Finished the main game + Descent + Trespasser in early 2020, but recently I've been coming back to the game to finish open world stuff I had left, so I decided to also start the DLC and it was a great choice! Hakkon brings a totally new region, with its own lore, main story and conflict. In a lot of ways, it's like any other region of the main game but better. It uses many of the open world systems and type of quests you can find in other zones but they feel more natural and necessary, and the narrative keeps things varied and interesting.

In some ways, this is a dramatic improvement over the main game. Indeed, the Frostback Basin is a decent mock-up for what the zones in the base game should have looked like. There's a coherent narrative and some consistent theming that's completely missing in, say, the Emerald Graves, or the Hissing Wastes, or any of the other utterly fungible areas from the main game.

That being said, roughly one third of the content here is still meaningless fluff - the lack of editorial wisdom remains dire. "I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil" - that's Capote, and he's right on. I just wish someone at BioWare had listened while they were making this game (though, the same could be said of the equally turgid Mass Effect: Andromeda, so one wouldn't be wrong to assume that the misguided devotion to bloat is now a studio hallmark).