Dragon Age - DLC Woes

Dhruin

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The process of obtaining the DLC and bonus content for Dragon Age has lead to complaints all over the 'net. While I didn't have any trouble with my Steam version, it was a round-about process - and it seems other users have found it even more so. Ars Technica has written about the issues, saying that Impulse buyers have it the worst:
EA and Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins launched yesterday, and PC gamers rejoiced at having another tactical Bioware RPG to sink their teeth into. With digital distribution platforms like Steam and Impulse becoming more popular, it's no surprise that many gamers decided to buy their copy of the game online. The problem? EA and Bioware require you to sign into their own websites, with their own accounts and login information, to allow you to access the bonus content from your purchase. That process, it seems, is broken for many users.
...and a statement from Impulse:
"While we are aware of the folks having issues with the DLC, we are also experiencing thousands of people playing the game with no hiccups on Impulse. For those few who are indeed experiencing issues with authentication due to EA's process, we are working now on a fix and expect this problem to be remedied very shortly."
There are links in the article and in our Dragon Age forums that might help for those still having trouble.
More information.
 
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For me the problem was knowing what to do - I ended up at the Steam forums, where there is a 'sticky' that tells you to head to the Bioware Dragon Age site and head to 'redeem' and you will get to enter your serial numbers and get all of your stuff. From there, head to the main game, hit the DLC on the front page and it should all be downloading.
 
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The biggest problem is that instead of just doing the entire thing thru the program interface, you have to juggle between an internet browser mucking around on some "social site" thing and the program itself. The instructions on the card which has the validation code can be followed verbatim, and still you'll be wondering if youre doing the right thing.

Worse yet, if you have gotten in their system previously (EA,Bioware) youre gonna be looking around for not only some old login account information, but your old forum moniker, etc.... granted that you should be keeping these things close at hand in some file somwhere, but even when i used my old info it required me to re-validate that. Did it work? Refresh the browser, login in the program itself, and if all went right it should show up in the game interface.

In hindsight, when it comes to some of the fiddling Ive had to do w/ games, (sometimes being literally days until im actually playing) it really isnt that bad. Still, it's certainly a process that could have been streamlined a bit, like Battlenet for example.
 
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Me != DLC purchase

I'm in no mood to go through EA BS to get a few silly trinkets and "quests". It comes directly and easily to me or no sale, not me to them.
 
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Yeah it was too all over the place and disorganized. The fact that it's somewhat different/extra hoops you need to jump through depending on what platform you bought just makes it even more confusing.

I'm just glad I've been fiddling with games and computers and the internet since each of them were born basically so I can usually figure things out for myself pretty quickly (after a little cursing). I can't imagine dealing with it if I were someone new to this sort of thing and just expecting to buy a game, install it, and play. And you know something could have been done much better if even the friggin console versions have trouble getting their DLC installed and working.

In the end it's worth jumping through all the hoops for but man it coulda been easier.
 
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Well, I'm stuck having to wait. I took off some days from work to play this, but they apparently didn't manage to send me the redemption codes for the free stuff, and since there are two quest packs that need to be integrated - I'm not going to be able to play properly until I've got them.

Pretty incredibly annoying and unsatisfying - but DLC is all about greed and this "bonus content" is to promote the product, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The way they've opted to handle it, however, is enough to get me frustrated and that takes some doing.
 
I agree that Steam's process was relatively painless, though can be confusing at first, especially since the window displaying your codes on Steam specifically says that all DLC will be automatically downloaded and installed. This was absolutely not the case. You had to log into your Bioware social site account in order to enter the DLC/bonus codes. Also, I somehow wound up creating an entirely new Bioware social club account and couldn't understand why the game wasn't showing the content for me, until I realized that my Bioware social login was different from my login in the game (yeah - that's how confused I was, too).

I really think the whole social, massively single-player thing is needless - certainly it shouldn't be necessary in order to claim DLC and bonuses. Maybe I'm just too old and grumpy?
 
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The crux of the whole isssue was the page said "Beta". On launch day no less. Be happy that the Steam version worked because for many with the real tin box in hand, the system was broken and not working. What a difference 24 hrs made. People had made threads on going into your program folder, cutting, pasting, swapping, With caps, without caps, etc. What a bunch of crap! Glad they got it working. Not so glad it wasted my first day. Oh well the game is pretty fun
 
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I'm very unhappy of several aspects of how they are handling premium content, particularly that I don't know if I'll ever be able to replay the game with the premium content years down the road (someone really needs to start an Angry Internet Men & Women campaign about that, BTW).

