Plot of Dragon Age 2 blows as much as plot of Skyrim?
Ok, lemme get this straight...
*spoilers*
Skyrim: You're an epic hero and world needs to be saved. *yawn*
DA2: You should take care of your family and your home, first and foremost, just to be swayed by events, kicking and screaming.
Suffice to say, I've been saving the world in a LOT of RPGs. I have very rarely been taking care of a family, and it's always been just a minor part of the story, not it's centre. But yeah, if your idea of a good story is 'ARNOLD SAVES!' then I could see why you'd think that.

I'm hoping for two things in DA3:

original story and more non-combat interaction

I agree about the civil war thing. It was very poorly handeled aspect in Skyrim and I never felt, that there was an actual war going on in the background. I love the game, but just like in all other Elder Scroll Games, the plot was pretty poorly done.

I really like the civil war mod though. It adds a lot of battle fields to the world map in where the two factions wage war.

CONTINUING SPOILERS
It offered an ending to the Kirkwall conflict, which the more 'important' storyline was about. What was left open was it's influence on the rest of DA's world.

Yes, your character could not influence how a very long-lasting conflict between sides numbering thousands turned out. Of course he couldn't, how could a single person do such a thing? That's what I liked about it. And 'to the slightest' bit is untrue - you couldn't influence how it panned out, but you could influence small things about it.

Huh? I genuinely don't understand what you just said.

It gave enough reason to me. Also, funny bit: Based on whether you choose male or female, your brother or your sister survives. And they have about ... 4 endings or so by themselves each, based on your decisions, which by what you say don't influence anything. Funny that.

Fairly personal. I have found most of the characters in this game to be fairly well developed, and really, really like them. Maybe the writing style just wasn't your cup of tea, maybe you were just biased by the changes from DA:O that you didn't see the game for what it was. As far as I'm concerned, however, the original DA: O was boring and I loved this one.
Which has nothing to do with the story at all. If you want to draw comparisons, calling DA2 on it's fetch quests in comparison with Skyrim is not a good idea :-P

I'll just skip a few more personal bits of your post, and skip to:

It has as much replayability as generally loved, linear, Bioware RPGs. Story of many characters branches quite nicely, and you can influence a lot. Also, Hawke's an awesome protagonist.

I think this is the problem with majority of DA2 criticism. People were generally unable to get over the changes it made from DA: O. And I can't blame them for that, it's really easy to see the differences. But what's important to me in an RPG is a good story and meaningful choices and consequences. DA: O felt ... Bland in this respect. DA 2 seemed like a huge step forward in this department.

Neither plot is worth that much debate.

I'm with Fenix on this. DA 2 is probably the most impressive RPG I played in the recent years. I put it in one line with F:NV and Alpha Protocol.

DA 2 plot and story is a lot like DX 1. Confusing and weird on the superficial level, but incredibly engaging and very well done in themes and personal conflicts.

This. A thousand times this.

DA 2 was an ill-conceived, misguided POS. Even with all the justified criticism it got, it baffles me that I find it still overrated.

Disagree on a massive scale. None of the choices really change anything and you cannot roleplay because Hawke is a defined character. The blood mage chick calls a demon right in front of me and all I can do is say "aww you're naughty but keep going" or "keep going."

It was a decent story with some cool ideas but as an RPG it's terrible.

It depends what you want from an RPG. The "role playing aspect" isn't important for me. I prefer a good, well written and engaging story.

But I agree that you basically hat three hawks to choose from. Which was vastly different from DA:O.

I don't think wanting roleplaying in my roleplaying game is that weird a notion.

Not even three characters really, just three personalities... Snarky Hawk, Angry Hawk, Ambivalent Hawk. You cannot make real roleplaying decisions, which was a bummer.

Do you really want to open up the can of "what is a RPG?" ;-). Is The Witcher a RPG? Geralt didn't even had personalities. He was just flat.

I don't care what you want to call DA 2. Call it a shooter. It was a brilliant game.

Some people associate stats with roleplaying. I don't. Either way you're right, genre doesn't matter, it was a disappointing game no matter the genre.

:P

I'm still a bit un-easy about BioWare's direction for Inqusition, making it open-world. However, UbiSoft showed us, with Far Cry 3, you don't need to compromise (much) for open-world.
Combat I think will suffer, but the usual BioWare-quality of characters should still be there.
Furthermore, with Crysis 3's crazy system specs & the fact that BF3 was a graphically intensive game, I'm interested to see how good BioWare is @ coding FrostBite 2 & how well FrostBite 2 handles open-world.

It's going to be a next-gen game and will likely have higher requirements than either of the two games you mentioned by a significant margin. We're all gonna have to upgrade soon if we want to keep running on high settings, same as it's always been when new consoles come out.