Totally overrated and boring game.
The whole game just feels like a rip off from other games but done badly. I mean if you are going to rip off other games at least do a good job of it.
From the start the character gen process seems to have some potential since you can make your character look unique and interesting but the lack of classes (3) is a big let down imo. However the idea of having different back stories is pretty interesting but they all have the same conclusion; your recruitment into the spectres, oh wait I mean... grey knights? dark knights? something knights or is it something grey? You know what I have forgotten since the game was so boring and clichéd. OK after a google search I have refreshed my memory; grey wardens.
The characters in DA that join you on your quest to save the world are for the most part rubbish. The only decent character imo was Alistair and his story that he tells of his adopted childhood make him seem very human and easy to relate to and apart from the annoying bouts of sarcasm is generally a likeable character. The others however, well they range from the annoying to just plain pathetic. The majority of the characters are all trying to be sarcastic funny guys. Well sarcasm might be funny in short bursts but when you have to put up with it all the time it really begins to grate on the nerves. Especially from Morigan; a hollow and totally unlikeable "human" that was just a completely failed attempt to rip off Viconia. Then you have a guy called Sten, supposedly a big tough guy when in combat he is a bit of a sissy. He is about as interesting as a plank of wood.
The romance options I felt were really bad, as a male you had the option between the soulless and ugly Morigan who would make a good Borg drone or an annoying bard woman who keeps singing; and I wouldn't blame Simon Cowell if he opened up on her with an uzi in the middle of her audition. As a girl you have better options; Alistair or an elf rogue whom I have forgotten the name.
Having liked Mass Effect (a lot) I felt the dialogue system was a big step backwards. The player character does not speak and I think the reason I like ME so much is because the main character speaks. It really helps build tension and excitement and enforces the dialogue choice you have made since you can hear the emotions in their voice. Also although the dialogue in ME is fairly linear I really like the free flowing feel to it with the dialogue wheel system. Where as on the other hand you have DA where you have to read through a wall of text and don't get to hear your character speak. Perhaps this will be something they change in DA2? I certainly hope so.
There were a few moments in DA where the consequences of my dialogue choices really mattered and in some cases were quite shocking (in a good way) but they are too few and far between. As an RPG the characters and dialogue should be rock solid and can help cover up any flaws in other areas like combat but in this game it really isn't. As I have said for the most part the characters are rubbish and the dialogue is boring.
I'm really running out of time/space so I will have to make the rest quick....
The combat system is naff, it feels like BG2 with abilities that you can activate for your melee characters and a third person option. You click an enemy to attack and then the game takes over which is pretty much like kotor. Sure you can take manual control of your characters movement but when you compare it to WoW's free flowing and twitch reflex combat it feels very rigid and sluggish. For the entire game I never felt that any of my characters really excelled at anything, they were just all mediocre which sucks. This is probably a culmination of the scaling enemies and rubbish character development process.
Also if you pick any class other than mage you are going to be struggling since they are so OP. Combine that with the games love of spawning in lots of tough mobs right next to you and you will be wishing you had rolled mage with crowd control skills.
The combat isn't helped at all by the appauling AI that is so stupid that it ends up being infuriating. You are almost always forced to take direct command of your team mates to stop them doing dumb sh*t. There is a "tactics" system in the game that is supposed to make automating your team mates easier but it just doesn't work. Basically each individual tactic will be a single condition together with a single result action. These tactics are then ordered from top to bottom in a list of priority. The game will move down checking each one until it has found one that will trigger.
It just doesn't work though, the ability to only have one condition on an action is so restrictive as to make it almost useless for advanced tactics. Also I think many of the conditions are broken such as "surrounded by X enemies" which sometimes will trigger or sometimes won't even though you think they should. Personally I would like to have seen somekind of simple script language that you could then import into the game so you could design really clever tactics.
The difficulty is also very hard, which wouldn't be a bad thing if it weren't for the idiot team mate AI or the spawning of mobs right on top of the party or the mediocre feeling to my characters.
The character progression is plain bad; it feels like they ripped of WoW/Diablo but then changed it to try and hide this but in so doing they just ruined it. WoW has a brilliant talent system and if you are going to rip it off for the love of God do it properly. Instead of getting say like 30 talents that you can develop through in a tree like fashion in DA you get 3-4 rows of 4 talents for each sub set of a class. For instance warrior has 2H, Dual wield and defense. And you have to proceed linearly through each row. Most of the abilities suck and the good ones are right at the end of the rows or have ridiculous requirements. For instance the defense tree has a whole bunch of shield talents where it adds X% missile protection. The problem being that not only are the buffs they add so pathetically minor as to have almost no visible affect but many of them do not stack with each other. So you have the tough choice of which useless ability you should chose between.
If that weren't bad enough the loot system is absolutely atrocious; you go through all the effort of taking down a big tough mini-boss or something and all you get is some trash loot or sometimes nothing at all! The loot is boring and are normally always downgrades or sidegrades to what you currently have. I want to feel rewarded for taking on a tough boss not insulted.
That brings me onto the art design. You spend 90% of the game time looking fugly. The armours and clothing don't look good and even the top tier armours look pretty plain. I want my character to look like a frickin bad ass not a peasant!
Before the conclusion I would just like to talk about the DLC in this game. On my first playthrough I was absolutely appauled and gobsmacked to see in game advertising for their DLC. I had pre-ordered the game and got it on the day of release but on first day they already had DLC ready and waiting to download. You walk up to a quest giver and it says something like "You need to have XYZ DLC to continue; would you like to connect to bioware and download now?" - F*ck that!
Lastly we come to modding; wow what a joke. Honestly the whole system is so absurdly complicated that I had to spend a long time reading through tutorials just to figure out how to do the most basic of tasks. Modding is something that Bethesda seems to have really nailed down and they have a good balance between functionality and ease of use. It is also a damn sight easier to make mods compatible with each other in Bethesda games thanks to the brilliant plugin system; in DA however you have to edit core game files so you either overwrite or have to manually merge stuff. The system needs to be both much easier to setup and use and serious work needs to be done to allow mods to integrate together without blowing the whole thing to hell.
Ok thats it, like I said this is a very overrated game that at the end of the day is rather boring and totally forgettable. My copy is on the shelf and I don't really have any willingness to pick it up ever again. I'm only scratching the surface of how bad this game is but have to stop because I realise that I have written an essay and spent a good few hours in the process.
EDIT(26/12/2010) - I would just like to add that for all its failings I did actually complete this game (with Alistair as my romance as a female dwarf rogue) and one of the endings I felt was so shocking that it made me feel really, really bad, so much so that I had to reload because I couldn't live with the guilt. It really does have a good ending (multiple ones actually). Basically what I am trying to say is that this game could have been absolutely amazing but was just ruined by boring and poorly executed gameplay features. A real shame imo.
I have seen the trailers for DA2 and heard the devs speak about it and i think it does hold promise. I won't get my hopes too high but I will most likely buy the game just because I think Bioware can learn from their mistakes and come back with a brilliant game if they really wanted to.