1. get a ssd, if you don't have one, 2. skip all the shard collecting and landmark placing, 3. enjoy the game
I just finished DA:I. I enjoyed the dialogues which are superb, skill trees and fighting, However, the end is so forced and the last two missions in the game take about 10 minutes. You never find out the true motives of the villain and everything feels unnaturally quickly wrapped up. In addition you spend the whole game gathering allies and resources for you fight against the main villain, but you never really need any of this.
I ran into several technical issues. I played the game across four different platforms, PS3 and three different PCs. The cloud saves worked most of the time - one time 10h of my gameplay got overwritten. However, I only had a 50% chance to connect to the game servers which really sucked. My girlfriend ran into the bug where her voice changed. The loading times are crazy long (1-2min+) if you don't have it installed on a ssd (10-20sek loading time) - in your PC folder the game is stored in gigabyte sized packages. A ssd, I noticed, also helps with slowdowns during cutscenes. The game crashed on me about 20 times on load-up while completing it. It crashed three times in-game which is alright considering that it took me 93h to complete everything (you can finish the main quest in 15h, 80% of the rest is "go there, kill that or collect item x"). I would still consider the game a bad PC port, and I am not one of the people complaining that I can't play the game with mouse and keyboard (which you really can't).
Right until the end the main quests are really, really well made. I enjoyed the scale of the battle which came across well compared to Dragon Age Origins where you always walked on these confined, preset paths. Seeing how these factions which you have met in DA:O and DA2 struggle to survive adds to the tension. The romances are funny and tasteful yet a bit short, I think. Each involves about three different scenes.
If I could go back and tell my former self from two weeks ago how to play the game, I would suggest him to skip all side-quests, because there really is no gem among them. I'd recommend me to play through the main quest and do some companion quests and that's it. There is a fun packed game at the core of DA:I, but there are so many distractions which I thought I kind of had to deal with at the beginning that the fun gets easily lost at times. A couple of month of polishing, a few more meaningful side-quests and a satisfying ending would have helped the game a great deal.
