Ya you could have a dual wielding warrior in the first game, the trouble is, it played exactly like a rogue in plate but with less utility.

By the way, is there anywhere you can go to respec your abilities?

If you actually looked at the metacritic user reviews, you would notice that a lot of the negative reviews were of people giving 0s and 1s, which is always the case when you have the internet rage mob. How on earth is this game a 0 or 1? that's usually reserved for the games that are deserving of hate and sadly not every game is a "leisure suit larry:box office bust". A more qualitative analysis of the 0s and 1s reviews would show you that it's people raging against bioware and advocating never to buy a bioware game again just because they felt that their expectations were not met. Ya, the numbers are damning, but if you actually read what they post, they are actually just trolling.

Is this a "great" game? in my opinion no it isn't. There are quite a few things that take away from the sense of immersion the first one had. Is it a good game though? in my opinion, it is fairly decent. The way the story plays out is far better than the usual CRPG hero plucked from obscurity to save world plot. The flashback mechanic involving Varric reminds me quite of how the events in the epic Slaine the horned god graphic novel played out as narrated by his dwarf Ukko.

If you think about it, the events in this film are quite similar to the events that take place in Scarface, the fereldens escaping from the blight, who are basically cubans escaping from communism. You have your hero hawke, who arrives with nothing, does some dodgy things to get a green card, gets money, women, power etc, loses family due to his/her action or inaction. There is even a "say hello to my little friend" reference in the game..

Few things that i did hate: recycled environments, the fact that all bodies explode into chunks. I'm only in the third act but i am enjoying it so far.

I don't know how some people are finishing this game in less than 25 hours unless they're skipping loads of dialogue or cheating their way to max level...

It's one of those bugged quests, quite a lot of people have spent a lot of time wondering up and down the wounded coast only to experience the exact same thing.

quite a few..

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/category/300/index

Seriously, there's a choice and it ain't exactly forced on you. If you don't want to RP gay sex then don't.. unless of course you really want to.