I don’t know, I think Inquisition did it worst for me.

It felt incredibly awkward that I could never initiate a conversation while on the road, but instead had to keep going back to base camp and continuously check if the story or the romance had progressed enough for another arbitrary conversation point, or if I was still stuck.

It was even worse romancing one of the characters that were perpetually stuck behind and not a part of the main party, which felt like a stilted, awkward courtship of running around that stupid area (too big and annoying to traverse by far) to make sure I’d progressed the conversations as far as I could (both for romance and friendships). It also robbed me of any of the fun ‘party banter’ that would otherwise have been part of it. I restarted the game with several different romance partners and ended up just not romancing anyone.

The third game is where I felt the most detached from any of my party members and I think part of it was just how tedious it was to talk to them. I felt in the first game, I could check in on them on the fly and it just felt much more natural to me, and I was far more engaged in the individual relationships because of it. I wasn’t constantly considering whether a specific plot point might give me another talking point back at the main camp.