LARPing is when you do things that aren't acknowledged in-game.
The game doesn't pretend to have a valid reason to kill elves. The only reason you could have for doing it is because you think Werewolves make a better army.
If it was a late cut, it must have been a painful one for them.
Wouldn't surprise me.
Patches don't pay the bills when it's "good enough.
Good patches pay dividends by improving the reputation of your company and making people want to buy your future products as a company committed to releasing good games.
I didn't need any mods my first time through, which was also completely unpatched.
Landsmeet bugs, ancient armor set bug, Oghren never fucking explains why he's coming along (there was a cutscene for this that they forgot to enable), Mage Origin has a number of broken and missing dialogues, Crime Wave questline was royally busted (and it was a rare questline where you have multiple means of solving every quest), siding with Harrowmont in Orzammar is supposed to turn out differently if you have evidence that Bhelen was responsible for Trian's death, Sten was down a spec, down racial stats, and missing a lot of contextual dialogues because of difficulties in getting their triggers to fire, Haste and Momentum combined would somehow result in the character behaving as though neither were applied, Healing Received modifiers did not work, a lot of quest bugs and missing items, a considerable number of broken combat talent mechanics (esp. threat mechanics), etc.
Hear! Hear! Fuck LucasArts and the Secret of Monkey Island, too.
You know that Monkey Island is not a serious world and LucasArts was making a blatant joke out of shameless advertising. EA on the other hand was completely serious in pretending to offer you a quest only to tell you that you should buy some DLC. It was completely jarring and annoyed the shit out of a lot of people.
When I replayed DA:O on hard with 1.02 I still had a difficult-enough time. That's the difficulty it was balanced for anyway (which is why noobs have such a hard time and why pros find Nightmare too easy).
The dex to damage patch (which they claimed was implementing the mechanic as originally intended, even though it obviously wasn't) also resulted in ridiculous things like pure dex builds that had so much defense no attack will hit them (unless it's the rare enemy with Perfect Striking), and it made Dual Weapon Mastery talent complete shit (because those weapons are 100% strength-based). For any weapon where you get dex to damage, dexterity was strictly better than strength unless you really wanted the physical resistance, but there are enough ways to get massive physical resistance bonuses anyway.