Yeah, I mean look at this:
It goes from pretty good on the left to pretty bad on the right. Like, a different floor texture would be good, even. It's way too empty.
I'm about 8 or 9 hours in and looking back on it, it's really quite noticeable how little dialog there is in this game compared to all other Bio games. I feel like it's stuck halfway between a full-on action game and an action RPG, and not in a good way. In the first 6 hours I talked to Aveline once, outside of quest stuff. That's unusual for Bioware.
Aside from the random teleport-spawning (which really does in your mages), combat gets marginally better as you advance levels and accumulate talents to use between DPS draining with your normal attack.
It's really unclear why they bothered including character stats in the game at all - it railroads you into exclusively pumping two stats associated with your class, because if you don't keep them high (dex+cun for rogues, str+con for fighters, int+will for mages) then you can't use new equipment. There are no exceptions to this. The skill trees, on the other hand, are pretty good.
Varric's the clear frontrunner in terms of the characters, but he doesn't have much competition. 5 years ago Merrill would've been fine with me but as it is I feel like she's nothing more than a less assertive, fantasy version of Tali (with some Aerie thrown in, given that she's the clear archetype being reheated). It is actively irritating me.