Yeah flash has really come a long way as a platform. It used to just be for making pretty graphic stuff move around on your website. now it's completely over my head because i've never been much of a programmer type ;p

I just assumed I could get this via Steam (not in the US at the moment) . . . and I guess I can't! Anyone know of a download service for this beastie when it's released?

Edit: Thank you, Direct2Drive :)

After playing the real game on 360 i gotta say this game is pretty damn good!

The way they handle the spells is very clean and fluid. X Y and B cast spells, if you hold right trigger it brings up another 3 to choose from. A selects targets/loots/talks to people.

The environments are all extremely well done and detailed so far. The voice acting is spot on, and there are TONS of people to talk to. The quests are all very clear and well labeled, i haven't had any trouble yet finding what i need to find or talking to who i need to talk to.

The dialog text has all been very interesting so far and you can take it in many different direction. You can be nice, be a prick.. talk people into and out of things based on your skills.

If you guys liked Elder Scrolls or Mass Effect DEFINITELY pick this game up. You WILL enjoy it. It takes everything from those games that was great and improves on it extremely well.

To all future mages: be careful in The Fade!

Metacritic has 13 PC reviews reporting, and it's currently sitting at 92%.

Everyone's talking about the story and characters. This is a good sign.

I think I know what's at the top of my Christmas list.

I'm about two hours into the game on PC.

The controls definitely take some getting used to. You cannot freely move the camera with the mouse without holding down any buttons in 3D mode, so the camera is mapped onto A and D. Of course, you can always control it like a Diablo game by just clicking on where you want to go and on things you want to interact with. The game has lots of statistics and in a little over an hour and a half, I've prompted 72 conversations. Of those, you have a list of at least 3-4 choices, sometimes more, of things to say. Nothing extra-ordinary yet.

I'm playing a Human noble Rogue, and the origin story has been a very good tutorial so far with plenty of fighting and tips on how to position your character.

Positioning here really does matter. Rogues specialize in back stabbing attacks so my character does more damage and sometimes a critical one hit kill if I position her behind the enemy. My party so far has consisted of various humans and my character's pet dog, whom you can control in battle as well. He levels up too and you get to assign points.

The very first merchant I ran into has a shitton of stuff for sale in terms of armor and weapons, so I'm guessing this game will be very rich in customization and options.

Voice acting is very good. Think Mass Effect quality. The graphics are on par with Mass Effect as well when it comes to character model. The faces aren't very detailed, but they look realistic thanks to the spot on facial expressions and really good lip syncing.

My gripes:

The controls don't feel right, but I'm guessing it's a matter of getting used to them. In many games I feel like I'm spot on with the character. This game feels a bit floaty.

The inventory system is static and doesn't scale as you go up in resolution. It only takes up 1/4 of the screen. At 1680x1050, I have to lean into my monitor to read item descriptions. I wish they would've scaled it as resolution went up.

Those are pretty much my impressions after two hours.

This game has too many menus for me to have considered getting it on a console.

There was certainly a big headache to login to the social "beta" site, register your game and redeem the promo codes when the game was first released. Luckily, they've fixed it by now. I blame EA, because the game itself seems so well done.

What's with the massive amount of blood splatter?

I agree the camera system is a little screwy, but it's still very playable. It's a tighter system than what Neverwinter Nights used. However, you can't see enough in the top-down view and, as mentioned above, you should be able to look around normally.

I hope the campaign is as expansive as BG was. If not, the game is mod-friendly so hopefully its a customizable, immersive experience to come.

I'm getting it.

I'm getting used to the camera. According to reviews, a leisurely walk through will take you 60 hours and around 80-90 if you want to do absolutely everything in the game.

Also, blood spatter can be turned off in the menu. The option with the check box is called Persistent Gore.

I'm thinking of buying this game, WineHQ has it listed under Silver Compatibility and people are saying they have it running in Linux with some tweaking. I'm going by the store today and seeing how much it costs.

I'm really interested in seeing how this game plays out story-wise. I've been dying for a good RPG.

It's $50, like every new PC game.

