Quite late to this party. I'm doing another playthrough of DA:II and I just got curious as to whether anyone else had noticed the bugs.
If I remember correctly, there were a couple of times in past playthroughs when I had this "allies don't attack" bug. I had to R1+L1 and make them all attack at once to get through fights and it wasn't a tactics or "hold" issue (so the smugness about that was not warranted). That was a long time ago, though.
The bugs that have been most prevalent for me are conversations repeating twice or more after they should end, and relationships glitching, e.g. I make love to Merrill and the game ends saying I lived happily ever after with Anders, even though I killed him. My wife and my oldest friend have also encountered these bugs. The former doesn't matter except as an inconvenience and immersion-breaker, the latter can essentially render your entire playthrough worthless (if, for instance, your main goal in that playthrough was to be a mage who hooks up with Fenris and the game ends up calling you a rogue who hooked up with Merrill).
Now, why are bugs in a game like Dragon Age II more egregious than in a game like Fallout? The answer is simple and reasonable: DAII is smaller and less complex. Think of the games as meals. Dragon Age II is a bowl of ramen and a sandwich, NV is a grand buffet. If the sandwich or the ramen is ruined and that's all you have to eat, your lunch is now ruined. If a couple of items in a buffet of 50 items are ruined, it hardly matters. The ramen and sandwich are also much harder to screw up -- it's easier to understand if someone makes a flat souffle than if they screwed up something much easier to make.
For all of DA2's streamlining and lack of variety, you'd think it would be quite easy to code the relationships correctly. New Vegas, however, makes Origins look simple by comparison -- keeping track of thousands of items and where you randomly drop them or bump into them, not locking you into a class tree and thus not limiting your range of actions in the same way, rendering one massive outdoor location as opposed to smaller, locked down cells, etc.
It's also not as if DA2 has no other problems. Reused dungeons, reused item textures (oh, that's a coincidence, my ub3r-l33t magic dragon-god armor from act 3 looks precisely like my very first rusty beginner armor from act 1!), the mis-labeling of the title as "2" when it's neither big enough (for some people... I think it barely squeaks by as big enough) or related enough to the first game to be a sequel, and a lack of strategy.
It's not bad that they changed these things from DA:O. It's bad that they changed them for the worse. Is anybody going to say that lazy game design is a positive change? Is one of you willing to defend game-breaking bugs, non-universal though they may be?
There's plenty of good in DA2, as well. For me, enough good to put up with the bad points. Of course, I am an avid RPG fanboy. But if BioWare's next installment of the franchise repeats these mistakes, I will drop them. I will not eat funky ramen twice, no matter how hungry I get. Besides, I now have the buffet of Skyrim to feast upon, and they're still adding new courses.
