For a long while, I considered Zaeed to be the worst of Bioware's companion DLCs, but after finally finishing Sebastian Vael's questlines, I'm now retracting that sentiment. At least Zaeed has a bit of a personality beyond his initial archetype unlike Sebastian who doesn't really feel like he's grown one way or another, and at least his one quest does everything necessary with an indicative moment of character growth for both you and him, compared to the three separate ones Sebastian hands you in each arc that doesn't necessary reach a concrete endstate.

Really, Exiled Prince is a microcosm of all the issues plaguing DA2. His quests revolve around basic dungeon crawling of (majorly) samey environments that (majorly) take too long to finish, his backstory - an evangelical Chantry follower due to the rather belligerent upstart he had as a Starkhaven royal - and the arc that's proposed from this doesn't come into full fruition, the lore and worldbuilding that he and the Chantry introduces never materialize into anything substantial within the context of the main narrative, and the Friendship-Rivalry points regarding these spokes are harder to nab due to complications arising if they happen to contradict with the personality and mindset you established upon Hawke (eg: my Hawke is mainly a mage advocate due to his upbringing and only rebuts if absolutely necessary, yet feels as if the Chantry is not the best place for Sebastian and wants to push him back to Starkhaven; his Act 3 quest is able to give a grand total of 45 extra Rivalry points, but only if I kept besmirching the Mages), and considering you can't even properly recruit him until the start of Act 2, that makes fully cementing him as a Friend or Rival that much harder. This is the second time I had to use console commands to increase the side I wanted, but at least in the other case that was just me being lazy and not wanting to redo hours of progress to gather a measly 5 points before the cutoff point, and doing so got me to better appreciate that companion's ordeal which made it worth the cheat; here I felt like I could've just left the bars as they were, and would've lost absolutely nothing. All of this would simply be a bitter pill to swallow if he was, at the very least, a decent combatant, but even in these terms he falls short. He's the ugly middle of Isabela's DPS hit-and-run approach as well as Varric's jack-of-trades strength/support archery - the same style Sebastian has, btw - meaning I never felt inclined to bring him along unless I absolutely had to.

I read on the DA Wiki that this was supposed to feature Nathaniel Howe, and that the narrative would've revolved around these two, but this had to be dropped due to contingencies regarding his potential passing in the Awakening expansion. I checked its sourced link, and while I've yet to find anything else to back this up, the fact this was released day-and-date with the base game (yea this means this is another awful case of that practice), knowing that ME2 and later ME3 would have similar change of plans, and Nathaniel's Act 3 cameo appearance feeling rather phoned in while occupying space with another, vaguely related Act 2 questline if he didn't make it after Awakening's conclusion, I can't exactly say I'm surprised something like this was theorized to begin with. Would this have helped him? Who knows, but at least it would've been nice to have a bit of chewing on if everything else was this unexciting, aside from the super brief cameo Leliana had at the tailend anyway. Nowadays, on PC, you're able to get every DLC of this game alongside every new purchase, so I can't say it's too frustrating of a deal, but at the same time the content within is so bare, you might as well just pretend it doesn't exist. In fact, here's something comedic: this and Black Emporium were the two D1DLCs for this game, yet the latter is (was too iirc) free with all new copies, it also had more beneficiary gains and inclusions that makes the overall ride a tad smoother to complete. Sebastian got beat out by a dog and an enigmatic old fuck of a Greek allegory. That's just, downright pathetic and hilarious.