In my opinion, bethsoft games are really all about modding and customization. Other than that, they are very meh.
i cant help but compare something like the dragon age series to stuff like oblivion/skyrim. They are both popular, they both have their own flaws, but they take very different approachs to an RPG.
I dont really like dragon age gameplay either, the whole deal with WOW style abilities and micro managing combat scripts, trying to get your party members to do something in the right order at the right time. But it is still much better balanced than stuff like skyrim, which is mostly "spamming melee attacks" or "Back pedaling with arrows/magic". Blocking in skyrim actually gets you killed faster because enemies dont leave themselves vulnerable after having their attack blocked (unlike oblivion, which actually had better meee), so they can just keep spamming attacks at you.
The "action combat" leaves a lot to be desirable since most of it is exploiting dumb AI, and the combat just isnt as fast paced or well done as something like dark souls. There is nearly no difference between the different weapon skills other than their unique weapons. Dungeons are boring and loot is uninteresting...oh look a container with a few gold coins and some junk. Yay. Fallout 3/NV had the same problem...opening containers got dull quickly simply because there was nothing decent in them, almost everything was low level trash or junk like clipboards or whatever. Fallout 2 had much better loot placement, at the expense of the maps being individually designed instead of randomly generated via badly designed level lists. Exploring in something like new vegas is largely a waste of time...all you get are empty wilderness, some annoying dogs that attack you, and as a reward, you find a shack with a varmint rifle and a sunset bottlecap. Lame.
Something like dragon age actually bothers to tell a story. The problem with the whole "sandbox" thing is that there is basically no story. Your character is this person who doesnt speak (because all those voiced lines would take a fortune to do), but unfortunately, there is almost nothing to read either (because their target market doesnt like to read). Stuff like planescape torment is a pleasure to read, but writing all that takes effort, so its easier for bethsoft to do player responses in the form of uninteresting one liners. You cant immerse yourself in your character because there is basically no character, nothing that defines his/her personality, her goals, etc.
Compare that to dragon age 2 where you play as Hawke, who actually feels like a real person. So do the party members that you can recruit. They make jokes, they talk, they laugh. They have personalities. Even though the dialogue options largely dont matter since they just range from sarcastic/good/evil responses, the dialogue is far better written than bethsoft games. Meanwhile, bethsoft games have you hire a companion, do a simple quest, and then they follow you for the rest of the game and say pretty much nothing. They are just there to help you kill stuff. At no point do you actually CARE about them because they are automated killing machines. I dont feel anything for any of the characters in any of the bethsoft games, except for the girl in the skyrim vampire DLC, which actually has decent voice acting and some attempt at storytelling...until you finish the DLC, at which point she turns into the same automated killing machine like the rest (barring one quest that unlocks after you finish the DLC).
Bethsoft games also consistently struggle to deliver interesting fights. Oh look, 2-3 bandits with the fraction of the player's HP and some low level gear. Literally, who cares? New vegas has you run into raiders all the time who try to kill you with pool sticks and pose zero threat to you. Even the "boss fights" are a total joke. They also can't create a balanced economy...every human enemy you kill drops a weapon/armor that you can sell for tons of gold, becoming filthy rich quickly. Its difficult to get around this problem...dragon age basically had to side step it entirely by not making human enemies drop all their gear, so they could balance the player's progression instead of throwing tons of loot at you with every encounter. Its not "realistic", but its better balanced.
