Yeah I tried to jump into DAI after finally completing Origins, boy was I incredibly disappointd. Full disclosure I have actually beaten DAI before but that was like 8 years after the last time I played origins and my only references for good gameplay at the time were equally bloated open world monstrosities. So, here's the highlight reel for my 8 hour excursion into the shit filled pit that is DAI:

The Okay

• It's pretty, that's about it.

• The character writing is basically the only thing that saves modern bioware games, but you need to wade through like 40 hours of game in this case to really dig into it.

The Bad

• All of Origin's Grimdark flavor has been completely stripped out of Inquisition and sanitized, it's nothing but a soulless generic high fantasy world now, goodbye Thedas.

• In origins your main character went through some seriously horrific shit to become a grey warden, showing you just how much the world really sucks. In inquisition you are an uber powered mary sue/gary stu who got their powers due to random chance and has absolutely zero motivation for doing any of the things they do.

• The dialogue is a joke. Every option is now a flavor of "Yes while bootlicking", "Sarcastic Yes", "Angry No but effectively Yes", There's almost no real choice in the game, even recruiting agents is basically just "do you want to join my inquisition or fuck off to princeton and exit the game?"

• This game's side quests are basically a thousand instances of "Collect 10 Bear Asses multiplied by 4, and also some frog shit and and a chicken because I'm hungry". Sure origin had some bear ass quests too, but none of them were vital to progress, in origins progression is now tied to how much fucking busy work you do.

• On that subject, after about 8 hours of gameplay, 5 of which spent on this playthrough, I reached the quest where you could advance to Skyhold at level 6. It was absolutely incompletable because the enemies were too strong so basically my options were "go grind sidequests for 5 levels" or delete the game. Guess which one I picked.

• War Table missions are a complete waste of time and design space, sure you can cheat and set your clock forward a million times to get infinite gold or whatever, but if you play with these as designed they're just there to make you waste more time fast traveling back to haven every 20 minutes to an hour to set more missions.

• "Get out of the Hinterlands though" Yeah I did, wasn't that impressed. Each area has like one major interesting quest and a bunch of side crap, and even the major quests are kind of mediocre. All filler no killer man.

• Oh my god the gear system is ass. I hate random loot with a fiery passion, and even the nonrandom loot barely makes a difference because of the stupid grindy level system where enemies two levels higher than you are borderline unkillable. Combine this with all the minor barely impactful stat tweaks and random sigil drops, I just hate it. Origin's random loot system wasn't great either but the static loot in the world you could find in every run is amazing and basically made the entire random gear/tier system completely null and void.

The Petty

• I fucking hate this game's color scheme. Eye bleaching lime green on grey lifeless backgrounds, oh boy. Between this and the recent rash of color vomit in modern games I'm beginning to miss the "brown period" more every day.

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Yeah that's all I got, I know it's popular to hate on inquisition but god damn playing it side by side with origins just blows massive holes in that game's design and mechanics, it's just not a good game.