Never finished the darn thing, but got quite close to the endgame twice (would have finished it if Hewlett Packard laptops were not such pieces of substandard crap - but that's a "cool story, bro" story).
I like the dish comparison someone used in this thread - the game gives off an impression of being better than it actually is, and the impression slowly fades away as you play.
Main spots of bother:
- Filler combat. I'd say "too much filler combat", but there can never be "just enough filler combat". Filler combat is filler shit, it's there to pad the game and make it look as if it has more content than it actually does.
FFS, leave grinding to WoW enthusiasts.
And the sad thing is - there are some decent combat encounters in the game. F.i. the Revanant fight in that Redcliffe castle courtyard, the Spider Queen fight in the Derp Roads, and a bunch of other stuff. If there was less combat in the game overall, and combat encounters were as interesting as these, the game would not have turned out such a big snorefest.
- Character builds. Ayup, the only way to make the incessant combat bearable (as in - to be done with it prior to going comatose) is to go for the most powerful builds possible, and these are few in number. Sure, you can go for different buidls, but then the filler combat becomes even more of a nuisance. It seemed to have potential, but, in the end - like most things with this game - turned out to be uninspired to say the least.
At first, I found the character and combat systems mildly interesting. It's very MMO-like, from what I gather, with timed abilites, aggravation rating (or whatever that was called) and whatnot, and I've never played a game with a system designed like that before. And playing this game made me realize it's not my cup of cheap, dirty swill.
I don't mind the story since I was not expecting anything too noteworthy anyway. Same with companions. They're chliched and dumb enough to give me a chuckle or two, but that's it. They very much remind me of NWN2 OC companions. Not the best thing in the world, but not annoying enough to warrant a rant. As my gaming years go by, I keep giving less and less shit about the story or the characters in a game, heh. I balme the violent media.
- Overlong introductory areas, the famous "origin stories" + that Orzammar crap before the battle. Good idea there, sloppy execution. They're just too long, especially Orzammar. And they make the gamer feel as if he had to trudge through them in order to get to the actual game. It's like a tutorial that takes several hours to finish, unskippable too.
Good things about the game - the engine might not be next-gen, but at least it's one of the very few gaming engines that's actually OPTIMIZED to any extent that I've seen in the last 10 years. Not a single crash, and performance should be decent on most any computer that can run Vista or some other assorted M$ operating system with the shinies.
- Several decent "extreme Shepard" moments. Good for a laugh.
That'd be it, I guess. Decent effort, but no Oscar. I do not think the game's got potential too pull people in like the Baldur's Gate series - which it did even to me, and I can't even really tell why. Probably because it was not as boring, never seemed like "work", and leveling up was fun.
