I guess I can post some impressions now, since I've played about 8 hours of DA:I now.
First of all, the game is really pretty. And I mean it. I'm playing on PC with all the bells and whistles, and sometimes I like to stop and just watch the surroundings for a moment. I don't know why, but I am particurarly impressed by the grass
Unfortunately the animations and character models often do not live up to that high standard. Horse riding looks particurarly horrible. And if we are talking about animations, I swear some of them are ripped straight out of Dragon Age II. Picking ore uses the lockpick animation and it's just looks soooo funny.
One of the reasons why I waited with buying DA:I was that I knew such a big game would be buggy. Playing it five months after release I can say I haven't encountered that many bugs... yet. Some bizzare stuff happened, yes. Like me killing some random templars in Hinterlands and Cassandra remarking that they must be Red Templars sent by Corypheus [???]. How do you know that, Cass, who told you? Or an enemy camp just dissapearing in front of my eyes and moving to a different location.
Combat... well, it hard to say anything as I don't have the access to late level abilities, but for me so far, playing as mage, it's been spamming cooldowns and the basic attack. I barely even switch to other characters as they do just fine by themselves. Normal isn't particurarly challenging (I tend to play games on this difficulty for the first playthrough) and I can easily take on enemies up to three levels higher than me, anything more and I die. All that remains in the Hinterlands for me to kill, is the dragon and some 12 level tear.
BUT... boy, oh boy. They couldn't have picked a worse starting area than Hinterlands. Pretty, but so... lifeless. No day/night cycle. Villagers just stuck in one place. And the questing, oh maaan. Fetch quest overkill I like to call it. Bring 10 of these, estabilish 5 of those, find 6 of that and so on. The only quest so far that didn't make me feel apathetic was the one with the dead grandpa. It was sorta funny.
I've been playing in small doses, about an hour or two a day, as my new uni semester has just started and it works in the game's favour. I can understand now, why people were complaining - it's easy to get burnt out on a game when all you do is meaningless crap. But still... the Hinterlands made me feel like this was some bizzard offline MMO.
So now... a question. Where should I go next? I've unlocked the Marshlands [I think that's what they're called] and that Coast area. Or should I do the Val Royeaux mission?