non-spoilery thoughts so far

[vio]

despite some pretty drastic changes compared to Origins (some for better, some not so much) I have only two real complaints about the game, the rest being no more than minor annoyances

firstly the timeskips, while I understand the reasons for them and the need for them, there's far too much "oh this happened during the bits you had no say over" explanations, it would have been nice to actually experience some of those events even if only in short (possibly optional to prevent them being tedious on replays) flashbacks or something rather than by listening to a narration or chatting with an NPC your character knows but the player doesn't

secondly, spoilers in quest titles. it's bad enough that BioWares forums were full of spoilers and didn't open the spoiler section until the day before release, it's pretty bloody bad that the trailers contain some spoilers of events that don't happen until pretty far into the game but those are down to inconsiderate forum-goers and marketing tactics so can be grudgingly accepted
but having a quest chain where the title strongly hints or blatantly reveals what will happen several steps into the chain really takes away some of the impact

apart from that though, I'm thoroughly enjoying the game, playing through as a female, good (mostly) warrior who's a mage-sympathiser, and got a side-project of a rather hostile and arrogant male mage which should make for a nice contrast. also planning on doing a rogue templar-sympathiser, a Hawke who's somewhat bitter about having to spend his/her life running and hiding because of Bethany I guess

oh and for minor complaints, the biggest one is the change of voice actors for some characters. likely outside of BioWares control (except for Merril which they admitted was because they retconned Dalish into having welsh accents) due to voice actor availability, but it does feel a little odd at times