I agree with so many of your points and would like to expand on why I’m feeling so jaded with the series as a whole after DAV. I will never understand why this company would lean away from compelling, fully fleshed out romances. It makes less than zero sense. It didn’t make sense when Anthem happened and it doesn’t make sense now. I’m a BioWare superfan that skipped Anthem specifically because that’s not what I want from a BioWare game. I can get mech suits and exploration from a million other companies if I wanted it (I don’t), but you know what I can’t get? Romance, especially romance while playing as a woman character, and especially not one baked into the story the way it was in the previous installments.
I will play a game that has the controls backwards and 3/4 upside down if it includes a romantic arc. Romance is the #1 selling genre of all time, and time and time again game devs and investors cut that content first. I still remember the minute little details from DAO, DA2, and DAI that made me go all girlish and giggly, and I’ve gotten nothing like that from DAV. I couldn’t wait to go back to Skyhold to see what I was in for, yet going back to the Lighthouse is an exercise in setting your expectations to near-zero and still being disappointed.
I think it’s a symptom of there being a lack of content overall, but for a player like me that will literally only buy the game because they’re established as THE name for fantasy romance, it’s the part that stings the worst. I waited ten years wondering how they were going to top Blackwall’s pained exclamation during the Well bit, Solas’ vallaslin scene, Cullen’s coin exchange, etc., and I ended up with about 10-15 minutes of mostly nothing, broke up into three scenes with 20+ hours between them. What happened?
