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).