I think I can safely say, even at this stage - I'm not sure how far I'm through, I've explored less than 50% of the world even on my furthest playthrough, I think - that this is the best RPG I've played - again, short praise since I haven't played all that many - it has depth, it's engaging and even the niggling interface failures are something I can work with and adapt to. The fact Bioware have managed to conjure up an entirely fresh fantasy landscape and setting with minimal derision, while keeping it easy to access and follow, is pretty fantastic. Even Mass Effect came from a scenario where the core concept was pretty familiar to anybody coming in from the outside at all - humans are humans, we go into space and surprisingly we are kinds of jerks about the aliens, and vice versa.
I must say though, I'm finding it a lot harder to try and play a jerky asshole character. In ME it was pretty easy to knock through two straight playthroughs as Paragon and Renegade respectively, but in DA there seems to be a lot of times where the choices are only between two evils anyway, lesser or no. This feels more realistic, I guess... games where you can clearly choose saint or sinner through incredibly obvious dialogue choices or actions tend to make your character come off as a pretty heavy archetype of whatever alignment you're going for, or perhaps even stretching it to somewhat overblown levels. Also in that I guess in the real world there isn't always a right and wrong, sometimes you're just playing for damage control, and many of the crunch decisions I've seen in DA have come off as such.
In DA there are 'bad' choices that I can even see a saintly character pursuing, and - while some might not appreciate it - the fact you can't negotiate your way through the game beating on every character to disagree with you is pretty refreshing.
It also makes me even more eager for ME2, to see if they can at least release product with the level of quality and polish on display here.
