1. Gender / class selection screen
She could immedietly choose what gender she wanted to play, but she wasn't certain about her class. Now, this is pretty unavoidable per se, but since I've heard devs comment that the first Varric exaggeration part of the game is supposed to double as some kind of "try your stuff out" part, it'd be awesome if the game reassured her that she could pick any and then try a new one at a later time. Cassandra could call bullcrap several times as Varric went, for instance, thus allowing her to play multiple classes.
2. Dialogue wheel tones
She didn't feel these icons were explained well enough. She did comment on how wonderful the wheel design itself was (drawing some parallels to some linux guru who had talked about how all PC menus should be of "pie" design instead of lists, in the process), but the icons weren't always obvious. Some were, some weren't. So every now and then she'd have to stop to ask me about how things worked. This was especially true for Investigate lines.
3. Character creation after being introduced to Hawke
As much as she was growing to like her character, she couldn't bear herself to change Hawke's looks since she had gotten used to the original design already. In a way, I guess this isn't a problem. But I know this girl likes dressup, she spent more time designing her Mii on my Wii last year than I did - and I'm notoriously picky and slow with those things =)
Had Hawke's default look simply been the default look and not thrown into her face in the beginning, she would likely have ventured into the CC which would also quite likely have endeared her to character even further. Playing with a look you've designed yourself is a strong "interest hook" in itself (heck I'd know, I bought Minecraft more or less only to be able to play with a skin I made once).
4. Lore and term bomb
I remember feeling I could ask about a lot of terms I already knew well enough when I started DA2, but she didn't feel the same way. Ostagar? Ferelden? The Blight? Lothering? An archdemon? Templars, and what have they got against mages? There were a -lot- of questions she needed me to answer to feel she had an idea what was going on. Reading up on pages worth of codex entries isn't something a new player wants to do.
I'm not saying the script shouldn't include these things until later - far from it - but more care should be taken to allow new players to Investigate to learn about all these things so they can understand the world around them.
5. Equipment management
Simply put, equipment management needs to be simplified somehow. I'm not saying change the entire system cause that'd just make the rest of us angry. But we've got a perfectly functional (at least for Casual difficulty and that's all that matters) Auto-Level feature for Attributes and Abilities.
Similarly, an "Optimise Equipment" button would do a lot of good on the inventory screen. How about when you press that button, you can choose to optimise only for your currently selected character, your current party, or your entire party, in a dialogue option? This would allow new players like her to transition into the game faster to enjoy the plot line without having to deal with all those numbers - the numbers the rest of us love. The Optimise function could simply equip items based on Abilities the character has learnt ("two handed or sword&shield?") and the amount of Stars an item has - as much as we feel the stars don't work perfectly, they'd certainly work good enough for a player on Casual who just doesn't want to run around with level 1 gear the entire game.
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These games aren't like Devil May Cry. The idea is that someone can choose to play on Casual and be capable of enjoying a great story line and role play without being challeneged very much game play-wise if they don't want to. It's the kind of game our mothers and people new to gaming could be able to enjoy. I say give them the option, as long as it doesn't detract from our experience =) I'm curious to see if my friend will want to continue playing DA2 or not the next time she comes over. She certainly seemed to enjoy herself overall even though she got stuck now and then ^^
