Seems like the traditional German PC reviewers are the most trust-worthy here (4players and Gamestar). DA Inquisition is IMHO a mess, a mediocre game through and through that benefits from only three points: lack of competition (especially on console), being a Bioware game and being better than Dragon Age 2 in some aspects. At the same time it integrated some of the worst trends in current gaming (especially making a big open world without filling it with meaningful content and without making it also a "lifelike" believable world).
It seems like Bioware copied parts of Skyrim, Assassin's Creed/Watch_Dogs and Dragon Age 2 and mixed them together without any care what the strengths of the respective games were and how they were achieved. In the process they forgot or ignored their own strengths of previous games and the result is a "trend or focus group driven game for the mainstream" without any specfic strength. Yeah, the world is big, good looking and filled with content. But how much of this "content" is really meaningful? And how much is just the typcial Assassin's Creed style meaningless distraction aka collection the next item for some pointless achievment or weapon you don't even need because the combat is lacking both challenge and depth? DA Origins was good because of three basic but well done strengths: a hard, gritty fantasy world with meaningful quests, well done characters and a focused narrative (no matter what you did), a really tactical combat system focused on the whole party and party interaction and classic RPG qualities like equipping and levelling up your party and gear and deciding how you want to progress with your party and characters. Inquisition has NONE of that or at least nothing even close to that level. Instead we have dozends of items to collect, dozens of simple fetch quests to master and nice visuals. Yeah, exactly what I expect from a story-driven RPG, marketed as the successor to Dragon Age Origins...
If this is really the future of RPGs I gladly leave the AAA market in this genre for good. I'm just glad that other companies haven't forgotten what good story-driven RPGs are all about so I'm looking forward to Pillars of Eternity and alike.
(like most of us here i suppose) So we cannot constructively discussed this contrast between these two articles. Can we?
