This half-made game has too much "fat" for it´s own good. It takes tooo long to become interesting.
Repetitive loot. Don´t expect to see lots especialized and visually unique weapons, armor, gloves, etc... for each class. You´ll end up picking the same loot over and over, and over again. It doesn´t seen to make a huge difference in gameplay anyway.
The history takes much time to become engrossing, and this happens because of the TONS of unnecessary and repetitive dialogue (oh yeah, what they didin´t put in equipment variety, they put in text). I have nothing aganist dialogues ( I played Mass Effect which had lots of it, and I love the game) but, I find myself spending more than half of the time of gameplay talking to secondary characters that doesn´t even have a quest for me, nor any valuable infomation to solve one. Why put them there anyway?
Things became even worst in this matter because of the cheap approval sistem. First, because you don´t really have options, just the illusion that you have them. Despite the six or seven different lines of the dialogue that you usually have at your disposal, you should ALWAYS say what your party members want to hear, if you want to keep them in your party or gain the bonusses of the increased approvall rating. As a consequence, there´s just one or two viable options if you want keep playing the game without party losses or penauties. It was much better if you just gain bonus yourself with your partciular moral options, like in other titles.
The combat is half done like the rest. In some other RPG´s (including the Bioware´s Mas Effect) they had some sort of good ballance betwen tatic pause and pure action. This is specially good in the beginnging, to understand how to use the huge number of different habilities of your party members. Instead, in DAO the AI of the game is lame. You have to pause in every single action, making the battle, supposedly the most agile and fast paced part of the game, just a burocratic and repetitive sequence of moves.
In the other hand, the character development is realy versatile, but, as all the other aspects, have a dounsize. It takes too long for the habilities you have make a huge difference in battle or in the history. On top of that, you have to split the already few skil points you gain (one for each 3 levels) betwen improving you character and oppening more tactic slots just to make your party play the better way. We should have all slots free from the beggining. Really bad.
Overall, Dragon Age: Origins is an average RPG. Actually, I have an almost certain that´s a half finished game. The homemade opening movie (anyone with the latest version of FLASH coud do that) compared to the astonishing and elaborated promo videos, the complete lack of detail and blendiness of the graphics, and the almost laughable poor animations (they remebered me the five-years old Dungeons Siege II) compared to the richness and easy-to-find production value of the interface and menus make this fellign very strong. It seen that EA have put pressure on Bioware to launch product in the much more profitable Christmas holiday, ready or not. This suspicion became certainty when I heard that they would launch an expansion just 4 months after the retail game. Maybe what was missing is in there? Unfortunatelly the graphics and the the blandness overall remains.