I found it great. Good concept and well executed. BUT going through it more than once is a bit of a chore.

If you use the toolset to morph your character, the fade plays up something chronic.
The mod gives you all the stat boosts as if you had completed the fade.

I totally agree, I bought it when it first came out. I was apalled when i arrived at the first main camp and was offered to go into a new area, the only catch was i had to purchase it first lol. Well that in game terms is now ancient history, as of last years Steam Xmas sale i bought the 'Ultimate' version. Frankly i'm glad i waited as i saved a shitload of money not buying all that DLC, not to mention all the frustration of getting those modules to work properly in game.

Thank you very much!
I don't know if this has been answered yet, but no. I don't need to download the DLC because it is on the disk, but they still want me to "Authenticate" it. Fuckers just want to make you sign up so they have someone else to force feed shite.
That sounds overly angry but I hate being compelled to sign up to these sites, to all these different games. Steam is bad enough but at least it is one client for all the games.

Never experienced any bugs on PC.

Great game.

I swear I am going to fucking video some of this bullshit, no one seems to believe me.

I've read of numerous bugs people have experienced with the game, including game-breakers. I was lucky enough not to experience anything major like that save one. My game crashed constantly in Denerim if I loaded a save when my character was outside. If I saved in a building and loaded that save, there were no issues. Never did figure out what caused it. Other than that, my experience with the game was remarkably trouble free. Too bad you're having such issues with it, OG, because it's really a good game.

Well, thanks for the well wishes. I did finally get past Warden's Keep, but I couldn't follow the path I'd selected (siding with Sophia and leading whatever-the-hell-his-name-is into a trap, then killing Sophia after she sealed the rift and gave me the location of the money). I also had to replay about 2.5 hours of stuff I'd already done, had to load near the beginning of the keep, before speaking to either Sophia or whatever-his-name-is and went to get Shale. I used Shale's boulder throw on whatever-his-name-is, because using it on Sophia caused the endless video loop to trigger again. The boulder throw at his feet knocked him onto the summoning circle and triggered the event.

Actually, speaking of Shale, that reminds me I had an issue with her as well. Had a glitch in the camp when I tried to talk to her that I couldn't solve without resorting to using the console. (I had to search the BSN for a fix, and it seems that was a fairly common issue as well). I hate to ask this, but have you tried a re-install? Sounds like you're having nothing but a glitch-fest. Maybe a re-install would help.

Yep, I deleted the whole install and redownloaded and reinstalled once already, EA phone support recommended this to get the DLC to authenticate. I was having random crashes before and after this, though I clearly hadn't yet done Warden's Keep.

Bloody hell. Sounds like you're one of the unlucky ones with this game. I know there were a number of reports on the BioWare boards by people complaining the game was a bug-fest. Of course, they were a minority, but that doesn't make the problems any less real. Wish I had some help to offer on this. Feel like posting system specs? Maybe I can dig up something that could help.

Intel Quad Core 2600K Sandy Bridge
ASRock Z68 Extreme7 Gen3 mobo
80 GB Intel SSD (320 series)
OCZ 750 Watt PSU
Coolermaster 212 Plus CPU cooler
16GB (4x4GB) Corsair RAM
2x XFX 6870 video cards (Crossfired)
ASUS DVD Burner

Note, the game is actually running on a second, 1.5 TB drive I have in the machine. The 80GB SSD is a bit small for a 27 GB game. The second drive has no page file, I reduced the page file on the main drive to 4GB (since the default 16 GB was a tad overzealous). I keep the system up to date and run MSSE as antivirus. Other than that it's pretty stock Win 7.

At any rate, I did install the 1.05 patch, which was mainly to get the DLC to auth, I now know why it wouldn't auth (bad location of the registry auth key when you download via the Origin client) so I might try reverting to 1.04 but that would be yet another 27GB download in just a few weeks and I'm not sure I have the patience or that Comcast might not start complaining (I stream a ton of movies and do a lot of other high bandwidth stuff).

You don't have to dig around on my account, I was mostly just posting specs to prove my rig wasn't a POS (though I probably should go through and do some Windows tuning, I'm kind of lazy and it doesn't sound all that fun).

Nice rig. Yeah, I've seen enough of your posts to know you're not the type to run a Volkswagon and want it to run like a Ferrari. I just thought if you post your specs it may trigger something I might've seen on the BioWare tech support forums. Alas, it didn't. The only thing I can suggest is perhaps to try with one card and not Crossfired. But that's likely a useless endeavor.

Does this game have balance problems in the higher levels? My dog, Spawnbane, (yes, I'm not quite clever enough to come up with a name as cool as this http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/11/6/) just soloed an Ogre from 85% to death in the time it took my other companions to run back and help my wimpy, mage ass with some aggro.

I have a bunch of healing magic but in a lot of areas it's faster to just tick off nukes until stuff dies. Alistair has some pretty good armor and Leliana has Starfang, but everyone's only level 12 or so...

EDIT: Posting because the game crashed a few minutes after, yet again, *sigh*

One of the most consistent gripes about the game is the difficulty spikes. For the most part, it seems to be fairly well balanced, but you will get spikes of insane difficulty and cake walks. Dog's pretty tough on his own though. I found him pretty tough and resilient when I used him.