Dragon Age’s drop in reputation had nothing to do with launchers, given many if not most players were on console.
“Simplicity” is arguably what killed it, because they had an excellent formula with Origins, and “simplified” it to the point it lost its identity as a true RPG.
combat was more fun I thought,
And this is the problem. The original game was made for people into RPGs (technically Real Time with Pause RPG).
The sequels gave a middle finger to those people by chasing simplistic, action focused combat with minimal RPG aspects. Hence why people despise them.
It’s always weird to me when people talk about video games as if story is the single most important aspect.
Personally I think 2’s biggest folly was abandoning the deep RPG in favor of overly-simplistic hack and slash. A mistake 3 somewhat attempted to correct, and for that, I’ll take its weaker story because I enjoy playing it much more. And if course 1 blows them both out of the water in terms of RPG gameplay.
Inquisition wasn’t quite as bad, I actually enjoyed it because it made an attempt to walk back some of the “streamlining” from 2, though obviously they both pale in comparison to Origins.
I was kind of hopeful they’d rediscovered their identity somewhat with Inquisition, but 4 looks like that hope was misplaced. They doubled down on abandoning the RPG in favor of the overly simplistic button masher with a smattering of RPG elements that are more or less meaningless.
It genuinely feels like the notion of a pure triple AAA RPG is slowly being torn down by publishers chasing the wide audience of action game fans who will ultimately not care that much for the end product.
And this, friends, is why so many businesses are closing their forums and other public facing, indexed spaces and using Discord. It’s a black box that they can gatekeep. No complainers allowed to kill the “vibe”, no publicly searchable database that will keep track of what has been deleted, and no visibility for the negativity to the general public doing a Google search on the product.