Just finished the game.
All in all, not bad, well, pretty good actually. After some time it becomes highly noticeably though that they've consciously 'spaced' their quest-time and kill-time. Every important mission starts out with a nice amount of conversation. After that, you end up doing quite a hell of a lot of dungeon crawling. They seem to have tried to put as much of the dungeon crawling in as possible, and then interrupt it at times with a few nice encounters, and end with the crawl just before it gets boring. Sometimes they overdid it though, and then the endless corridors of endless encounters starts to become a drudge.
This isn't all that bad, dungeon crawling is a big part of such games anyway. But they should've camouflaged it better. Most levels are obviously artificially made so as to last as long as possible. In the mage tower, every new floor makes you go all around the sodding thing, in other levels barricades, heaps of stone or whatever nonsense are placed in strategic spots just so as to draw more time from you, or, to voice it better, to maximize the amount of gameplay per load/level.
The voice acting is good, the combat is good, and the story is pretty decent apart from being very much not-that-gray. The art at times is quite stunning, which makes me a bit sad when I find out that the camera is so uselessly limited when zooming out. I seriously want more angles than just one. If anything, they should've hired better level-designers so as to create levels with a more...natural plan to them. Just not placing doors and a few more walls, and making the argument that some places just have shitty architecture would've made a more convincing argument than placing random amounts of debris that magically blocks your passage.
Mild spoilers.
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Oh and they should've made the grey wardens more...well, grey. Seriously, what makes them grey now is a bit of demonic blood, the occasional murder of new recruits, and the opportunity for sacrifice. If anyone was gray its Loghain, whose 'ends justifies the means' makes him a far more interesting character than most of the other one-sided morality crusaders. Granted, the game gives one a nice opportunity to be a Loghain-like character, if you'd choose for the werewolves, for the golems, and such. But the problem is that this doesn't really give any advantage. The final battles are a pushover. If truly I had had a need for the army that I was given in the end, and would've benefited from going with stronger but more evil choices, just so as to win from a greater evil by using lesser evils...well, that would've been interesting. Right now you can just stomp through Ferelden, be good all the way, and have no problem whatsoever doing it.
Having the ability to be good and consistent with your choices is not the problem though. But I dislike that being good isn't hard at all, and only in a few moments is it questionable what 'the good' thing to do actually is. The story would've been more interesting had king Cailan been a miserable commander who, wanting to do good and act for glory, turns out to lead everything into destruction. Seriously, they should've just given the player character a role closer to Loghain's, or one of his supporters, with the choices he had to make. A few grey warden collaborators on the side of Loghain would also have been nice. They would've had to not make Loghain blame grey wardens then though, which was politically speaking a stupid move anyway. There was a serious potential for grey-ness on the side of Loghain. The current version should've named them white wardens, who ride griffins and have a moral compass equal to Jesus.
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