How well will side-questing be handled?

Well, Bioware did say they took inspiration from Witcher 3's sidequests this time around instead of DA:I. And we haven't really seen anything much about sidecontent other than the loyalty missions. My guess is that it's going to be a mix of both fully-fledged sidequests and fetchquests. We do have a crafting system which means we will be scanning for resources throughout the game. It will be inevitable that some quests make use of that scanning system.

My only hope is that they minimize the fetchquests as much as possible. That was my number one issue with DA:I. The overwhelming amount of fetchquests was what turned me away from making more playthroughs on that game (Which is crazy, as I usually makes dozens of playthroughs on Bioware games).