I've been playing it for a few days now, and am pretty much hooked. I play an elf fighter, which has some interesting effects on the interactions with NPC's (racism for example). Very well done.
The game looks great. The camera and controls take some getting used to, but it works. The story is very interesting, with plenty of twists and turns.
The combat is challenging. If you just barge in, you'll probably get your ass kicked a lot (I know I did). If you plan ahead and use your special moves (and the pause key) at the right moment, it's much easier. I like how the fighter, rogue and mage all have their own strengths and weaknesses. You need all three to get the most out of the game: a thief to sneak, backstab, open locks and disarm (and set!) traps, a mage to strike from a distance, and a fighter for hand-to-hand fighting.

About 22 hours in. Playing a Human Rogue. Very much hooked. One of the best RPGs I've ever played. [/comic book guy]

I can't even install the damn game. Getting a "Data Error" about 75% through the install. Checked the forums, apparently I'm not the only one. Trying to troubleshoot, but I don't really want to start deleting "corrupted files" within the game.

Fail! Hope they can fix it soon ;)

Bought it yesterday. Haven't installed it yet because I'm installing Windows 7 this weekend. :(

How does the game run in Windows 7? I'm having problems getting it to run in linux and going to duel-boot this weekend so I can play it. Don't know if I should install windows 7 or XP this weekend to run it (I'm only running windows to run this game). Anyone else runing win7 and the game?

I'm running it with the Win 7 RC that I have not bothered updating off yet it works fine except for the random crashes you seem to get with any pc game, or maybe that's just me.

On an unrelated note anyone else noticed they lowered the price of the game today? What the fuck... it's $10 cheaper on both PC and consoles, and I think they even lowered the Collector's if you can still find one.

I haven't had any crashes at all (on Vista). In fact, I almost never get crashes with PC games... So yes, that may be just you. :D
(or your computer hardware and drivers, or some other program running in the background or any of a dozen other possible reasons...)

Runs just fine on Win 7. There does seem to be some issues with XP SP2 and below so if you decide to use XP make sure you install SP3 before playing. Another thing to watch for in XP and earlier versions of Vista is the patch was compiled using a newer version of the MS VC++ 2005 runtime libraries so make sure you update them by going to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en and download install vcredist_x86.exe before patching. Newer versions of Vista and Win 7 already have the newer libraries so you should be fine if you have them.

I got a Win7 RC cd laying around my house and a Winxp SP3 cd (legal version), so I need to figure out which to install so I can play this game. I had it running for about 30 seconds the other night, then I tried to fix the black flickering in the game (that's the main problem in running in under Wine in linux) it crashed and I went back to square one. I guess I need to load myself down with rum and try to get back to the point where I made it work.

Been playing it since release, got the Digital Deluxe Ed. off steam. I love this game. ;P

Anybody else getting their tail kicked on "normal?" Doing the tower of Ishaa and just getting stomped every battle. I guess I suck!

i'm playing on hard and its way hard. I had to turn it down to normal a few times, those damn revenants rock me.

I'm only like 25% done with the story because i did all the DLC first (tho i'm not using anything from the dlc, the armor or the new character, i'll do that on the next playthrough probably)

I just downed the High Dragon, playing on normal, no real problems so far. I might die once or twice but I just adjust my strategies a bit and find something that works.

High Dragon is a range fight with a really good tank/kiter :D

Beat it some 15 minutes ago with 46 hours on the clock and 46% of the game completed (with 93% of the areas explored).

Wow. Fantastic atmosphere, character interaction and story telling. One of the best RPGs I've ever played. Some of the choices I had to make were genuinely hard to morally agree on due to some interactions and friendship that has been built with my characters. In one case, I felt so guilty about a choice, I reloaded an earlier save and picked another option. If that's not masterful immersion, I don't know what is. It doesn't hurt that the voice acting is fantastic and gives characters life.

With the lady who played Capt. Janeway on Voyage, Claudia Black from Dexter Season 2, and Tim motherfuckin Curry, I don't see how the voice acting in this game could have been bad. For all the reviews that take a weak stab at saying "oh but the graphics aren't there" it's nice to see them totally dominate the other senses.

I hate the crap out of the overwhelm ability.

I just got the game running on Linux, just got to fix one last thing and I'm off to play the game.

I want to throw a big shoutout to Martian for helping me patch wine and helping me figure out the PATCH command in Linux. Thanks man, you were a huge help!

