DA was announced in 2004, and EA took over in 2007 with the game coming out in 2009. I definitely think EA had some influence over the game, but I feel it was too far along for them to change it much if any. DA2 was a full EA owned production though, and it clearly shows.
I know you liked DA2, but I thought it was easily one of the worst games of all time because of what it should and could have been. The story was anything but compelling. The environments were recycled so much I almost thought it was an intentional joke of some kind. The game play was anything but tactical, enemies spawning out of the sky and ground? That was more of a joke than the recycled environments! I don't know of any old school RPG gamers that liked DA2, it was an abomination of epic proportions.
Does that really make it one of the
worst games? Worse than something like, say,
Mindjack? Worse than Kinect and Wii shovelware? Worse than movie-licensed games sold for a quick buck? To put it another way, would you rather
play those games rather than DAII? Sure, DAII can be seen as plenty disappointing, but disappointing is not the same thing as simply being awful.
I get a lot of the criticisms of DAII. Recycled environments, definitely. The first Mass Effect got a bunch of criticism for reusing environments as well, so I would have figured that the DAII devs should have known they would be criticized for it. They probably had to cut corners on that in order to rush the game out. Running through DAO again, it's noticeable that they did recycle environments for some things, but it either was not too conspicuous or it made sense in the story. The random encounters on the road reused a few maps, but they were not too essential to the story. You revisited areas that you may have seen before in origin stories, but it was after being away for a while so it felt natural and not because they were being cheap. Whereas in DAII there was a specific set of maps that they noticeably reused over...and over...and over...almost worse than ME1, really, because these recycled environments came up in plot or main character related quests. A return to the approach in DAO would be very welcome.
Enemies essentially respawning in the middle of a fight was also annoying. I do think that the game retained a level of tactics, because I still felt I had to prioritize taking out mages or elite enemies, or at different times taking out the mooks so they wouldn't chip away at me while I deal with the elites. The harder fights still required strategizing, managing what my party members were using mana/stamina on, when and who to use health poultices, etc. But yeah, no respawning enemies in Inquisition please, BioWare.
The story, I thought, was pretty good; the Qunari arc was probably the best, and the mages vs templars was good though a little too heavyhanded at times and sort of crumbled by the end. I've heard it said that it was bad for DAII to have everything centered around one city rather than moving around a whole country; I disagree. DAO's story was good, but it was, at its core, a generic story of questing around to find the plot Macguffins (support from allies) in order to stop the evil invasion of orc expies. Well written and executed, but still generic at its core. With DAII they tried to do something different, and I think they did it rather well, and could have done even better if they hadn't so obviously rushed the game.
I'm not sure if I can call myself an "old school RPG gamer". The first real RPG I played, not counting Zelda games, was Knights of the Old Republic (PC version). I loved it, and I would later play the Mass Effect games and Dragon Age Origins and loved them as well. I've heard it said that fans of DAO tend to hate DAII while people who like DAII dislike DAO; I disagree because I myself enjoy both. DAO is clearly the superior game, though, and I hope Dragon Age Inquisition is a great improvement over DAII.