I have only played DA:I in brief sessions so far and it's been a bit tricky to discern the critical path even early on; resulting in me running around aimlessly in the first big zone (the Hinterlands) for far too long and getting the party progressively more underlevelled relative to the enemies we're facing. It finally dawned on me that the game really wanted us to head off to the "city" (or tiny street-like area, rather) of Val Royeaux, and in doing so I finally got some new companions to replace Varric with (combat-wise he was my least favorite character in DA2 and he doesn't appear to have changed much since then). Sera seems a deliberate attempt to make a Chaotic character (to use the D&D term) and she could get annoying in the long run, but I sure hope she brings some much-needed rogue backstabbing to the party. Vivienne is a flamboyant mage I probably won't be needing in this playthrough since her specialities happens to overlap with the player character's.
As for the combat, I've finally returned to the tactical camera again (seeing as I'm playing on Nightmare difficulty right from the start it's going to be hard to avoid that aspect altogether), and at least the system is a lot less cumbersome with a gamepad than it was with the mouse cursor awkwardly emulating an analog stick (!). I've even turned off Tactics for now, and I really hope it won't be necessary to turn them on again since I want Dragon Age combat to be all about micromanagement (provided that the controls are up for the task, that is).
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