DA:O is only isometric if you scroll the camera out and want it to be. You do run around with the camera behind your character (or whichever from your party you're controlling - you can control any of them and switch when you want) in a fairly typical third person view, but can get that strategic isometric top-down view of the battlefield whenever you want. There's quite a bit of freedom with the camera as opposed to DA2, which tied it lower down, although you could still pull back a fair bit - which means that you can move it around to get the best angles that work for you.
It can look like this:
or this:
and various things in between.
This is what it looks like when you're just running around:
Like Epona said, it's not really comparable to Skyrim. There isn't really any of that open world exploration, although it feels freer and more open than DA2. There are a series of separate areas you can go to, and you have a small amount of freedom within them but it's still fairly linear about what you have to achieve while you're there. You can visit the main areas in the order you want, though, and approach many of the quests in a couple of different ways, sometimes requiring you to leave the area for a while, do something else, and return later if that's what you decide.
It's a decently long game, but part of that is down to things like the blasted Deep Roads section which takes forever and is the bane of every DA:O player's life. And the Fade. *cries*
There's plenty of humour in the game, and all the characters are interesting in their own right. The lore is where it shines, along with the storytelling, which really is excellent. The origin stories are a great mechanic - and playing through all of them before getting started on the game proper can be quite a good idea if you think you're not likely to ever slog through the game 8 times (or whatever it is). The city elf and the dwarven origins are really good. The human noble origin is probably what you'd expect. The dalish elf origin is certainly worth doing if you are ever going to play DA2 because it gives quite a bit of background to one of the characters and quests in it. The mage origins are so-so - interesting enough to understand how the circle works but no great shakes, tbh. Loghain is a fascinating character.
All in all it's a very solid rpg, good fun, interesting, and a decent bridge of 'old school' and some slightly newer ideas ('newer' is relative, because it's very definitely dated now, but that's no bad thing).
You can set up tactics so that your party will execute certain commands and use certain spells/actions when various criteria are met. That can be useful when wanting to chain spell effects, or make sure a party member drinks a health potion when they fall below X health, or they use X attack when facing 3 enemies at a time, and Y attack when facing one really big bastard, etc. That allows you to focus on just one or two characters if you want, so you can let combat feel a little bit more fast paced ('fast' again being relative, since it suffers from the old 'click mouse, shuffle shuffle shuffle shuffle stab' syndrome) by not pausing to issue commands to every single character for every single attack, the others will just auto-attack using the tactics you've set up (or their own auto-attack if you haven't). So depending on your approach and what you want out of the game, you can create a relatively strategic combat game from it (it does certainly have its limitations), or just breeze through simply controlling your character while the others get on with their thing if all you're interested in is seeing the story.
The ultimate edition, which includes all the DLC (some of which is standalone and not necessarily that good) plus the Awakening expansion (which is a fascinating addition in terms of lore if nothing else), is about £15 on Steam right now. I reckon it's worth it (in fact I just bought it a couple of weeks ago, despite having bought the game twice before on different platforms).
There are also mods. It has its own nexus. It's not anywhere near as sophisticated as Skyrim in that regard, but you can get some useful stuff. Like 'Lock Bash'. God yes.
) but I can give you my perspective. Dragon Age: Origins is nothing like Skyrim, it's more like a modern day Baldur's Gate - top down isometric view, pause during combat to issue commands to your party members (not true turn-based combat, but you can simulate it fairly well by using the pause button). I can't say that if you liked Skyrim you'll like DA:O, because they are completely different games with completely different gameplay mechanics, despite being in the same genre.
