I'd definitely like to see some cases where our character gets defeated or injured. I prefer the PC to feel human and not some invincible halfgod.
In DAO I really liked that the PC got overrun and wounded at Ostagar and captured and imprisoned in fort Drakon. Although you did have the option of fighting Cauthrien (if someone wanted to) getting imprisoned was definitely more rewarding because of the prisonbreak quests.
I really dislike feeling like my character is some demigod, yeah. I usually take it farther than most; I don't even like the ME2 ending most people strive to achieve.
So yeah, good ideas all across.
Heck, that's part of the reason I love Hawke most out of all my Bioware Protagonist Brigade. I'm not going to say DA2 was the best Bioware game ever, because if I did, I'd be kind of looney. I like Hawke because Hawke is pretty much swept along, instead of being a force of nature chosen one. So I can sympathize and want to hug him/her by the end of the game.
That being said, it makes some of my buddies chew on the walls when Hawke can't SAVE THA DAY FOR EVERYTHING.
I'm generally in favor of more customization and choices, but you have to strike a balance. After all, we fans carry a healthy supply of pitchforks when we don't like the results of said choices.
Going back to what (I think) the OP intended: for many, many months, folks on the board have talked a lot about how actions should influence the outcomes. I thoroughly agree; I think it should define the types of outcomes available as well. For me, it resonates most strongly with the end boss battles. The other day, I looked at the end games for a number of my favorite (and not-so-favorite) games, and I saw three consistent clichés (used either singly or together) which pervaded most of them (along the lines of the "semi-god" point of the OP):
(1) Brute force: you're a demi-semi-god, you've acquired lots of muscle, and it's time to use it. Perhaps you may have some special item or skill or "troops at need" that help with this, but you had no choice in getting it, so it doesn't matter. The fight requires you to concentrate on certain spells or healing potions, and often degenerates into "let's throw even more monsters at you." Pools of Darkness, Baldur's Gate, Throne of Bhaal, Dragon Age: Origins and DA:Awakening, Dragon Age 2, and the Icewind Dale series are good examples of this.
(2) I'm not dead yet: My least favorite cliché, in which you have to defeat the bad guy multiple times due to some (usually badly contrived) reason. Baldur's Gate 2 is the classic example (2 defeats), Throne of Bhaal took it to a ridiculous extreme (4 defeats, in addition to several enemies along the way using it as well), Neverwinter Nights 2 had three defeat points, IIRC, and Dragon Age 2's tactics here were almost identical to Throne of Bhaal's, minus one defeat IIRC. Neither who your character is nor what they've learned matters in these fights
(3) Throw the switch: you have to do something non-obvious (or semi-obvious) to render the bad guy vulnerable before proceeding to cliché #1. Pools of Darkness sorta-kinda did this with the crystal (it reduced the number of monsters you faced, but you were teed up to do it), Neverwinter Nights and Shadows of Undrentide had classic examples of this; Baldur's Gate 2 and BG2:Throne of Bhaal had imperfect examples of this (like PoD, you were told explicitly what to do a priori); IWD:Heart of Winter used this as well. Neverwinter Nights 2's use of this was flagrantly bad (made wosr by the fact that the other two clichés were used as well); everyone who had already played NWN:SoU had a perfect right to throw a chair through their monitor when told to destroy the source-of-power pillars in NWN2, given that they'd already probably been trying to do that in the previous two iterations of the battle because they'd done the same thing in SoU. Again, who your character is, and the choices your character made, are irrelevant here -- you (as the player) have to make a single mental leap at the end.
But, in games like Planescape:Torment, how you evolved your character *did* matter, and gave you different choices at the end. And while the sprit eater condition was forced onto you in NWN2:Mask of the Betrayer (a game also very much like Planescape:Torment in other ways), the way you evolved your character in reaction to that condition gave you different options in the final battle, and different outcomes in the epilogue. These were all nicely surprising. (DA:O did have different endings, true, but the battle itself hinged on whether or not you could operate and maintain a ballista, frankly.)
I'm hoping very much that DA:I is more in the mode of the latter as far as what matters at the end, and that it's designed from the viewpoint of confrontation relevant to your character (with all that implies) rather than just a lengthy one-size-fits-all encounter.
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