's connections. Environment and game-play graphics are excellent. CGI and character animations left something to be desired. In particular with the character animations, the character's facial features seemed sub-par, and once again female characters were stuck wearing very un-girly macho looking hair choices. There is also some issues with lighting in both the character creation UI and Armor Tinting UI that does not show realistic results of the way your characters and armor looks outside the UI screens. I found often my character looked cool in the creation UI but then later in CGI scenes looked terrible, or armor looked a completely different shade outside the tinting UI.
Armor and weapon creation was pretty good but could have been simpler to do some things missing were the ability to see what the armor or weapon looks like or does (it's stats) before choosing to buy the schematic. I am also almost positive that I may have bought and/or found the same schematics several times in the game and there was no warning that I already owned them.
Leveling up characters is fairly easy but it lacks one very basic concept I have never seen before in an RPG. Unless I'm mistaken you don't get any increases in stats or health. I have never seen a game allow me to pick spells but not also pick a main stat for instance magic to level up as I see fit. This made two of my characters fairly weak in the higher levels. Basically the game relied too heavily on armor and weapons to increase stats and health. The other annoying thing about character stats that irritated me is that you cannot see in what way if any increases main stats such as Willpower is doing, if anything for your character. You have stat bars that show up when equipping armor, but it fails to measure these stats so makes it very hard to decide if it's better to have +40 to health or +2 to Constitution in this game.
The story-line and characters really is the best part of this game in my opinion and it outweighs the negatives which is why I gave this title a very high score. I look forward to the DLC and will review those once I've played them. I recommend this game to any RPG lover, especially if you are a story driven player who likes investigation and reading back story, because there is lots of it. Oh and there are definatley dragons.