Honestly, I’ve been playing and playing this… and I’m just not sure I want to go on. There’s so many cool aspects here, but so much that just plain sucks. I’m on the X360 (no, my computer isn’t good enough, so don’t bother to argue over it) and it’s a giant pain. The AI is atrociously bad, and the enemies scale so badly with me that I never feel as though I’m really getting stronger, because they can always kick my butt. Even in good armor, I’ve been brutally raped by archers, even to the point of being one-shotted by a lucky hit (as in, 150+ damage crits). They get such ridiculous bonuses as you level that it’s very, very hard to keep up, and it feels like I’m on the endless treadmill.
Moreover, they’ve basically made a really dramatic story about complete incompetent dolts. Seriously, the Grey Wardens are just stupid. OK, fine, you need to drink TEH EBLE BLUOD mixture… which seems to have only one upside and huge downsides which make it largely pointless. I mean, why not just make the drinky stuff optional once you hit 55 or so after a lifetime of battle? This seems to be a game where old people are incredibly badass (Duncan, Loghain, Wynne), and then they wouldn’t really lose much, if anything, from the lost years. As it is, they’re basically killing off their best warriors in their prime for nothing. Or even better, just don’t bother to drink it unless a Blight seems probable, 'cuz I’ve got a whole party of people who’ve bathed in Darkspawn blood 50 times over and they ain’t hurt from it yet.
And then there’s Loghain. Oh don’t get me started on him. His “brilliant” plan was to sacrifice half his army, murder the king (his own son in law!), try to take over as regent more or less on sheer force, and blame it all on the extremely nonpolitical leaders of the battles against TEH EBLE MAJIKLE EMENY. He was then apparently caught by surprise when many nobles started a civil war. Apparently, he also had no plan for dealing with the darkspawn and was mostly going to just sit around for a while until player characters happened.
And Flemeth… soooo yeah. I mean seriosuly, my character is a well-educated mage of impressivve knowledge, wisdom, and power. I have no options except to blindly follow along and take somebody’s word for it or take somebody else’s word for it. Well, actually, Flemeth doesn’t even bother saying anything comprehensible, so I plan on killing her for kicks.