The Dragon Age series, to me, has been a strange mirror of the Mass Effect series in terms of the quality of their installments. (Yea, I know they're made by the same company, but it still feels weird) The first installments were really heavy and dense on the lore and world building, the locations felt bigger and more sprawling than they needed to be, given the linearity of the gameplay, and the combat was the most needlessly complicated in either series. The sequels took on a tone of assuming the player was already somewhat familiar with the world and thus went less heavy on the expository dialogue and interactions, while still putting depth into the stories. They also made the maps more linear to match the gameplay, but not so much that you were in modern military FPS singleplayer campaign, and the combat was faster, streamlined, and more satisfying. By the time the third installment came out they seemed to focus more on making pretty worlds and character models and wrapping up the stories than to allow as much choice or meaningful interaction as the previous games did, and ultimately wound up being very overrated games that get by on reputation and pedigree of their previous installments.