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Notes -
I played DA:O and DA:I. DAII is on my to-play list, though I'll admit it's been there for a while. DA:O was the one I played the most, if with pretty normie gameplay decisions for most runthroughs and complaining about The Deep Roads pacing every fucking time. As gameplay matters, both are very happy to let you take subobtimal decisions, but it's also far more punishing than Mass Effect: most of my runs used Arcane Mage approaches, because I found that origin most interesting, but Arcane Mage could faceroll hard and readily challenge nightmare difficulty where Shapeshifter-only struggled on medium and even easy, especially with some of the unavoidable fights. And fights were long enough that struggling was less fun.
While DA:I suffered a bit from throwing in random game mechanics to fill time, it really built on a lot of the setting ideas. Cole explores a lot of the spirit world stuff better than Wynne did, imo, and as much as Iron Bull (and the game in general) suffers from the Drizzt problem where every named member of a race is explicitly defying the stereotypes (and explicit rules, given the Qun!) rather than just being more complex than the stereotypes, he was still executed as well or better than Sten as someone you'd actually want to work with. Actual combat gameplay was a lot more even, both in highs and lows, and there's a bit more handholding for character builds.
It's good to hear that DA4 hasn't been cancelled, since it'd been pretty much incommunicado for a while now, and there's definitely some interesting balls left in the air after DA:I that would be pretty frustrating if they never land. The series has been a lot less than Mass Effect, for better or worse -- I don't think anyone expect the Big End Game Decision from DA:O to mean the last game in the series will want your save file, even if that necessarily cuts off a large portion of the lore and characterization space (eg, warnings that killing all the Archdemons will cause an apocalypse don't work great if one of the archdemons is in a Schrodinger's cat, Cole's loyalty quest limits what DA4 can do with him short of declaring one choice canon). But if that means the game also doesn't devolve into choosing between three big lights at the end, I'm willing to accept weird retrocanon.
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