Black Swan

We finished it yesterday. I am relatively satisfied overall -- some things I enjoyed, some complaints for sure. From what little I've seen of a consensus (since we played so slowly I haven't been following along with commentary at all), I agree that the story and characters had a lot of potential but were underwritten. Given where the story starts, I feel like we missed almost an entire game of backstory (the story DA: Dread Wolf was going to be?). I understand why, from a practical position, this game stands so separate from all the others -- there are so many potential world states by now that managing all the different versions would be a Herculean task (I suppose that's what fic is for) -- but divorcing the action and characters almost completely from what happened in southern Thedas over the past ten years made it harder for me to connect to the larger world. Also T got pretty bored with the sidequests about halfway through -- he felt like they weren't interesting enough on their own to justify spending the time. So we focused on main story and character quests, and toward the end on getting every faction up to a rank of at least two stars.

To the surprise of no one who knows me, we played a Grey Warden dwarf and romanced Harding (although we flirted with everybody until we were forced to make a choice, and it was hard to resist Neve (T's favorite companion by far) and Davrin (thereby breaking my streak of romancing the Grey Warden companion the first time through every game; I justified it because we were the Grey Warden this time)). Everything else is spoilers, so I'll put it behind a cut).

Here be spoilers, you are officially warned.

( Spoilers for all of DA:V )

For a game in a series that's been so important to my fannish life, I feel like I ought to have more to say, but maybe its inevitable, given that I've been disconnected from the fandom for so long. Maybe it's time to fix that.

Who else has played? What do you think? Feel free to leave spoilers in the comments (but mark them as such in case there are others here who don't want them).