I don't see anyone asking for your opinion, newfag.
Stop taking your cues on forum culture from 4chan. You're not going to blend in acting like that.
Again, it's a great game. These utter faggots just want to be edgy fucks. I'm surprised anyone gives a fuck that it's so "cool on the Codex" to hate DA: O. Those are the faggots that are sad right there. It's already written in stone that this is a top 100 greatest RPG of all time. That's not something that can be changed.
Seriously man, why do you give so much of a fuck? You sound like a man who feels threatened by the fact that there are other people who dislike the things you like.
Let's not confuse everything. I will divide the term "story" in 3 different thing :
-The characters. For an rpg, they are indeed quite good
I'll disagree. They're pretty one-dimensional with a token attempt at hidden depths or twists. Alistair is a naive pushover. Leliana's a fruity religious nut with a thing for killing people and somehow nowhere near as interesting as that brief description sounded. Morrigan is supposed to be an independent person who values personal gain over helping others, but in practice she's mostly a nagging shrew who complains every time you try to do something that helps other people, even if it obviously helps yourself to do so, to the point that "Morrigan disapproves" is an actual meme. Zevran doesn't feel like a person either. Oghren is basically a full-on irresponsible alcoholic who is just along for the ride because the only thing he's good at is hitting things.
None of these are very good characters. Maybe they had potential, but it certainly isn't realized well.
Loghain is a very believable villain, and most of your follower are fleshed out, have good banter between them and coherent reaction regarding your decision. I have no quarrel with that.
Loghain as originally conceptualized (when it was planned that Cailan was going to divorce Anora for Celene and merge Ferelden back into Orlais, with Eamon being the intermediary for Cailan and Celene's courtship because he is a sympathizer for Orlais and ultimately disapproves of Loghain and Anora as jumped-up peasants rather than true-blood nobles) was a fairly believable villain. Loghain as we actually got him was basically a mustache-twirling villain who decided that in the midst of a highly important battle between Ferelden and the darkspawn he was going to throw the battle, get his own king killed, screw over Ferelden by opening it up to darkspawn hordes, and start usurping power, just because.
-The setting and world-building. It has potential, lot of nice idea, but there is quite a few time it's badly handled (for reason already evoked two pages ago) and a sudden discrepancy appear. Was retconned into much worse in later installment, but who the fuck care about DA2 and 3.
Potential, sure, but for the most part it was what we call a "standard fantasy setting." Just plain old medieval fantasy with elves, dwarves, etc. and an over-arching good vs evil conflict (but being Bioware they didn't know how to handle an actual war vs evil mindless murder hordes as the basis for a plot, so they needed Loghain as a villain instead). Retcons are also dime-a-dozen in Dragon Age and started creeping up as early as Awakening and inconsistencies even existed in DAO proper. In addition, it's worth noting that while DAO tried to be more of a "dark" and "mature" fantasy, Bioware was extremely "good vs evil" in the way they handled things so their usual solution to make things gray is that shitty decisions can have some good consequences and good decisions can have shitty consequences. It's not a very deep approach to drawing moral dilemmas; it's someone basically putting spots of black onto white and spots of white onto black and expecting you to squint hard enough so it looks gray.
Frankly, Bioware was
never good at handling moral grayness or doing dark, mature stories. It's simply not their style.
-Quest and overarching plot line. The subplot line ( character origin, gathering ally in a zone ) tend to start decently but some end up with disappointing resolution,against due to dumbing down ( elves and dwarf origin being the blatant example). Overarching plot is extremely classical, one could argue is just NWN OC campaign reskinned.
The bigger problem with the overarching plot vs the subplot (same one Inquisition has) is that it tries to establish narrative time pressure to race against doomsday but in reality you can just fuck around as long as you like doing all kinds of ludicrously menial and unnecessary sidequests. Other than that the main quest isn't really anything to sing home about and is mostly just a narrative device to funnel players through the four main points of the quest. Integration of narrative goals between the overarching story (you're in a race to stop the darkspawn) and subquests is weak and the integration of the overarching story with the actual game as the player experiences it (you never suffer for taking your time and you never really lead any efforts to check the darkspawn's advance) is much worse.
And then we deal with dumbing down like the gutting of the Dwarf Noble questline, the dumbing down of the Dalish Elf questline, the removal of the Celene subplot, removing consequences for being a Blood Mage, and so on.
