Some enjoyable characters do not make up for the blatant game padding that will fill most of your time with DA:O
Cheap deaths are far too common and there isn't much you can do to prevent them. The targeting in combat is terrible and will cause more than a few problems late in the game when every fight seems like it has to be against fifty people. Also the game's autosave is unreliable, not activating after key battles, so most players will probably end up repeating a good section of the game before they relearn to stop and save every five minutes.
What progress you do make in the game is slow. Even after over fifty hours of investment my characters were still only at level 18. In the beginning it especially feels like you're just waiting to level. Its made worse because as a new player you're not sure what skills you would like, and if you put your early points in the wrong place, it might take another five levels to "fix" your mistake. Really, I thought the RPGs you needed a guide to play were a thing of the past. DA:O works hard to make sure they're not completely dead yet.
As for the story, the entirety of the plot is laid out in the first few hours of the game. You are a Grey Warden and you have to stop the Arch Demon to end the blight which threatens the entire world. You end up trying to get the allegiance of different groups and have to jump through hoops to do so. There are four groups you have to work with and each one will drag you through many hours of BS before finally giving you the "real quest". Of course, once you have that quest the game will still throw three unnecessary and very large dungeons in the way, just because.
In the game, every decision you make gets evaluated by your current team members and they will decide if they like you more or less based on your choices. While in theory this would be great, in practice its terrible. Because of the games difficulty, you're almost required to take specific characters (read: your healer) with you at all times. Because you are so dependent on that character, you don't want to risk upsetting them and losing their support (or maybe even having to kill them). So, instead of your player character influencing your squad members, your squad members almost make you major plot decisions for you.
In the end, you'll probably be left unhappy with how many events in the story turned out. Many times your only choices in that game are bad option #1 or bad option #2. The "dislike" you get from one of your team members is just the icing on the pain cake. At the very end, you'll get to read the results of your choices. There is no ending cinematic, its just text that you read. Thats it. There is also no new game plus option.
To Bioware's credit, they did manage to create some believable characters. Every one of your team members has a personality that you can explore if you get them to like you and the voice acting is spectacular in almost every instance. The downside to this is that by comparison your main character feels bland. In fact, the player's character seems a little ham fisted into the game. The story would work better without him/her.
Another thing to note is that the graphics are rather poor for a modern game. Its obvious the Bioware cut the texture resolutions to the absolute minimum to make room for all the voice acting on one DVD. The draw distance is short when in open areas and in later battles with many enemies the game does slow down some. There are also a few buggy quests, but nothing that prevents you from completing the game. These are small problems though and don't ruin any enjoyment the game might offer.
Overall, DA:O is a game best left alone. Its a modern RPG that the majority of the game is stuck in the past. Dungeons are repetitive and boring and all the unnecessary game padding is annoying. The no-win situations and dissenting team-mates might be more realistic, but they are far less fun. Leveling is slow even with the game often spamming you with enemies. The game can easily eat up a lot of time, but much of that will likely be spent being frustrated. This game is best avoided.