What
DA2 wasn't generic. They tried something new with story, not another chosen one who saves the world. They gave the series a visual identity. You look at something and you can see "yep it's Dragon Age"
DAI was amazing. Except fetch quests of course.
What was about DAO that is not generic? Grey colors everywhere, so everything looked like shit, another chosen one, slow and boring combat, on consoles combat was especially terrible
I'll never be able to understand anyone who thinks DA2 was a positive move for the series. It was a thin veneer of Dragon Age over a poorly made, shallow action-RPG. It reused its own assets left and right, rewrote characters from the first game to make them 1 dimensional, and had a narrative that was not only a fraction of the scope of its predecessor, but had amateurish writing on top of it. It took everything interesting about DA:O and tossed it out or watered it down in favor of a quick follow up cash grab.
DA:I by comparison is a bloated, overlong, mediocre affair that retains the writing quality of DA2, but at least attempts to be mechanically interesting. It ended up being a game that deserved to be 25 hours long, and instead was stretched over 70, no doubt because some design document mandated that it needed to be big because big = value and quality (It does not; it did not).
Complaining about the color palette of DA:O is a trivial thing; welcome to the 360 era, so many much of it was muted color palettes (This also ignores the creativity of the environments, monsters, and characters which were highly varied). The combat was likewise of a formula very familiar and welcome to people who liked isometric RPGs from which the game takes inspiration. It can be easy and boring or complex depending on the difficulty. But the core of what made DA:O fantastic was the way it took some familiar fantasy tropes and built a interesting, complex, and unique world. The writing was very well done to build this world and very well done for nearly every character.
And chosen one character plot? That is absolutely not what the plot is. It's conclusion actually allows you to let someone else make the great sacrifices, because you're not the lone savior. It is not a chosen one narrative.
This is a digression from the core of this thread, but my feelings on Dragon Age as a shell franchise aren't changing. It's another dead series from Bioware.
