I am not sure if calling it good is right, I think that is pushing it. But I don't think it was terrible either though, I liked some things, but I had problems with it. At the time I gave it some leeway because I figured they spent all their budget on creating that engine, which was good. I hoped that with DA2 they would use the same engine and spend all their budget on a better game, but instead they went the opposite direction.
The good bits about DAO are that the graphics looked decent, it no longer was held back by having to be made with a "toolset". Instead it just looked more like a real RPG world instead of a bunch of copy paste tiles and objects. Also the story, characters, and acting was all decent, and usually I hate that stuff. And again, I liked the engine, playing with that 3rd person perspective is fine, and scrolling out to get a high up view of the battlefield was great. Also everything felt slick and worked well, the interface, telling the characters to hold while I scouted ahead, etc.. Technology wise, I think the game was great.
The problems I have are just with the gameplay. The classes weren't deep enough and there weren't nearly enough spells. In NWN you get to choose from about 20-30 spells each time you level up, DAO doesn't even have that many in the entire game. Spending hours using fireball and arcane blast or whatever, is shit. I respect making your own system, why pay for rights to D&D when you can just make your own that is just as good, and they went half way there, but it just needs far more stuff. I had my main character specced to be a nuker which meant that he only really had cone of cold, and a few other boring spells. Then I had my Morrigan specced as a control mage with enfeeblement type spells, auras, etc. Imo both of those sets of spells should have been on just one of my mage characters. Both sets of spells on my mage and I would have been happy.
Then comes the healer, I had Wynn as a healer, I think that was the only option... But I didn't like the way healing worked. It was just too dumbed down. I didn't like the auto-healing aura. It should all have been done manually, and the various heals should have been given far earlier. This isn't an MMO where you have to string the players along and make them grind so they keep paying monthly fees, this is a single player RPG, so I should have got a group heal, big heal, regen, and various other stuff far earlier on. Instead I only got a good selection of heals and buffs by about half way through the game. The biggest problem is that I didn't get much else after that... The healer was just boring compared to D&D healers. It needed more heals, and it should have had shapeshifting, cc, and some of the debuffing all combined into one class, and then I would have been happy. Also being able to rez characters mid battle trivialized the whole thing.
The same pattern is true of all the other classes, they were just too bare bones. They were like a 90s MMO and they should have been like one of the good MMOs where warriors have a hotbar full of stuff to use that is all very tactical. Generally the classes just didn't have enough spells and abilities and that is my main problem with the game.
Besides the classes though, I hated how regen was so fast outside of combat. It makes mana meaningless, you just nuke the hell out of stuff in every fight, then 3 seconds after the fight ends, everyone is full again. It is no fun when a game goes to the opposite extreme with 1 spell per fight etc. but there is a middle ground where balancing resources is important, and it annoys me that games can't see how obvious that is. The only game I've ever seen do a good job of this is Everquest. After playing that, all RPGs seem like a let down at this. The same goes for loot.
Besides the classes and combat, my only other gripe is that most of the the quests were boring, the city could have been more interesting, and overall the game was too short. I felt like I was building up to something epic, I did the deep roads etc, killed some dragon for some crafted armor, started finally feeling like I gaining some power, and then we rushed off for a battle, and it ended up being the final battle of the game... I thought there was going to be at least a good 10 hours left after that point, but it just ended.
I enjoyed some of the bosses, the brood mother etc, I liked how combat worked, real time, fast enough to be exciting yet slow enough to let me make tactical decisions. I never used the character orders thing, I set them all to puppet mode and just controlled them manually and I liked that. It was almost a great game, but those good bits were ruined by the desperate need for better classes and spells, some better quests, more length and depth to the storyline, and some tedious moments like the fade etc.. For me it is 4 ish out of 10, maybe 5. I sometimes wondered if my standards were too high, but then DoS came along and imo it embarrasses the Dragon Age series.
