Inquisition is a great game and I've logged my 2nd most hours on it out of all games I've played this gen (playing it again now). People complained about petty things like "There's too many fetch quests.", there are hardly any and if you don't want to collect the shards, don't. 50% of the larger missions are linear paths like DA:O and then we have an open world full of varied locals and missions, plus the epic dragon fights. My only issues were lack of dick options in dialogue (I can't be an elf who thinks humans are dicks) and high tier loot is only attainable from end game dragons and aren't as good as some craftable items.

I don't understand why in 2014 when it came out (5 years ago) they didn't start immediately working on the next one. It was well received by critics, sold really well. Since Bioware have released 2 (both of which didn't meet expectations of the series set before it) and cancelled 1 (Shadow Realms could have been a rival to Diablo for all we know). Anthem seems to lack Bioware's strength which is why it fails because even with gameplay shortcomings, stories could keep you invested (weirdly was the other way around for me in ME:A).

Now, I feel we might never get a DA4, I wanted to punch Solas again. 

2014 also happened to be the year that Destiny came out. And the year that Bioware started work on Anthem.

My guess is, EA ordered Bioware to begin working on a Destiny-type game after seeing the insane amount of hype it got (not realizing that said hype was due to Bungie's reputation and the impressive demo visuals, instead of the fact that it was a grindy loot shooter), Bioware thought "Cool, everyone said that Destiny didn't live up to its potential, we can show them how it's really done", but various circumstances conspired to make the finished product a trainwreck.

You've pretty much nailed it. IIRC they had already gotten deep into the concept stages of DA4 but everything was put on the back burner for Anthem. 

Certainly looks that way, although to be honest, to me BioWare hasn't seemed very healthy in a long time. Also, good riddance. Perhaps I've missed the best games, but so far, BioWare's games have been pretty far from what you might think considering their reputation. Maybe once I get to play some of BioWare's games I've missed, I'll think otherwise though.

I haven't played KotOR but I have played DA:O and while I did enjoy it, I never got around to finishing it since I felt all the dungeons become a chore very quickly. Also, the game was structured in a very unimaginative manner, which made it feels more like a game and less like... an experience. It's not a bad game and I still hope to finish it some day, but it just didn't do it for me. On another note, I definitely wouldn't recommend the first Mass Effect. Then again, I'm not a huge fan of BioWare either, so you probably shouldn't listen to me. Jade Empire is a game I really want to like but when I got to try it on PC a bit many years ago, I didn't really like the controls and didn't get very far into the game. I think I might be able to get into it if I tried properly, but now I have a pretty big backlog...

I actually own them both on GOG, PC. :P It's just that I haven't had the time to play them. I also played ME1 on PC, and while performance wasn't great IIRC, I don't think it was too bad.

Maybe their GaaS strategy is what keeps the remakes away. If you could get games in a subscription, it might be harder to sell them separately as well.

It's unfortunately looking likely. That said, they can still salvage Anthem and make it work financially, but it'll take some pretty rapid updates, good press in a few months time and decent marketing to pull it off. Initial sales are important to establish a user base but the real money gets made later down the line.

I really hope EA don't close them down as I'm still hopeful of a decent Dragon Age game, a follow up to Mass Effect (Andromeda had enough of a starting point for sequels to build on), KoToR and the often forgotten Jade Empire.