Dragon Age - Inquisition: Some problems I have with the game

I am about, I dunno, 40-50 hours of gameplay in to this extremely huge and for the most part very well-executed RPG. I really like most aspects of it but just like any game, it does have its problems and I want to briefly talk about them here. Overall it is still a great game but I'm gonna "nitpick" for a little while here.

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No game is flawless. There are some that come close but for the most part RPG's are open to significantly more scrutiny than other types of games because they are so immense, especially when they have an open world layout and this game certainly has that.

Where TF do I go now?

Dragon Age is such a massive game that carries on in an almost completely non-liner fashion and has 10x the amount of side-quests than the mado-quests (mandatory quests.) This stays fun for a while, but at many points in the game I am wandering around and then have to really think for a while to figure out what it is that I am meant to be doing exactly.

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this isn't even the fully expanded journal. It is so long it wont fit on one screen

In order to figure out what it is that you are meant to be doing as part of the main quest you have to enter the journal and then friggin figure it out. Normally the major quest objectives are at the top but then the description of which area you are meant to go to to trigger the event isn't terribly obvious and you end up wandering around one of the localized maps for an hour or so only to realize that this isn't even the correct map and you haven't actually advanced the story at all. At first this appealed to me because the world is so huge... now it is starting to get on my nerves.

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no access to "currently equipped items from some menus

For the most part they did this quite well, but then all of a sudden, in certain menus such as when you are crafting customized weapons, you all of a sudden can not look to see what your crew is currently wearing to see if crafting another item is even going to be worth it (mostly it isn't)

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So you are in here and looking at the 123-143 armor rating range and thinking "well how much of an improvement would that be over what I currently have?" only to discover that the only way to cross check this is to completely exit the crafting station and manually search your inventory for that specific character and what he or she is currently wearing. This might seem like I am being picky but you have 10 characters plus, all with different gear on. How can anyone be expected to simply remember the armor and DPS ratings of all of these guys? The end result is that you either play a game with a pen and paper in front of you, you spend a lot of time jumping exiting and entering menus, or you simply bypass crafting altogether because it isn't really necessary anyway (I think most people do the last thing.) This could have been solved simply by adding a "compare" button to the interface and I cant imagine why they didn't do this.

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Senselessly making you walk / view cutscenes time and time again

Although this game is not anywhere near as bad an offender as other titles such as the grand champion of repetitive cutscenes, Final Fantasy 15; they still make you watch a couple of animation sequences that you revisit hundreds of times in the game.

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This is the "War Table" and it is a centerpiece to the game. You will be meeting at this table a hundred times during your journey in the game and each time you visit this place you are forced by virtue of fast-travel-waypoints never being right next to it, to wander down hallways, opening multiple doors, and then sitting through a cutscene where everyone gathers to stand next to the war table. The War Table, is also always in a completely different room so there is a (albeit minor) load time in order to see it at all.

I know this is me perhaps being too picky but I find anything that must be done dozens or even hundreds of times in a game having a cutscene beyond the first couple of times that you encounter it to be annoying and inexcusable especially if the cutsene animation is EXACTLY THE SAME every time that you see it.

Also, once you do open the War Table interface, it is not entirely clear where it is that you are meant to be going next and the flowery nicknames for the various places you can go don't really give a good indication of WTF you are supposed to be doing next. I don't know how many times I have actually traveled to the wrong place and then realized it almost as soon as I go there (sitting through load times) only to have to re-load back, walk down the hallway to the war room / war table again, in order to correct this mistake.

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tl;dr ... and yes, this article is "tl"

Dragon Age - Inquisition is still a great game and especially when you consider the fact that it is under $10 at the moment, i think it is one of the better choices out there at the moment for any RPG fan. However, I am still a little perplexed how it is that a game can manage to get through all the testing and the finished product still ends up having these annoying "features" in it.

The game is HUGE and a vast majority of the stuff that you can do, you don't actually have to do it to progress the game. I normally like having sidequests, but I think that DA:I may have actually made this open world a little too open.