They really dropped the ball with the Mages questline

Honestly, the time travel thing doesn't bother me. Especially since they made it clear that it couldn't be done now that the Breach is closed so it won't likely happen again.

What bothers me more about the mage questline overall is that the mage-Templar war was resolved so easily.

I think we should have been running into rogue splinter groups all over the place of both mages and templars, taking over small villages, practicing blood magic, holding kangaroo courts, plotting. Really emphasize how chaotic the conflict was supposed to make the South.

Instead we got one battleground in the Hinterlands..

And drink.

Yeh, I've said this time and again in posts on multiple threads. The time travel plot should never have been part of the game. It breaks the lore previously established about the limits of magic and it is very poorly explained how it actually worked, particularly the idea that Alexius wound back time just in the bubble of Redcliffe so he could recruit the mages BEFORE Fiona left to give her invitation, so she denies all knowledge of the meeting and then starts rubbing her head as if perhaps she does remember. One or the other guys, either she never gave the invitation and you just turn up by accident, or she gave the invitation but Alexius turns up before you arrive and persuades her to his cause.

To my mind, it doesn't matter if they do say it was only possible because of the Breach, it is an immersion breaking anomaly. They could have dealt with the plotline far better if they had relied on conventional blood magic mind control to explain everything. Fiona was controlled by blood magic into making her decision (making a valid excuse for such stupidity), Alexius could have tried to control the Inquisitor's mind through blood magic and demons in the Fade (requiring Dorian to use his expertise to go into the Fade to aid you) and the whole business about knowing the future could have been dealt with in exactly the same way as for CoJ.

Instead we had Dorian as the Thedas Dr Who, who just need to locate his sonic screwdriver (amulet) in order to put everything back the way it was. To make it more annoying you have to take this path if you want to side with the mages. My canon game goes with Champions of the Just. It introduces Cole in a much better way, I find Dorian far more heroic in that scenario, having been knocked back because I didn't believe his whole time magic spiel (I still go to Redcliffe, my PC just finds the whole thing mind boggling) and the lore for what happens is consistent with the game world.

Our PC can even object to Dorian's explanation in the Chantry of "It's time magic, go for it". Well I didn't.

I'm telling you, it was all just a dream/mind game that Alexius did, not actual time travel happened.

Indeed, this time travel never happened... this is the time travel's essence!

On the other hand; holy shit motherfucking time travel it's awsome. It's about perspective

I have very little patience when it comes to time-travel plots. There are so many ways it could go wrong, and so many ways it could end up being just a contrived way of making a plot seem cool. And Dragon Age's attempt at a time-travel plot left much to be desired.

Companions were relatively unaffected by the red lyrium, the entire time thing seemed to only affect Redcliffe even though we know Fiona was presumably outside that bubble when she tried to contact the Inquisition--only for Fiona herself to seem susceptible to the time magic by the time we try to meet her. So the actual scope of time manipulation is sketchy to say the least. I will give them props though for giving a convincing reason for why time travel was possible in this particular instance though (breach allowing time to be more malleable).

The only good thing that came out of the plot was the theories that players came up with afterwards.
Some of the interesting ones included the theory that elves were once immortal because a world without the veil is less affected by time permanence.
Another was how even we saw a future, that future was merely a possible reality perpetuated by spirits, with several lore references to how spirits view times differently than others, and how Cole has made several references to how spirits can see "what can be". Like a dream that doubled as a premonition or a prophesy.
Another one went Game theory on it and said that the only reality is a dream reality and the entire dragon age series is merely one particular form of these dream-realities, where every possible world state exists because there are multiple dream realities.

Any time you resort to time travel when it isn't already part of your fictional premise you're copping out. I can't believe David Gaider didn't stop this from happening.

Who's to say it won't happen again?
This was an experiment made by Alexius,if they improve the spell they may even be able to create time travel without the need of the breach or they could create small breaches just to cast the spell.Afterall it takes nothing to create tears in the veil for Tevinter mages.

I liked Meredith's fate, and I don't think, that this was "sudden". (But I'm curious, what happened to the smith, who created her sword.)

Dorian doesn't "need" that quest though to be a great character. As I've said above, it could just as easily have been Dorian entering the Fade to rescue you from a blood magic attack. He could still have been the hero of the quest using his undoubted mage skills. Everything could have pretty much been the same, except it wouldn't have involved time travel and throwing up all the problems that it did with explaining how it could possibly work.

You can simply ignore the ridiculousness of the premise but it does rather spoil the immersion. Mind you, I suppose you could say the same of 'Into the Abyss' and physically walking in the Fade with all your companions simply because you have a magical bauble in your hand, or Corypheus being suddenly able to levitate whole mountains with his blight magic.

What I loved about Dragon Age is that the setting had an internal consistency. There were limitations on what mages could do and this wasn't just because of the southern Chantry's attitude to magic as Tevinter had been pushing the boundaries of magic for hundreds of years, so they knew what was and wasn't possible. Then suddenly everything we had been told concerning the limitations of magic in Thedas was suddenly thrown out of the window because of the discovery of long hidden elven artefacts (I'm thinking that amulet that Alexius was using wasn't something he made himself).

The Limits of Magic given in WoT were, so far as I was aware, the rules set out by the writers and not meant to be something that could be hand waved away. It says the following: "Like mages, enchanted items are unable to break the rules of common magic. Enchanted items cannot resurrect the dead or physically enter the Fade." Now it would seem that we can forget these rules, so long as we can find some ancient elven artefact. In fact DG was breaking the rules as far back as his comic series, since the Magellan was meant to be some sort of magical artefact that Aurelius Titus had discovered that could make Thedas-wide effects once powered up by someone's "special" blood. So who knows what they will come up with next.

She didn't lost her emotions, these only intensified. Meredith was paranoid and cruel even before red lyrium. Her paranoia was the reason, why she could not resist the temptation and her foolish and overweening faith in her own willpower made her confident, that she will be able to handle this magical power. This is really human, and so similar than her despised blood mages' reasons. She died as an Abomination.
Very ironic.

But she was really strong, she was able to withstand the total madness for a long time. Until the end, she behaved as if she was almost normal.