Yep thats the one. It's hard to say if you will experience any bugs as people are reporting lots of different ones that I haven't experienced. The CTD seems to happen when a LOT of magic is happening. It wasn't so bad when I was playing my Rogue but my Arcane Warrior get's it quite often. All I would suggest is keeping two saves and alternating between them.
The sluggish-ness is a Memory leak that Bioware claim to have fixed but seem to have made worse. In the 1.02 patch the leak was causing the game's loading times to increase the longer you played the game for. It's fixed by saving then restarting the game. Now the leak seems to affect the game itself with FPS dropping the longer you play the game for. Again it's fixed by restarting.
As for the Denerim bug I have no idea what's causing that but it's a bad one I have been hit by twice. If you save in the Arl's estate or in the tavern or even the Alienage there is no problem but save in the streets of Denerim and anytime you reload a save it will CTD.

Ah, ok, thanks for the heads up. I'll be carefull with the saves in Denerim then. And the char i'm going with since i installed Awakenings, and the patch i guess, is a Rogue, so maybe that's why i haven't experienced any crashes.
Still no one picked up on that ridiculous cutscene on Lothering's Chantry, uh? I mean Morrigan kneeling and bowing her head to receive a blessing, yeah, right ;)

Are any of the new DLCs worth it? Return to Ostagar or Awakenings?
I found the original DAO to be good, but way to hack and slash. Every area or dungeon was basically just a kill fest. Yes, the overall story was good, but there was nothing really to do in any of the dungeons but kill things.
Are the expansions or DLCs or whatever just more of the same?

Yeah, you have to love the combat. I found it really addictive myself so I loved it til the end. :)

Is there any excuse for the bugs that are still in this game? I tried giving it a chance on PC and thought tactically it's better, the amount of game breaking bugs are stupid. Warden's Keep DLC alone has 2-3 seriously game breaking bugs that prevent you from finishing. Now if I go back I get in an infinite cutscene loop. Awesome.

Frankly Bioware should be ashamed this game is considered as one of their better games. Do you seriously have to break out the console commands to even play the game?

What bugs are you refering to?
I remember there was one demon who wouldn't drop a key if you leveled up during that fight.

I'm pissed because I purchased the ultimate edtion without knowing I required an internet connection to play any of the DLC. Now I can't play them, anyone know of a mod/patch I can download elsewhere then transfer and instal to allow me to play offline?

Otherwise I am looking at pirating a copy, which will piss me off no end and probably be the last legit game I will buy except via GOG.

Yeah, there's an .xml file (I think) and you can basically just open it up and say, 'hey, you don't really need to authenticate these DLCs', and you can just play them. Somebody else can give you more information, though.

My Documents\BioWare\Dragon Age\Settings\AddIns.xml
find and replace every
RequiresAuthorization="1"
with
RequiresAuthorization="0"

Wait... You mean that even if you buy the Ultimate Edition, you *still* have to make a bioware account and manually download the DLC?

Crazy necro-ed!

*on topic*
I don't remember if there was ever an unofficial patch or whatever, but I don't remember it being too buggy (until I tried modding it too much and it decided it hated me and so would crash all the time).
I would check around the Bioware forums/maybe DA:O modding forums (Nexus maybe?) to see if there are solutions.

Dragon Age is great,. I loved playing it, despite being a baldurs gate fan

Yes, and that one still exists though I did not encounter it. There's a bug where no matter who you "pick" to seal the rift they say, "Okay I'll get started, protect me" and walk over and do nothing. They have to end up in one of the glowing circle but just stand there dumb a couple steps away. Some people were able to redo the sequence with another resolution and they'd end up in the correct spot, didn't work for me. Someone else managed to use Shale's rock throw to knock them into the circle (I hear Fireball works as well). So I went and got Shale and now if I walk to the second floor Sophia's greeting cutscene plays over and over, in an infinite loop, you literally have to end the game because Esc doesn't bring up the menu in this situation (just skips you forward into the cutscene so you can see it again even faster).

Yeah, sorry for the necro, felt dumb creating a new thread when there was a 27 pager on the subject.

This game is so fucked, seriously, I pretty much forgive people like Ironlore as they got fired before they could patch anything at all, not sure what Bioware's excuse was, this was their first DLC and they never did fix some of the serious bugs in it. What a bunch of tools.
No, they are "downloaded" just not authorized, so you're half right, you have to make an Origins (not Bioware) account and log on long enough for them to authorize.

But another phenomenal bug is if you download via Origin (which I did) it puts the CD key in the wrong spot in the registry, so your DLC will never authorize. You have to download the 1.05 patch, installing it fixes this issue by copying the key where it belongs.

Or I guess you can just do the XML trick listed above (I didn't know about it).

Btw, Origin chat support knows how to fix shit, Origin phone support had me uninstall and redownload... it's a 27GB game and of course didn't fix the issue.

Seriously, fuck Bioware for the state of this game.

By "origins" you don't mean *the* Origin, but a separate service, right?

So much for trying to minimize the amount of accounts I have to make. I guess I'll take this game out of my wishlist for now, then.

Sorry, I did write "Origins" a couple times when it's actually Origin, yes, I'm referring to the online service by EA, they merged the old Bioware accounts into Origin some time ago, there is no separate account anymore.

Pretty much all the stuff above with reference to Origin means the EA service, Origin, sorry for the confusion. You don't need a bunch of accounts (or at least less now). If you log in on the Bioware site you use your Origin credentials (single sign on style) and you get access to the additional Bioware services. Same with loggin in on the game launch screen, you now use your Origin account. There are some issues if you somehow managed to have separate emails between pre-existing Origin and Bioware accounts, you are supposed to make them the same (somehow), I'm not really sure what the ramifications or solutions are in that instance and I'd recommend contacting support if you need to solve that one (or checking their FAQs/Knowledge Base).
I'm sure it'd would at least be a bit more great if it was actually playable, which I'm finding it to not be.