Origins was a full game while this is an expansion. I think for an expansion its pretty fair. 25 hours as most of the reviews have been mentioning is more than a lot of other full games currently on the market.
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Well, I clocked a rather embarrassing 285 hours in Dragon Age: Origins, not in a single play through of course.
From what I've been reading, Awakening in general scores above average, but doesn't quite live up to the rather steep standards set by Origins. For sure I'm going to give Awakening a play, but I suspect to fulfill my RPG needs completely I'm going to have to wait for Dragon Age 2.
I believe its unrealistic to expect an expansion to match or even exceed a full game. That's basicly what some of the negative comments has been about. For me what an expansion needs to to do is add to the original and with the interesting story(the small bits that I have read) awakening seems to do that.
I doudt it can satisfy fully my rpg requirements especially with the fact that unlike origins the expansion has no romantical options but I do feel it will add to the game and tide us over for a decent time periond till feb 2011 comes around. For those who don't know EA with their financial forecast gave away that a unspecified dao title will be launched in that time frame and the speculation is that its dao 2.
When is it releasing in SA?
Today. Got my copy this morning, finishing up ac 2 first though.
Just tested to see if the game is working. Word of warning patch 1.03/awakening screws up the dao content updater service. When I installed it it changed my dlc to unauthorized because the updater wasn't running anymore. In order to fix it run the dao updater diagnostics tool. You can get the tool here:DAO updater diagnostics
Of course I wouldn't expect an expansion pack to give me an additional 285 hours. What I was actually getting at was that Origins was rated at 50 hours+- by most reviewers, I got lost in it for days on end, literally. So an expansion rated at 25 hours is probably going to give me quite a bit of extra play time.
I'm not a 100% complete, unlock everything and get all the achievements kind of person, but in Dragon Age there was almost always something interesting to do, or new and different ways to try an accomplish something and many different avenues to explore. And of course then there was trying the game as different races and classes. I'm hoping the expansion at least expands on that.
My copy is supposed to be arriving this afternoon.
/holds thumbs.
I am 9 hours into the expansion and loving it so far, especially some of the humor.
Played yesterday. So far its great. I really like anders. One of the so called companion shouldn't be listed as a companion though, that npc last way too short to be classified as such.
Anyone know where the oil for the heart of forest quest is located?? Looked online but its not showing up on the kitchen table in the inn. Anyone knows if you need to wait or what??
I just want to know whether this game really is that good. It beats Dawn of Discovery or Anno:1404 in review scores and I think Dawn of Discovery is one of the best games I've ever laid my hands on. Anyway, I remember I've tried their flash demo and I wasn't really impressed. I've seen some graphics of it and it resembles WoW graphics. Is the story that good? ^^
Finished awakening. Going to give it 85% reason is due to a few annoying bugs if they fix this it goes to 90%. If you liked the original game you will love this game but some of the things might be difficult to understand if you haven't read the calling.
I don't think any of these are spoilers:
1.Memory band disappears when captured by the architect, all other equipment is reclaimed but that ring.
2.Correct ending slide for those of us who romanced morrigan correctly does not play at the end.
3.Skills from wardens keep doesn't work, the blood skills appear in your skills list but they don't function.
4.If you don't do the main quests in a specific order you can't do the joining for velana and sigrun.
5.Velana sidequest doesn't always trigger, have to use the console for some of my playthroughs. No solution currently if you are playing on the console.
6.Very hard/nearly impossible to get oghren approval high enough for sidequest. Would be solved if there were more gifts in the game or if you import an origins character he retains some approval instead of starting at 0. I solved it with console commands since I didn't want to wait around for a fix to finish my final side quest.
7.Sigrun,velana and justice get to 100 approval first gift I give them. This is a major problem due to you not then getting the npc skills for advancing their relationship status.
Yah, I found Awakening to be great but not nearly as good as Origins.
Reasons: I didnt like how you could just buy new specs. Would have been nice to earn them.
Storyline was also a little bland
Not difficult enough
And I couldnt find most of the recipe ingredients to get Wade to make the special items
I would give it 80% (considering i gave origins 100%...i loved it)
Oh, also all the DLC items and warden armour arnt carried over! Which made me crazy because I basically played the first hour of the game naked! :-/