Something that needs to be said here is that Bioware generally has their strengths, and they play to them. Graphics have never been a priority for them, or for many other western RPG developers. ( Does anyone else here remember Daggerfall for crying out loud? )
Bioware Strengths:
Excellent writing and storytelling.
Good world creation ( NOT Design, necessarily, this ties into story )
Bioware Weakness: Lazy in game features.
Yes, I said it. I've been a fan of their since KotoR which is STILL one of my favorite games, but Bioware is typically extremely lazy when it comes to game feature creation. This is why their menus are fundamentally the same as since 2003. I'm not saying they don't try different things, ( The combat in Mass Effect series and Jade Empire for example ) but they know their strengths, and that is the cornerstone of their games.
Some people really like this. ( Myself included ). Some people do not.
To answer the original poster, I think that graphics can add alot to the immersion, but sometimes they also break immersion completely. Fallout 3 was frankly, a pretty ugly game, and characters still had sticks up their bums when you spoke to them and eerily followed you all over the place, but the world design made up for it. The Wastelands weren't as big as Cyrodil, but they were dense and varied enough that it FELT like I was wandering a new world. So, immersion, very good.
Does anyone remember Silent Hill 2? Playing that game, back to back with the more recent Silent Hill Homecoming for the Playstation 3, SH2 is far and away the more immersive of the two. Homecoming looks much nicer yes, the graphics are much more detailed, but that actually breaks the immersion in the game. Some games, especially in the horror genre, rely on psychology and tense atmosphere, and leaving detail out of in game images actually serves to force the gamer's imagination to fill in the blanks. We will ALWAYS scare ourselves better then someone else can scare us, if we're put into the right frame of mind.
Another example for Oblivion, which at the time had amazing graphics which many people had a hard time running on their PC's. Yes, the world looked very pretty, but you still had to click on a sign to read it, and that's the kind of thing that will make someone realize very quickly they're still in a game.
Graphics are a piece of the puzzle, absolutely, but you can not neglect other areas of game design in favor of pixel count. Doing so will just make the entire project suffer.
I could be wrong though. Frankly, the fact that Modern Warfare 2 sold a billion copies means not EVERYONE gets hung up on story as I do. But that's where personal taste comes into it. To answer the original question; Is Dragon Age an utter dissapointment?
Dunno. Alot more people bought it then even Bioware was expecting. For my part, I got more or less exactly what I expected. A story driven, lazily designed world with very interesting people living in it, using archaic gameplay and mediocre graphics.
And I had an absolute fucking blast with it.
To the one guy who mentioned it, you're right, Awakening was absolute shit however. But that's another story.
