So let me get this straight.

just about everyone on this thread was claiming that Awakening and the DLC packs for DA:O were "omitted" or "written-out" of DA2's timeline. I loaded my Awakening save and it had all of the Awakening choices.

Now because of these forum rumors, I had deleted my DLC saves, since "Bioware wrote them out".

You bastards.

Now, being the perfectionist I am, will have to go back to DA:O, import my awakenings character to each of the DLC's and reconstruct my story.

You dirty, dirty bastards.

Also, what is this I see that the importer isn't working? Worked fine for me. X-Box retail copy.

I really, REALLY hope BW gets that patch out asap for the auto-attack. I cannot believe this was overlooked.

Yeah on the escapist the reviewer wactually said something along the lines of "its a memorable game, atleast until Skyrim".

Apparently companions dont have inventory. THE [censored]!
I hope that is a troll.

I havent seen anyone say it was written out, then agian I havent been checking that regularlyuntil now.

The import works, thats the impressive part. I will use an exampe.
A guy imported with a character with a living architect, later on for some reason the game acted as though he killed it.
It imports correctly, but it has errors over time. How BW did that I dont know.

Keep playing - you'll see the problem:



That comes straight from the readme file.

There were complaints about Awakenings not being "addressed" in DA2 and that the Dark Ritual and Witchunt DLC were written out because there were only the 3 default storylines. I assume these rumors began with pirated copies that didn't show that the import save option was there.

@Sojourner

X-Box retail copy. No read me file.

No documentation for 360 version? The problem affects all platforms (players on 360 are reporting issues) - if you import, apparently plot flags start getting screwed up through the course of the game. Savegame corruption is mentioned.

I just saw the ending, very dissapointing.

well, ill just reconstruct my story and save the import until patches are out.

Besides no point doing a main playthroguh until you know how to dodge bugs, if its like DA:A which by the sound of it, it is, then you wont be able to get a decent outcome until the wiki is updated.
May awell ust do a test run see how the game feels, importing at this time is pointless.

There's one quest in DA2 you can hose by simply being a thrifty looter and picking up a letter before being told to pick it up. So, yea, I recommend having a guide on hand to dodge bugs.

Its sigruns quest all over again.

I pre-ordered the Steam version which unlocked a bit late, a few minutes after midnight for some reason instead of 12:01 PST. Played for a a few hours last night and it was great fun.

At first I was disappointed that the opening portion is identical to the content of the demo, but I soon got over that with the excellent dialogue and voice acting and noticing some of tiny details that were different from the demo. It was also cool to play around with some of the perk trees that were locked in the demo. Here are a few first impressions:

BALANCE:
Excellent work by the Bioware devs on the gameplay balance - completely blown away by this. Nightmare mode kicks your ass! I died many times and since I only had a few hours I gave up and switched to Very Hard, which in DAO was a total joke. In DA2, Very Hard is also challenging and fun - died several times as well.

I noticed one strategy that seemed to work in both very hard and nightmare (at least if there were no enemy archers left) was after all the other characters died and only a mage remained, I could run around the enemies in circles while waiting for my cooldowns to expire and keep pausing once in a while to hit someone with a fireball, spirit bolt or winter's grasp.

Due to the complexity of micromanaging 4 characters at once, I think it would be practically impossible to do this with the rest of the party still alive without using tactics. It doesn't seem like it would be feasible to make a character run in a circle by highlighting destination points. (A big part of the fun for me is disabling all tactics and micromanaging every single action by every character, pausing each time.)

I hope we can expect this level of balance throughout the entire game. So far, it is perfect and I imagine it must be extremely difficult for devs to get just right, since I've played so few RPGs with good balance.

STORY:
I have only started the game, but so far I'm immensely enjoying the story of the "Champion of Kirkwall," and really weighing carefully even the tiniest decision, as I have no idea what will be important later on.