This game is just...so good. I can hardly contain myself. I'm playing through two games simultaneously. One game I'm on my own as a 2h warrior human noble and the other game I'm playing through with my wife on a dw/archer Dalish rogue. I do all the combat and she picks the dialogue options. To say I'm having a great time wouldn't begin to describe it. BioWare truly pulled out all the stops when they put this thing together. I love it.

Yeah . . . it pretty much kicks ass.

I am completely digging this game (Even with the movies flickering when I watch them, that's a linux problem) and I am officially hooked. I'm playing a standard sword and shield Dwarfen noble (I haven't found a good axe for him yet). I'm already thinking about starting over again and making a new character. I've heard that duel weapons characters kick ungodly amounts of ass as you rise up in the character skills. This game is all kinds of awesome, I recommend this game to any RPG lover out there. BUY IT.

I was a dual wielding Human Noble Rogue. When you get the legendary dagger and have your dual wielding skills nearly maxed out, you can face a group of Darkspawn on your own and only get hit maybe twice due to extremely high evasion and blocking bonuses.

Example, remember how much trouble the first Ogre was? Well, they become a somewhat common enemy later on. I could down one in about 6 seconds. On my own.

This game is just getting better and better. The story and character interactions are pretty awesome.

this dude used a bit of exploiting to get his specialization/levels early in the game but I think his gameplay is still impressive to watch. Kind of gives you an idea of the level of tactics you can employ as a rogue/ranger

That is very impressive. I played a rogue my entire game and never even bothered with poisons or trap making. Damn, it would've made some fights a whole lot easier. I'd like to see how he manages larger crowds that actually come at you without giving you a chance to go into stealth first (unless you're Level IV).

Thinking about getting this game fox XBox 360 on Black Friday. I have a couple questions. Would you recommend this game over Fallout 3? I haven't played either. DA is $35, F3 is $20. Can you control and upgrade multiple characters or only the main character? I used to play Baldur's Gate back in the day and I see some similarities with this game, though I couldn't imagine playing BG on a controller. Would the gameplay be that much worse on the XBOX360 than the PC?

I received this as an early Xmas gift (yay me).

You guys weren't kidding, nor exaggerating. This game is absolutely awesome!

This makes me wish that Bioware made Neverwinter Nights 2. It would have been infinitely more playable then, and it has me looking forward to SW: The Old Republic.

Is anyone else extremely impressed with how the game performs on their machines? I mean, it looks really good with only a few drawbacks, but it runs really smoothly compared to other games I've played (esp. Neverwinter Nights 2).

It has me wondering if it uses quad-core technology. Any thoughts on this?

It does and it makes a difference. PC Games Hardware did a few benchmarks as well as put together a few tuning tips. From the article...

They're two completely different games. I loved Fallout 3 and I loved Dragon Age: Origins. I don't think I could recommend one over the other. They're both really, really good.

You can control every character in your party as if it were your main in real time. Each one also levels up (even those who stay in your camp so that you don't end up having your main party at level 13 and your reserves stuck at level 3).

As for the controls. Honestly, I think the game is terrible on the console just for the interface alone. Eventually you will have 20+ spells for your mage and around 10-15 for your normal characters. On the PC it's as simple as clicking an icon on the icon bar on the bottom of the screen. On the console, you only get 6 slots per character and if you want to switch out spells or abilities, you need to go through a wheel menu. Do that a few times per battle and you will be pretty frustrated with the game. Honestly, I could not imagine playing this game on a console.

Interesting. I had a hunch. It runs better than World of Warcraft on my machine. Seriously. I haven't tried jacking up the graphics settings, but I did switch it to "Ultra" and 2X antialiasing and didn't notice a performance difference. I'll see what jacking it up to max will do.

I'm running a 2.4Ghz quad core with an 8800GT.

This is really promising if future games use quad core effectively as well. I'm really impressed.

I had both wow and dragon age open last night for somewhat odd reasons and noticed no real play difference on either. I play both at max settings except I have detail textures turned down one notch in dragon age. For some reason if I set that to max, no ones hair models will show up which looks really awful. It's too bad because I know the rest of the game would look so good. But having everyone with weird blotches on their head is far too distracting.

I have 4 gigs of ram and a dual core for comparison. You should easily e able to crank dragon age up.

For people who have finished, does hitting 20 happen pretty naturally or did you really have to go looking to cap?