Could've been worse, could've been better. A good attempt overall.
This game seemed like more than just an expansion, it seemed like a showcase of things that could be done with the engine they used. One of my gripes in DAO was that when you get Soldier's Peak you only get to walk around the courtyard. This expansion offers you, as the Grey Warden, to live on, secure & maintain a fief of land given to you by Ferelden after the campaign in DAO. This land was the land that belonged to the Howe family, and I guess it's north of Denerim but it would really be nice to see a finished worldmap at some point in the distant future.
Some of the things that are showcased are the ability to add heraldry to certain shields, though I only found 1 that I was able to add heraldry to, I assume it would work with certain DAO shields if you import your character and they have a heraldry marked on them. They have this little resource system where you get resources for certain people around your place, which is nice. Though I didn't really notice any changes because they didn't come into effect until later. It would have been nice to have an opportunity to walk around and see the guards wearing different armor, etc. This was done in NWN2 nicely. I am somewhat disappointed though I am happy to at least see the effort.
It seemed short and a bit rushed but still, I thought it was good. I feel like if they had put these things in DAO then it would have been much better. And I'm sure they know that too. It seems to me like they are looking for criticism until they release the next dragon age game, because there is very little codex lore to the game outside of the game itself. A real expansive project would have these details readily available. So part of me looks forward to the next release, and I hope they are encouraged by these flaws rather than overwhelmed by all the criticism on the forums.
The AI though still needs work though. Some people seem to find it hard while others think it's really easy. They should think of adding more tactics in a patch sometime in the future. If all the monsters go by this tactical ai then it would probably be pretty easy to make that a little more manageable on the code level in an editor or script.
But this game has a lot of potential overall. It's just not quite there yet in my opinion. The attempt alone is worth an easy 8 points from me.