Yeah, played through some of DragonAge 1, never tried 2. Am part way through Mass Effect at the moment and yeah, I'd agree, that's awesome.
I only really tried it a few months ago after a mate told me that you could play it without hardly giving a thought to the whole team bit, and apart from selecting which characters you wanted on your team, you could just leave them to their own devices. Once I knew that, I bought it. The whole 'giving your team orders' is not something that I'm particularly taken with in games and they really made a big thing about that aspect of it when they released the game.
The bonus of only just playing it now is that it was cheap