I think BioWare clearly learned from Inquisition in their hindsight.

I'm currently reading through Jason Schreier's "Blood, Sweat And Pixels" book which details the developmental struggles of 10 different well known games including Dragon Age Inquisition and Bungie's Destiny.

Reading about DA:I's development is interesting. They basically had zero way of actually judging the pacing of the game until the very final months because it was such a scramble with Frostbite getting set up to actually implement all features. Writers would sometimes go in to review a story segment only to load up a level with no dialogue playing beyond the main character, and whenever the story lacked gameplay or systems they would use text-boxes detailing what was supposed to happen next, and it was only near the end when the game actually came together just like Andromeda, except they were a bit more on time and besides haphazardly writing the plot the game wasn't ever in any complete struggle unlike Andromeda. I'm just covering that ground to say that I don't think you should take what Andromeda was as an insight into whether BioWare learned from the game or not.

Now, Cameron Lee, the producer of DA:I has since then left the company but he was interviewed in this book and he, with first-hand knowledge of the game seemed very aware of where they messed up in various places. In particular he makes a very good point that the community has also raised before. Here's the excerpt.


Cameron Lee:
I very much agree with this, in fact he's spot-on, and I hope since he can tell other DA Leads can too, because it would mean Patrick Weekes's DA4 will end up on a much more managable scale whether it's some live-service Destiny-like "Buy all our DLCs over 3 years" type game or another annoying open world sandbox title instead of a spiritual successor to DA:O as long as the scale of the main campaign is somewhat like Trespasser but obviously longer and in more chapters I think they have a good template for DA4.

That said, it's absolutely mindboggling to hear about how chaotic the ongoing development of Inquistion was to the point where it's even admitted in the book that the PAX 2013 demo that promised us capturing keeps was entirely scripted to tailor an experience Mike Laidlaw expect them to be able to hit, so all the talk about how they tried but didn't get it to work... I mean, with this in mind it was never actually working, leading into regression, they just didn't manage to get it made because the game literally wasn't sewn together with functional systems including face animation until very few months before it released. 8 months from ship they still hadn't gotten a build where the player could pick companions.

All that considered they also knew some months before release that they would either have to cut something or crunch like heck and they chose to crunch. But that said, if it hadn't been such a rush to complete it there are so many things I think they would've changed. For one, the initial prologue mission literally had you closing the Breach right away leaving the player with no purpose. The ending in the vanilla game has similar kinds of story-odd reasons and as people have often joked Inquisition has an improper dramatic curve where after Haven you just keep climaxing and winning making it lose any tension it should have had.