they needed an excuse to play for so damn long! :D

Well, Desslock always knows his RPGs.

No. You can have as many as you want at the party camp.
And if you're referring to Morrigan (the one everyone doesn't like), I like her as well. Great character.

This game is definitely a must get for gamers who enjoyed RPGs.
I played it through my entire weekend.
Even the back story was well written. Can't wait to finish work and head home for Dragon Age: Origins.

One of the best rpg in a long time even tops Risen for pc rpg of the year. Story is well crafed, graphics are good not state of the art but they work for me and it runs pretty smootly even with a lot of action. Music is nice too although i prefer baulders gates music.
This game just sucks you in and before you know it many hours have past.

Thanks.
Yeah, she's a great character. Some things about her are just perfect. I really like her voice, perfect match to her personality. And some details make her very believable, like her expression and tone when she gets asked about her...culinary skills. Priceless.

just my 2 cents....
I picked this up in tesco last friday for a rather cool £26 (the normal version, but you do get blood armour which u start with, and it sells for loads :D ) I started with a human noble warrior, tbh I wasnt impressed with the how it controlled. It seemed everything i was trying to do hindered my char more than helped. so I re rolled as a elven mage. much better, actually had spells/ abilities that do something :) and with just 1 spell in the healing tree the game became alot more friendly....
I may go back to the warrior after a while but for me it was a bit too autonomous. with the mage you can really command whats going on. (even though when I was trying to pick off a straggler from a group I had to set all my group to stand still before they mindlessly kamikaze themselves)
I am impressed at how the different background control the 1st hour or so of the game. they've come very far from mass effect where it only really effected a few lines of dialogue.
All in all i'm impressed. the graphics aren’t bad and for its genre it stands out as being one of the best, there is some clipping in any cut scene where someone’s wearing armor but its no biggy, i just wonder how it wasn’t picked up. it is absurdly gory but not really something im bothered by. and on some bits they seemed to forget to do a check before fireing off a pre defined movement (for example, a death animation where someone gets stabbed through the face..... with a mace!? that would really hurt me thinks :s ) .it is very cinematic and im about 4 hours in there’s more plot twists than in lost, which keeps you on your toes at least.
I’d recommend to anyone.

I played this a good bit over the weekend. I got through Lotharing and moved on to Redcliffe, which is what I'm working on now. So far so good, and SO good so far. I liked the game up until Redcliffe, but this is definitely the best part I've played so far. I hope the game continues to shine, and doesn't drop off and become rote or tedious after such a promising beginning. I could nitpick the usual Bioware tropes, but the level of craftsmanship here is very high regardless.
The combat has won me over. As I've already mentioned, I was pretty disappointed when they first started talking about the combat system, but it really does work well. Compared to Baldur's Gate, command of your troops is much smoother and more natural, because actions are based on attack speeds and casting / recovery times, rather than arbitrary six-second rounds. There's also more to think about, because you need to keep constant control over what four characters are doing, rather than just watching everyone auto-attack and hope that none of your valuable spell slots are needed. At the same time, a little work with the AI scripting helps prevent having to micromanage too much. All in all, combat manages to be both tactically interesting and visually exciting, which is pretty impressive in a roleplaying game.

I actually don't have a problem with her. She's rude, she's abrasive, and she's got all the personality of a... something with a distinct lack of personality. But for God's sake, she was raised in the middle of a goddamn swamp by Admiral Janeway. That'd make anyone cranky.
Still, I actually think she's a fairly interesting character. The problem is, she's just kinda difficult to keep from getting cranky. I'm managing it so far, but hell if I have any idea how to actually get on her good side unless you act like a complete bastard to everyone all the time. Usually, with characters like that, taking the "pragmatic" approach to everything is enough, but it hasn't been the case so far. And being "pragmatic" has gotten Alistair a wee bit ticked at me. Oops. Heh.

I'm... always a bit stymied when people say that. Are we looking at the same game? I've just been constantly amazed by the visuals. Is it just me, but the level of detail on the characters is just... wow. And the first time I stepped into that temple looking for the urn that held Andraste's Ashes... everything was frosted over, there was faint sunlight gleaming in through cracks in the walls and such... the whole scene just looked absolutely incredible. I guess I just don't understand how people can call this "mediocre."

LOL @ the bit in bold.
The influence system seems a little bit broken, it's very easy to get your party to hate you, but harder to get them to like you. I'm not against this exactly, but it seems to push you into having to either do a lot of (persuade) or use a lot of gifts to get positive influence.
In general, I find myself not warming to the characters possibly because they're a bit too "uncanny valley". Much easier to like someone when all you have is a portrait and a voice. It'll be a while before the animation is expressive enough for me to consider this better than more stylised graphics.
On the graphics issue, most of it is wonderful. However, there are a few things that look out of place, such as the cup in the Watchers initiation (and in one of the Teyrn Logain cutscenes in denerim for that matter). Also, the clipping of the templar armour is an odd one, since surely they could have just tweaked it a little bit? Beards can be a touch odd also, if you catch someone with a beard at the wrong angle, you can see that it's not right...
It isn't the best looking game I've seen, Batman was pretty stunning for example... but considering the vast scope of the game that's to be expected.

Re: Influence system. It does seem that way. It seems like the largest single influence gain I've ever made was maybe a +5 bump or something like that, but I've seen losses around the order of -10, maybe even more. That's... a little unbalanced. And the little gift/bribes, from what I've been told suffer from diminishing returns, so that's not an ideal solution. Bleh.
Re: Graphics. I guess I've noticed a few of those hiccups, too, but it's just... just sitting there, going seamlessly from cutscenes to gameplay and back... it just... looks -really- good to me. It just -looks- like a fantasy world should, and I haven't seen enough of the little niggles to be taken out of the game by them.
And ok, yes, Arkham Asylum was also really pretty, but I guess the reason why I wasn't as immediately floored by that was because I was playing that on my PS3 and thus on my TV which I sit considerably farther away from than my computer screen. So it's sharper and closer on my monitor than my TV.

On the Influence System,
You can give gifts to party members, but make sure they make sense, giving a Chantry necklace to morrigan isn't really going to win her over. But if you give it to Leliana it will.
Also, I've had points where I've gained +10

There's a merchant that sells a golden mirror in the dwarf city orzimmar. if you give it to morrigan and say that's she's beautiful, you get +20 influence from her.

Haven't been there yet, but makes sense given the whole sob story about how she stole a mirror as a little kid, and big, mean, Mommy Flemeth smashed it.

I came across a bit of information yesterday regarding the DLC for this game and was hoping that someone here (preferably with a retail copy) could confirm or deny it. What I read was that in order to play the game when any of the DLC installed it's necessary for the DLC to validate itself online every time the game is started up. Thus if for any reason that's no internet connection the game cannot be played with any of the DLC, and this includes playing any savegames that had been started with DLC in use. Can anyone comment if this is true or is it just a baseless rumor?