Great story hooks with the family on arriving in Kirkwall. Since I've already seen the sibling character croak many times while playing the demo, that part didn't have as much emotional impact, but no matter how many times I watch Flemeth and the FemHawke voice actress interact, they are both riveting performances.

TEXTURES:
I was also dazzled by the high res texture pack. Although it seemed that a few of the textures were not as high res as others, it was certainly vastly improved over the demo and some of the textures were incredibly detailed.

For example, you could see very faint freckles and detailed musculature on Avelline's chest that was not visible in the demo, some of the clothing and armor were much crisper than the demo, and this was all visible in the cutscenes as well. In general these textures seemed to be far beyond any "high res" textures included in the vanilla versions of DAO, FNV, FO3, or Oblivion on the highest detail settings.

The bronze statues on the mountains near Kirkwall and in the Gallows area were radiant and gorgeous, however, the texture of the rocks supporting the statues were not as impressive. The stone textures of the walls inside the Kirkwall gallows area were gorgeous, more striking than the best wall textures that I have seen of Oblivion HD texture mods, for example.

OVERALL GRAPHICS:
I was also impressed and surprised that I was able to play at a decent frame rate on my laptop at 1920x1080, all settings at Very High, SSAO, DX11, high res texture pack enabled, 4x AA, 4x Anisotropic filtering, high quality blur, Diffusion depth of field. My laptop is an Envy 15 with the AMD 5830M card overclocked to 540MHz core / 1100MHz memory.

With these settings, everything looked gorgeous projected on my wall from a 1080p projector, especially cutscenes with smoke, fire or something happening far off in the distance.the only area where the frame rate dropped a bit was the cutscene after Flemeth changes into human form where there is lots of fire on the ground, but even that seemed to be about the same fps or perhaps better than in the demo, and the demo did not have "Very High" detail settings available to select, or any high res textures.

How fast is your PC gaining talent points?

@sojourner

I don't understand - what are talent points?

They're...what you use to get new abilities/spells for your characters (or upgrade existing ones), usually obtained when leveling up.

Sorry, by PC, I thought you meant personal computer instead of player character

In DA2, as far as I can tell so far, each character must choose exactly one perk per level.

I only got up to level 3 or 4 I believe.

It's as bad as I feared then. Too many of the talents are upgrades - rather than new abilities.

Theres about 4-6 talents per tree (including passives), per class, most with at least 1 upgrade per skill. I think 6 or 7 trees per class. theres a lot more skills than you'd believe, although not as many as DA:O. then again, DA:O had a lot of skills that mostly went unused IMO. "Filler" Skills if you would, to make the skill selection "bigger".

You can also choose two specializations at levels 7 and 14. Adding two new trees to your skills.

That's weird, with my 1GB GTS450 and Dx11 enabled it runs a like a half of a frozen snail going uphill. With Dx9 and all best settings it runs perfectly. And i don't see even see any graphics details missing. And this sytem runs the new AvP with Dx11 without a hitch.

What is "Tesselation" anyway? (From videos i've seen some sort of super bump mapping?)

Really? Have you looked at the requirements for some of those talents? No "filler" talents, my ass.

I have heard that there is some sort of issue with NVIDIA cards that might be fixable with a new driver update.

and tesselation allows for many more polygons with much less impact on frame rate.

Thank you. Why hasn't anyone put it that simply before

I can't claim to be any sort of expert - I hope my understanding is correct.

i said "IMO", your opinion may differ. They felt like filler, regardless of the requirements to me, as I found many of them useless to my combat style and strategy. Like the glyphs. Why would I want to "draw" glyphs on the ground and hope an enemy steps into them when I could just do direct damage with elementals or entropy spells?

Or traps? Why use traps and hope an enemy steps into them when I can focus on combat skills? Traps weren't even really needed unless you planned on fighting Flemeth.

Cone of fire and frost? Those two hurt your allies more often then enemies and are completely useless if given to an ally mage who always uses them at an inopportune moment.

Need I go on?

If your spells are hurting your allies more than your enemies, then it's your own damn fault.