I'm... hoping Ironagepig is being sarcastic. It can be sometimes hard to convey because there are some people that fanatical towards Bioware that they would say things like that, but the post struck me as being purposely over the top.
In terms of the game. Well, I can't say much because I'm apparently super slow compared to everyone else. I'm just now hitting the end of Act I. But I did follow the spoiler thread and I am really worried about this habit Bioware seems to be making of "Pfft, you didn't really want to -talk- to the same companion more than once, did you? That's boring!" I mean. I LOVED that you really had to win Zev's trust over lots of conversations to find out just how hard a past he had. And then the pre-stuff for the game all went "You can still talk to people, you just have to go to their home base to do it." and I went "Okay, that kinda is time consuming, but I'll take it." Except.. what was meant was, apparently in ACt I you can go to their home base and talk to them ONCE and then all the other times has to be because of a quest. I can't bring myself to care about the characters on more than a superficial level because of this. So if that was something you liked about DAO, got annoyed by lack of in Awakenings, and was hoping for a return of... uhm...you don't get it. It's better than Awakenings in terms of that but not by much.
Why is this such a major weakness? It isn't if you don't care about characters. But the problem is that this a game FOCUSSED on what happens to these characters in Kirkwall. Not a huge span like DAO. Yet, DAO had more attention to character detail and personality, very few re-used maps until the DLCs, and an epic plot of stopping the freaking blight by killing an archdemon. I don't mind downsizing things to one city. I don't mind making it more about the characters. I don't mind that the plot is less "SO THIS IS HUGE". But if you fail to let us talk to the characters, get to know them better, and really care about them- and oh yeah, sticking crap in that requires extreme intricacy to avoid IF you manage to avoid it- you've failed to create an RPG. You've created an action game with a veneer of RP.
The plots concerning the fate of family members and the fate of a building (I know this is marked with spoilers but I'm trying to be polite)...look. There was NO NEED to kill off a sibling to begin with, or at least let US pick the sibling, not tell us based on our class which one gets squashed. Example: Hawke could have seen the ogre charging. BOTH siblings are in the way. You only have time to pull one out of the way. Thus, we get choice. A lot of people dislike one or the other sibling, while really liking the other. Especially for replays, choice should have been there. And what happens to the other two family members, come on. We start out with a parent and sibling dead, so you screw over the rest of our family too? (Except the Uncle who we want dead?) Some rise to greatness...we can't even stop those events without being completely aware before hand and knowing EXACTLY how to play it...and one of them, no one seems to know if there's a way to modify at all. Same goes for the building. If you HAD To have it happen, you could have at least given us a way of stopping it but it happens through other, unrelated measures and we get the blame anyway because there were indications we were accomplices. It wouldn't change the flow of the story, but would allow us to at least know the truth and not feel like such failures AGAIN. If I wanted to be stuck doing whatever the devs decided I should do no matter what, I'd be playing Assassin's Creed again. Which I probably will never play again despite enjoying it...it's not worth playing again to me. Dragon Age: Origins was played around five times through and I bought all the DLC because I wanted to see how I could alter the story and what changes it'd make this time.
Uhm. This is getting long, so I'll stop. But just examples of the problems inherent to the storytelling/characters of the game, because that's what I care about the most.
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