The one thing I liked the most about Dragon Age 2 was the change from a big epic story that involved your party moving around the map, into a much more contained one (in one city) but stretched out over years. Obviously this partly lead to the terrible overuse of the same assets, but I appreciated the new format.
Yes and no. Reusing the same textures decorations made sense, as you said, but the main issue caused by the rushing of the game is that they kept reusing whole maps, just changing the entry point, blocking and opening some path in some weak attempt to made them look slightly differents. Every single cave around Kirkwal had pretty much the same layout, with very few variations. It's kind of fine when you don't try to do most of the content, but if you do, it becomes painfully obvious that althoug you're supposed to go to some other place, it looks exactly like all the previous similar place you went.
If anything, DA2 is a perfect exemple of why level design is important and why it shouldn't be rushed. Had they took the time to make a few more layouts to add some variety and spread the repetitions a bit more, I think that there might have been a bit less complains about the game.
but like you, I enjoyed the fact that the story stayed mostly in Kirkwall and spanned many years, it was always nice to go have a chat with the party to learn what happened over the years. Plus, dating Merryl was awesome just to piss off the neighborhood. :D
