I'm late to the party. I was going to wait until I built a new gaming PC and finished a replay of DA 1 and 2. However, I finished my replay (much) more quickly than I expected. So, even though my CPU is slightly below min requirements, I decided to take the plunge. I have had it for a little over a week and played over 20 hours. I now am in the "new digs".
The game is a lot of fun, but yes the inventory / character screens are AWFUL. I hate the rings that benefit abilities since there is no quick and easy way to see whether or not my character uses those abilities. Even if I could just back out to the character screen and it would stick to the character I was looking at in the inventory screen, this might be somewhat tolerable, but of course it doesn't. Seriously, I don't understand who thought this interface was acceptable, but they are fools.
I am mixed on the whole "open world" thing. On the one hand, I miss the more "hand crafted" areas. I have been to very few of them so far. On the other hand, I sure have had fun running around the Hinterlands doing quest after quest. I like the fact that there are things too tough for me to handle right now. Not just pure "scaling". (Though I am sure it's in there.)
The tactical menu is so useless they may as well have left it out. It's way too low and it's just clunky to use. I haven't really felt the need to use it much, as I just stick with the MMO approach with pausing here and there.
Look DA:O is by far the best DA game, and I doubt Bioware will ever make a game close to as good as it ever again. But, DA3 is still better than DA2 (which I liked then and enjoyed a 2nd time, despite its flaws). Still this is a lot of fun, even though it runs a little dumpy on my old PC. I laughed when I let the Geforce Experience "optimize" the game for me. When I loaded it it was so pixellated it looked like Minecraft!!!
I have dialed things up to a more low/medium level.
I like this game enough that I am probably going to build my new PC sooner than later, so I can still enjoy most/half the game with more optimal settings.
One last thing, I found the DA Keep VERY clunky. I understand they need this thing for consoles, but it would have been much better to simply import saves (at least for the PC) especially since they are stored online. LAZY!!! Making me manually configure the look of my.... uh old character was lame.