Okay, I verified my game files in Origin, updated my video driver, and updated my operating system; then, I rebooted.
I managed to get from "clicking to start the game" to "look at me, I'm the Herald of Andraste!" in five minutes, so that's a success there, even if I'm not sure how it happened!
Then, lightning did something with the power lines and my computer died, and I left it unplugged for about four hours. Then, I managed to get the game to load in six minutes, and transitioned from the Hinterlands to Haven in about a minute.
So ... I guess whatever's wrong is fixed now?
It is hard to say. But I won't be asking for a refund, at least.
Oh, and thank you for your advice, both of you who replied!
Six minutes to load the game is still very long, but if a lightning strike did improve overall load times, then I think you should indeed be grateful for this divine intervention. (My money's on Zeus.)
I have a Predator helios 300 i5 7300HQ GTX 1050ti and i have extreme long loading times more than 20 minutes i just started the game and after almost 1h couldn't even played just passed the choosing character head and name and then the cutscene after the spiders chase and here i go again for another black loadning screen for who knows how much time
You may want to post up a DxDiag file, and maybe try a clean boot, or check your computer settings for things such as Anti-virus, firewall, origin, cloud saves and such because anything over 2-3 minutes is bad, as in really really bad, you have a problem somewhere. Even before I updated to my Ryzen 7 CPU and upped my RAM to 16 gigs, I was running a 4 core AMD chip, with 8 gigs ram and standard HDs, and my load times were about a minute in length. With my new system they are still about that, because it just takes a time to pull the data off standard HDs instead of having SSDs. Even back in the early times of DAI very few people had more than 1-2 minute load times, and so you having 20 minute loads on a decent machine is abnormal.
I can generally start the game from Origin, and be in game, with character loaded to last save in less than 5 minutes and I would bet closer to 3 minutes, but I haven't actually timed it.
Edited to add: Just started game from Origin and watched the clock at bottom of my second monitor...elapsed time from clicking play to full control of character in Skyhold was less than 2 minutes and was actually probably closer to 1 minute 15 seconds.
