Kadara is BioWare Austin

I like the hub just fine but you can tell... you can TELL the Badlands area and its quests are done by the SWTOR team, even the enemy scripting.

In DA:I The Descent which was also co-Austin made you could tell it was Austin because the new enemies in it had a certain stiffness to them and sometimes no transitional animations within their movesets. It created that Quality MMO NPC flavor to them and I'm experiencing some of this on Kadara too. The quests sink to the absolute lowest level of effort with a murder thing where you have to find 5 bodies across the entire map just to pick up the trail, the terrain collissions feel notably worse than any other place I've been in the game thus far and the enemies react strangely sometimes, like something is just off about this area. It doesn't help it's the most tonally "whatever" series of quests you get. Ryder/Pathfinder is whatever the flying fuck the writers want him to be on this planet so you get a murder mystery and he even jokes "so I'm a detective now?" and they joke "Well you're finding the culprit, right?" and lastly this area does not feel like something from Mass Effect at all! It feels like KOTOR.

I kept thinking "why does this feel like KOTOR? Why does this feel like KO--that's it! It's the SWTOR team, oh god."

And then I checked it up and surely enough, Coutney Woods who, despite also writing Lexi, is an Austin-based writer and she wrote a bunch of the quests you stumble into on this planet.

I didn't fully get what big of a deal the alleged "wildly inconsistent level of quality" critique meant until I started exploring this area. It doesn't help that so far none of the quests I've found via NPC dialogues had an option to say "no. I don't have time" unlike other quests in the game. There was literally a tree where it's like "1. Why do you need me?, 2. Tell me about this. 3. I'll do it." but no "I don't give a shit" choice when the quest was the lowest tier of DA:I crap like "Oh no! My husband is gone, where is he, can you find him?"

I found a whopping 2 or maybe even 3 Inquisition quests on this planet that revolve around absent family members. This is the DA:I-ness at its finest. Don't ever do this again BioWare.