Love the game, but not jumping on the Dragon Wagon with any Perfect 10s.
We should probably say from the beginning that we love this game. Definitely got our money's worth, it met all expectations, solid experience. Gameplay, graphics, music, art direction, story, characters, ect, ect, all terrific.
The creation system is pretty nice, we dig the alternate tutorial levels depending upon race and background. It doesn't seem to be that big a deal in the context of the whole game though. No decision yet has emerged with a consequence down the road. Still this game blows Risen out of the water, which was to be expected.
Dragon Age made some choices along the way that we've got mixed feelings about. This game uses fast travel to skip from one side of the continent to the other while still allotting for random encounters between points. We suppose we prefer this to following a compass and getting caught in valleys, but Dragon Age's terrain still gets in the way. Doesn't seem fair that we have to guess whether our archer can shoot over a fence waist high or if the shot will get blocked.
There's this tactics mechanic that is suppose to alleviate micromanagement of your team by allowing you to essentially program how your team reacts. We can't get it working well. We suppose if you had time to invest in making it work it could, but most of the time it loses the battle. Team mates will still do stupid things if you aren't watching them closely. Variables like hostility, the priority of attack enemies choose your characters, isn't out there to look at despite equipment that reportedly reduces it by +5 or whatever.
What's most unfortunate about the game are some of the conventions of RPGs that it remains faithful to. The skill trees are a little on the annoying side and you're not going to want to mix and match if you want a formidable team. You have to basically build the characters into one of the three arch-typical RPG classes; tank, range, support. It isn't bad per se, but it's a tad predictable. Factor that in with a bunch of specializations for Warrior, Mage, and Rouge that utilize completely different stats makes them nothing worth investing in.
The story is decent thus far. The romance thing is novel, but we're not thrilled by it. There's a few guilds you can do side quests for, but they're mostly scavenger hunts and search and destroy missions. There isn't an overall karma rating and a lot of the "evil" sided solutions don't seem to do much beyond losing approval with good characters and disproportionally raise it a little tiny bit for bad/neutral characters. There's only a few points where playing bad actually gets you anything, but more often than not it just prevents you from participating in a quest or getting a reward. Despite how well being bad seems to be working for other characters in the story, for the main character at least, being bad doesn't really pay.
There's an NPC in the game who's sole purpose is to sell you DLC. It's a little disconcerting. Nickle and dime-ing you out of the box is never a good sign. On principle alone that's a dent in Dragon Age's armor.
We're definitely going to play this through and maybe a second or third time, so the replay value is there. Thinking about passing on the DLC. Tried breaking it down, for the price of roughly 30% of the full game you'd get about 5%... and selling equipment like rings, weapons, and armor separately is just goofy as all hell.
Conclusion, DA is a great game. No surprises there. It's engaging, immerse, and addictive... if not somewhat agitating around the edges.