Honestly, reading this thread it is fairly obvious that a lot of people are jumping to conclusions. How many of you have actually gone and read some of the reviews on metacritic? While there are a LOT of people just saying "It sucks 0/10" there are also a LOT of people bringing up legitimate points about their experience with the game, including objections about the story, gameplay, mechanics, graphics and many other aspects. Personally, I have only played the demo, but I can't say I was particularly impressed. It wasn't awful, but it wasn't great, and it certainly doesn't feel like a proper RPG.
Now I don't want to say that every RPG has to have enormous open-world environments, but I don't find a completely linear path with enemies jumping out at random points fun. I love RPGs. I love tabletop games, I love Fallout, I thought Mass Effect was fun, if not to my tastes. However, the thing that draws me most to these types of games is the ability to create my own character, not choose one of six options, with a few builds available for each. One of the reasons people rave about Morrowind constantly is that there were a massive number of options for how to play your character. DA2 has some fun options, but when you get right down to it they don't compare to a lot of other RPGs.
There were also several other things that bugged me when I played the demo. I hear a lot of people talking about how awesome the combat was. Hell, PC Gamer called it "The best RPG combat ever." Unless they vastly improved things from the demo, I can't say that I really agree. It was fun, I guess, but it felt like I was playing World of Warcraft; hit the enemy until your special abilities recharge, use special ability, keep hitting them. The combat in the Elder Scrolls games sucked, but I had more fun with that than with DA2. It was visually quite impressive seeing the combat animations, but after a while they started bugging me. Particularly the mage's spectacularly retarded twist around 90 degrees and thrust my staff in the exact same direction I was facing before I twisted around. It looks cool the first few times, but it also makes no sense...
I also felt the tits and gore were a bit over-the-top. From what I hear Dragon Age 1 wasn't spectacularly subtle in this regard either, but the whole thing seemed like pandering to immaturity. To tell the truth I like tits and I like gore. But I prefer them not being shoved in my face.
I realize that I am kind of biased, having played only a small sample of the game, but what I saw definitely failed to impress me. To me, Dragon Age 2 doesn't look like a bad game, it just doesn't look like a great RPG. It doesn't deserve a 0/10 and it probably doesn't deserve a 3/10. People are overreacting, it's true. There are probably people who haven't played enough of the game to give it a fair score. But I read through this entire thread, and I was getting kind of sick of people stating that people are conspiring to drive the score down or simply yelling "they changed it now it sucks." A lot of players have legitimate, well-thought-out reasons for disliking the game, and putting it down to a conspiracy or fanboyism is foolish at best. No matter what you think of the game, just dismissing the people who gave it low scores as trolls is not helpful.
Oh, and just a side note to WorldCritic, just because it's a fantasy game we still have suspension of disbelief. The issue is not that a character is teleporting in a fantasy setting, but we don't expect it from a rogue, at least not without some magic mumbo-jumbo.
I do apologize for the massive post.
