I hope the next game has smaller and more focused worlds.
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I never pretended it was otherwise.
To illustrate the role lore plays in a story when used properly. Lore gives the audience a sense of wonder; an illusion that the world is larger and more mysterious than what we read on the page or see on a movie screen. Personally, I can't get invested in Dragon Age's lore in the slightest because it follows all the tropes of modern fantasy writing to a hilt. Like I said in my last post, it practically writes itself. Everything in the Dragon Age universe has been done in fantasy writing before. There is not an original bone in its body.
It's not meant to be original. It's meant to be a classic fantasy story with high production values like excellent voice acting, excellent music and excellent graphics coupled with a well-realized story that follows all the tropes but still has the occasional original concept and character. There is nothing wrong with this kind of game.
I really understand what you are saying. While I enjoyed DA:I, I had seen almost everything the game had to offer in previous titles. It's a very good game but I couldn't fall in love with it because I've seen this kind of thing so many times now. It's a bit like what's going on with MMOs, It doesn;t matter if SWOTR is a good WoW clone with above average story and VA (for an MMO), players are already used to the MMO "experience". Grinding, daily questing, quest hubs and raids were once very novel things for the games industry but players are bored out of their skull with it right now. You can't just take these tired game design principles and expect people to like them again just because it's a new game. Even the new WOW expansion, which is the best so far fails to maintain my attention because although the graphics are far better, the storytelling is far better and the gameplay mechanics are far better, at its core it's still the same game I've been playing for 7 years. People often confuse this with the game or the developers sucking.
I think people also expected the game to make them feel exactly like DA:O did, While certainly reasonable I don't think it is really possible. For starters lots of us were still teenagers who had played only a handful of CRPGs before when DA came out. My point is that we were different people with different tastes back then. 5 years have passed now and people change a lot in 5 years, especially young people like myself and maybe we don't always notice it. To give an example, the ending cutscene of act 1 in TW1 had a really big impact on me when I first saw it, it was the first story driven RPG I had ever played. That was in 2008. If I saw something of similar quality today I probably would not be nearly as impressed as I was back then because I have matured as a person and so have my tastes.
The element of surprise is no longer possible either. Not only do we read a ton about games before we play then but we also had expectations from the games we play nowadays. When I played ME, TW and DA for the first time I had no expectations and I think that made the experience better.
I don't think there are very grave blunders in DA. The graphics are excellent, the writing is good with a few standout moments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9EBcOUhgbA (The actress should get an oscar for the performance. This moment was brilliant. Shame about the lip sync), voice acting is great and the story is OK but I feel that the game didn't take enough risks. I think BioWare played it a little too safe but I can't blame them after DA2.
