Been playing a bunch of DA:O recently, and for the most part; Giant, effing high five Bioware. It's been a long long time since i enjoyed a party based RPG this much, and it really does feel like it harks back to the BG2 days. The world struck me as hopelessly generic at first, but it's coming into its own, particularly with the notion of the Fade.
 
The only thing that really bothers me with it right now is the whole weird sorta-creepy relationship stuff. On one hand, it feels hilariously awesome to see such transparent dating game nonsense in such a big budget high profile release, but on the other it feels disappointing to have Bioware create these massive characters to get to know, and boil down the process of getting to know them into manipulating what's essentially a progress bar. As getting closer to a character has real game benefits in terms of upgrades and such, you want to get that bar as far right as possible; It's only natural as a player. So instead of gradually getting to know these characters over time, like BG2 did for instance, you can for the most part simply go to camp, spam gifts on a character and save/reload conversations to optimize your "score". It reduces well written characters to machines you can manipulate. That the peak of a relationship tends to be an awkward dry humping session set to this overbearing epic "romance theme" doesn't help either.
 
The funny thing is, this really influenced the way i role played my character. I went in wanting to be all goodie two shoes and help everybody, like i always have. However, now, a little over 20 hours in, i'm a lying, cheating, conniving, manipulative bastard, who will HELP DEMONS to get the best out of every deal.
 
This is actually pretty cool. It's literally a new perspective for me as an RPG player. Where i was previously absolutely incapable of being mean to anyone in Fallout 3, i will do the meanest shit to ANYONE for kicks in DA:O, because the role-play aspect of the game feels like a machine to mess around with, and not a world in which my actions are judged.
 
But cool or not, it feels like Bioware are selling themselves short. All this depth and all this dialog, and it's all reduced to a graphs and numbers.
 
I feel like a lot of this could have been changed around simply by hiding the numbers. If you'd hid for me the effects of a conversation, i'd feel less inclined to retry them and optimize their results. If i didn't have that bar to look at, i'd rather have to read a character's opinion of me out of their behavior. I wish this was an option.
 
How about the rest of you; feel like DA:O's roleplay aspect plays out differently than other recent RPGs?