I played far enough into Dragon Age until Morrigan joins my party. That's about 3-4 hours in? I think I'm going to give up. The story is compelling enough, but I can't stand the combat. Everything feels so floaty, and none of my party is doing what I'm telling them to do. The tactics system bills itself as easy to use, but I fiddled around with it for quite awhile before I just gave up. Here's what would normally happen in combat, maybe someone can help me out.
1.) I tell all my party to attack one target.
2.) I tell one of my party to use a special attack.
3.) I may queue up other special attacks from other party members during paused time.
4.) After someone performs the special attack, they just sit there and don't move, leaving me to tell them to resume attacking the target they were just attacking.
This was especially frustrating during the first boss fight. No matter how hard I tried to get my party members to keep attacking the boss, they would just stand their twiddling their thumbs after Shield Bashing or Growling. I really hoped that the tactics page would fix this, but I can't for the life of me find any command that says "Don't stop attacking something until I tell you to stop."
Oh well.