Meaningful side quests

That is fantastic. Nothing ruins an RPG faster than having boring quests. I haven't actually gotten around to playing The Witcher 3 yet, but I hear that the side quests are fantastic.

Every single Bioware RPG has some side content that I've found to be boring and a waste of time. Worst has been ME2's planet scanning and ME1's empty planets. Inquisition's mistakes were nothing compared to that. I had no problem collecting shards or whatever it is people complain about.

If we get better sidequests then good, sometimes DAI's fetch quests were indeed boring (mind you ME also had plenty of those as did DAO&DA2) and didn't provide much roleplaying options. Just "Find my pants" and "Okay here's your pants" certainly wasn't very good side content.

Well, having finally played and completed the Witcher 3 a couple weeks ago, I have to say it's a good game to be inspired by. The side quests were quite well done and the characters were awesome.

1. Side quests that serve to develop or elaborate on the main narrative.
2. Side quests make sense in the setting.
3. Interesting, memorable characters met during these side quests.
4. Game ending acknowledges more important choices made during side quests.
5. Don't waste my goddamn time.

That about sums it up.

let's hope they will walk the talk. What I'm concerned about is that they may mean well, but not necessarily have the writing/designing talent to pull it off. I can't remember many sidequests in ME franchise that I was truly satisfied with that weren't the main course of specific DLC like Overlord or BDTS.

Me1's planets might have been empty, but I do think that the sidequests that were there were done "right". They weren't necessary in any way, had a variety of quality in rewards, and were basically there to tell a little background story of the planet and side/historic characters.

Sure, I would've loved if there had been more of them, but I figure that resources to make them were limited. They already obviously reused the same assets everywhere, which did already get repetitive, seeing the same type of outpost over and over. Even more locations and sidequests would've required more designs of buildings, which in turn would've required more funds. And we're talking about the first Mass Effect game here, when they were kept on a much tighter budget.

The Citadel side quests were pretty good in quantity and giving more background, and the Citadel offered a lot of variety in areas. The quests themselves just required a bit too much running back and forth.
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This pleases me, Witcher 3 is probably my favourite game of all time. The side quests were amazing and really helped flesh out the world. It's funny, I think the lore in Dragon Age is more interesting than The Witcher, but because the side quests were lame I didn't really enjoy the game as well as I could have done. I've always thought the Mass Effect series (Apart from the original Mass Effect) had decent side quests so I am looking forward to that.

If they could turn thoughts into game content sure. But I highly doubt the general side-content will feel as thoroughly designed as it did in Witcher 3.

And for the record, while TW3 had a lot of "scan, walk, fight, scan, talk" it also had unique quests like one on Skellige where you suddenly get knocked out by guards and sent to prison giving you a handful of escape-options or one where there's a cave with visions of the future and one where you take a rite of passage speedrun across a mountain and slide all the way down one of the sides.

It had plenty of creativity. It only feels padded if you start exhausting the content instead of picking and choosing. Picking and choosing in DA:I was worthless because individual quests had no meat for the most part. All of it revolved around combat and having some meandering conversation you didn't pay attention to. I liked some of it but the average content was really barebones.

Don't forget tossing a baby in the oven and the awesome woodland spirit mission where your choices give some pretty unexpected outcomes

Words, words, words. Bioware promised a lot of things before DA:I and Me:3 and both games felt like a letdown. Let's just hope they got their shit right this time. I won't bear another disappointment.

Encouraging? Knowing BioWare aknowledging errors is usually the first and last step in addressing the problem. It's like when fans complained about Leliana's retcon in DA2 and they addressed it in DA:I by making her mention the inconsistency with a very vague handwave and that ended up drawing even more attention to the flaw, just like the "Why is Cerberus here?" thing in ME3.

I've gotten to the point where I don't care about how much BioWare show that they're aware of their mistakes, I don't wanna see Mike Laidlaw hand out praise to CDPR to show how good BioWare is either, I just want them to make games that are as good or better than Witcher 3 so we can stop making fun of BioWare and feel satisfied about their work. All else, including their twitter/interview reassurances about how good it will be doesn't matter. Make or break it, that's all that matters.

So much this.
At this point BioWare should just realize that them promising things reflects poorly on them. Flynn, don't talk about how impressive the animation is in Frostbite 3 when people just made a big ruckus over the last trailer because FemRyder looked "like shit" and the disarm animation was hilariously bad, and Mac, stop talking about "The Smiling Asari" that was embarassing.

I agree but you highlighted a feature that goes both for and against Witcher 3's great quest design: That awesomeness right there is exclusively in the cutscenes. The actual quest is the average "use witcher senses, have dialogue, combat" quest, and that's become an argument against other devs trying to mimic what TW3 "did well", but personally I think you just highlighted why that mostly doesn't matter because we remember this stuff because there's always cutscenes and interesting characters to behold.