Also as a little side note I can't remember where and can't be bothered going back to find it, but someone said that DA2 is shit because the story is all over the place and is more like episodes from Kirkwall rather than a central storyline to follow. Amusingly this is kinda what I like most about the game, I suppose it reminds me of all my favorite tv shows, quite a few which do have some very VERY loose plot. Most go from episode to episode throwing the main protagonists into seemingly random situations just to see how they will react.
Seeing as I am dead tired of the high fantasy quest for mount doom crap.
You know in some ways... oh god I'm almost scared to say it, but the structure of the story is reminiscent of PS:T.... you get a random cast of people (which frankly are far more fleshed out in DA2, PS:T at best has very one sided companions), give them a loose goal in a city, run around doing random shit till you figure out what's going on. Now I must say that PS:T does this better simply because there's actually some mystery and thinking required to progress (also a lot more filler content, love it or hate it), this by itself makes the game far more entertaining. Still I think that people that bash the story too hard are just focusing on the negatives in such a fierce way, they fail to see certain things or just refuse to look.