Just beat it, almost exactly 44 hours as a male archer, did every quest save for like 3 minor ones. I wont lie, I loved this game. The characters were fantastic, the story was great and the combat was pretty damn fun most of the time save for some severe spikes. I really enjoyed the build up of the plot, Ive been wanting an RPG for a long long time to focus more on a characters life and personal struggles instead of just the typical save the world from horrible terrible doom that most games have from the very start, like DAO, and while the end of DA2 was also world altering/shattering stuff it was quite different from the norm and I found it be quite intriguing and novel. I think Bioware did a pretty good job building up to the finale, and I didnt find it at all lackluster or less epic than DAO's ending really.
Surprisingly I kind of got use to the new look to the elves and dont hate them so much anymore, some of them actually look pretty good, others not so much, but Im ok with it. The recycling of locals didnt bother me too much even though it was pretty prevalent, its not even close to ME1 levels of horribleness since these environments actually have a fair amount of detail and atmosphere to them and arent just square rooms with nothing in them but boxes.
I was really sad to the see the story end and there were a number of times where I wish they had gone deeper and expanded on stuff, especially in the beginning with the escape from Lothering and the first year in Kirkwall. Family dynamics werent as great as they could have been, but I still cared for my mother and sister despite it. But the companions were all basically fantastic, Sebastian being the weakest link in my opinion and even he was as good as most of the DAO cast.
I was also pretty fond of the quest design in this game, I liked always having something to do, and most of the quests were actually pretty interesting and had a decent amount of production to them all, unlike DAO quests which were basically all the terrible fetch quests, half of which took the entire game to complete.
All in all I am very pleased with the game and in the end I probably prefer it to DAO, though we'll see after I beat it a few more times since Ive beaten DAO 5 times now. I at least found its improvements and good qualities to far outweigh the bad and I cant wait for some DLC and hopefully Awakenings, or larger if were lucky, sized expansions.
