why is this game considered great

[Jazz the Goose]

cause i dont get it. fetch quests, terrible unresponsive combat, mute unrelatable protagonist, generic setting and story line, empty linear world. its below average imo, both da2 and especially inquisition are miles ahead of this game in every aspect. this is just a clunky mess of a game

[Gyrmadet]

by op's logic, everything would fall into "generic". Then I'd point out that if we REALLY want to synthesize, well then I'd say it's the oldest cliché of "bad guys vs good guys". Much like everything else; what sets it apart, for those who appreciate it, is the quality of the storytelling.
Yes the combat is clunky, the graphic didn't age well, once you get the most powerful gear there is no point into trying anything else (unless you do so for the sake of curiosity/challenge), but in the end I didn't choose to play this game for that, I wanted to experience a story and feel part of it. Bioware succeded at this, so I consider DAO a timeless masterpiece that I am still playing nowadays.
And let's not forget the music....oh boys, the music!

[Mr. Whiskers]

Originally posted by Bhryaen:

Since I wasn't intending to be arrogant or condescending to a PERSON, just PRECISE about a POINT being made, I won't follow that "advice." Actually you sound more arrogant/condescending by saying that about me than I did by sticking to a point entirely without any personal quips at all. And since being "taken seriously" isn't guaranteed regardless, why pretend I can assure it? It's a common tendency for a poor debater to use dismissive personal jests against an opponent that clearly is in the right, no?

Just because you didn't intend to be such doesn't stop it from being true. Instead of getting so bizarrely defensive you should look at your posts from the eyes of others and learn how to improve them. It's also rather odd that you're calling yourself a poor debater at the same time as denying any poor wording or possibility for improvement on your part. Surely if you're self aware enough to know you're a poor debater you should also know you have room to improve. And while, yes, it's impossible to guarantee every person will take you seriously, that doesn't mean you can't make it more likely that people will. If you focus on making the content of your posts sound you won't need to work so hard on trying to fabricate authority for yourself, making others appear beneath you and, as you say, making dismissive remarks about others for no real reason.

Originally posted by Bhryaen:

The important thing you missed from my post was that I asked QUESTIONS.

I am curious how you're going to make you having "asked questions" relevant and how you're going to show that I missed that.

Originally posted by Bhryaen:

Saying that the setting is "straight Tolkienian" doesn't address any of the points I made.

Of course it doesn't, because if you read the post I made you'd see the whole point was that your post wasn't making relevant points to the section quoted. You took your opinion that the narrative was not generic and falsely applied that to the setting. Setting and narrative are not the same thing.

Originally posted by Bhryaen:

In fact, I already mentioned in the previous post that Tolkien is arguably just a "generic" fantasy writer given the pre-existence of fantasy setting folklore prior to his novels. Elves, dwarves, wizards, magic, etc... all pre-date Tolkien, yeah? So can we not call _The Hobbit_ a "generic" fantasy novel as well? There may even be a rich set of fantasy fiction prior to Tolkien for all I know.

Of course there were fantasy settings for things before Tolkien, but his work is what popularized the way we think of fantasy in most media today.

Take, for example, your mention of elves. They existed pre-Tolkien, but he popularized a very specific way of describing them. To pull from a relevant page on elves:[en.wikipedia.org]

Early pioneers of the genre such as Lord Dunsany in The King of Elfland's Daughter and Poul Anderson in The Broken Sword featured Norse-style elves. However, the elves found in the works of the 20th-century philologist and fantasy writer J. R. R. Tolkien have formed the view of elves in modern fantasy like no other singular source.

Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) became extremely popular and was extensively imitated. In the 1960s and afterwards, elves similar to those in Tolkien's novels became staple, non-human characters, in high fantasy works and in fantasy role-playing games.

A hallmark of fantasy elves is also their long and pointed ears (a convention begun with a note of Tolkien's that the ears of elves were "leaf-shaped"). The length and shape of these ears varies depending on the artist or medium in question. Post-Tolkien fantasy elves (popularized by the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game) tend to be immortal or longeval in comparison to humans, more beautiful and wiser, with sharper senses and perceptions, and abilities or crafts that seem alien or magical. Often elves do not possess facial or body hair, are not portrayed fat or old and are consequently perceived to be androgynous.

As a race, Elves are more ancient than humans or other races, mentioned to have flourished in a sort of Golden Age which has been forgotten by other races. That age was often long before other races appeared or were created. Consequently, Elves are often a living relic of a setting's respective fictional mythology and source of its lore.

Take Tolkien's name out of the last quote especially and you've got an almost perfect description of elves in Dragon Age. Thus the point that it's a generic post-Tolkien fantasy setting (which, remember, is not the same as narrative).

Originally posted by Bhryaen:

And most important, if we can call Tolkien's work "generic," does it not make the term "generic" meaningless?

Well yeah, because you have to throw out the meaning of generic to do so. The work that establishes the trend is not generic, works become generic when a large volume of them are following the outline popularized by a particular work.

Originally posted by Bhryaen:

My contention is that either the term generic requires a more specific meaning like "uses a genre's fundamental characteristics in a simplistic and non-innovative way"... in which case I'd argue DAO does not and is thus not generic fantasy fiction... or generic just means "uses the fundamental characteristsics of a genre" in which case EVERYthing that fits into a genre (sci-fi, horror, fantasy, etc.) is "generic," so the term is synomous with saying, "DAO is a fantasy-based game"... i.e., so that trying to lambast DAO as "generic" is meaningless.

You're really working way too hard on semantics here, but I would like to point out that the fact that you think all fantasy settings are so similar is why they're generic and that there's a reason why modern generic fantasy is also called "post-Tolkien" fantasy: because those similarities are founded on the world popularized by Tolkien (and that the fact that you view fantasy that adheres to Tolkien's work as the definitive description of fantasy only reinforces the point). And to point to This video to talk about generic fantasy settings because it's much more entertaining than this post and frankly I've not got the interest in petty semantics to go over this section of the post with an level of seriousness.

(I would also encourage you, on a semi-relevant note, to notice that the linked video does not say that the game being generic makes it bad. You seem rather worried that a game being generic automatically makes it a bad game and that's just not true.)

Originally posted by Bhryaen:

but you still need to answer the discursive matter sufficiently to counter my point.

Don't demand of others what you won't do yourself, darling.

Originally posted by Bhryaen:

Or just don't take me seriously. It's the easy road after all...

And you really should try to consider how to improve yourself instead of just trying to cast off any idea of mistakes onto the reader. That's just childish and it's not helping you or anyone else.