But I can report that, fortunately, I haven't had trouble getting it into my current game. All my content is there which includes all the pre-order stuff, store-specific stuff, CE stuff, DA:Journeys stuff, original purchase stuff, character creator stuff, and whatever other stuff there was.

Because I already had the social network garbage (and I refer to it as that both because it's a very poor website and because I'm, as I've said before, an anti-social curmudgeon) setup ahead of time for the CC and Journeys, everything else was, fortunately, painless and fast.
 
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I'm unsure why ppl jumped on that game the same day it was released.
The same day? Who am I kidding, the same second it got released, thousands were getting it.
And we all know that nothing works like a charm the very first day, right?

So I'm still waiting till everything is dealt with. If you expect me to be another DLC and/or game tester, you're very wrong.
Get it to work and release a patch or two, then we'll talk about the game. :D
 
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Well I'm like a few other OCD suckers who wanted to have all the content loaded up and ready prior to starting my first playthrough.

I found having created a social profile for the char creator worked well, and getting all of the extra content through Journeys and D2D was very smooth (asides from the delayed pre-download, kudos to them). The only problem that took me a few minutes to figure out was how to purchase Warden's Keep.
 
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@DArtagnan:

There's no need really to wait on getting the DLC installed before playing. They will integrate into your pre-existing saves (at least they all have with mine, Stone Prisoner hasn't finished loading but I've read it will as well).

The Warden's Keep and Stone Prisoner won't be doable until about 10+ hours into the game (assuming you read the codex info and do all the side quests). And I've restarted about 5 times already trying different origins/builds as I learn the game mechanics so even longer if you do that. The Dragon Blood armor piece that you get from the start has such a huge Strength req that you'll be at least 6-8 hours into the game before being able to use it...assuming you max Str. The ring and one CE item you can start with are nice but nothing worth delaying starting the game for.
 
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I haven't decided yet if I get this Game or not - stuff like this is not encouraging at all...
 
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I'm sure plenty will disagree (and I can understand some are frustrated) but I'd judge the game on the game itself. The DLC setup is pretty silly but doesn't have much impact on playing the game itself and most of the freebies are trinkets.
 
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Thanks for the advice, and I sorta figured as much. But I'm pretty pedantic about such things, and I enjoy the idea of having some nice items for the begininng making the game more managable, seeing as how I'm planning on playing on hard.

That said, if I don't get the codes by tomorrow, I'll just live with it.

Really wish they'd handled all of this differently - but it's no big deal in the great scheme of things.

On a more positive note, this game really does seem quite excellent and I might just have to eat my words about Bioware. But the jury's still out - and I can't tell you how often I've been initially impressed by mega-hyped games only to have them fade in time.

But so far, so good.
 
When talking about DLC woes, here's one more: (small spoiler to follow)

When playing the Dwarven Noble origin, you will, at one point, be stripped of all your gear. This includes any DLC that you have such as rings, tomes etc. It only happens on the PC, though. Small comfort...

OriginalBaern points to a solution to this

http://daforums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=702526&forum=145&sp=30

A Bioware dev. (Sydney Tang has verified this to be true; he has also confirmed that the issue is NOT to be found in the console versions of the game:

Sidney Tang wrote:

I am told that this bug was fixed for the console versions of the DLC items. The issue was found and fixed while testing the console port of the DLC, but the Windows DLC had been finalized by then.

Seems maybe Bioware wasn't ready for so much DLC ? or maybe they didn't expect so many people to buy the game - and the DLC that came with it?
 
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I'm sorry to hear that so many people are having issues with their DLC downloads. I was actually impressed by how smooth mine was. It took me less than 10 minutes to download and install The Stone Prisoner.
 
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I'm sorry to hear that so many people are having issues with their DLC downloads. I was actually impressed by how smooth mine was. It took me less than 10 minutes to download and install The Stone Prisoner.

Same here. The most "stressful" part was getting my lazy ass out of my chair to walk over to the couch (really long walk, you know) to retrieve my wallet from my jacket and to enter my credit card number for Warden's Keep. A truly exhausting experience I tells ya! :biggrin:
Other than that it could barely have been any easier though I agree with Sammy that browser integration into the game's interface would have been even more comfy so that you would've been able to do it all from within the game.

Must admit in all fairness that I only got my boxed US CE yesterday and not on Tuesday when the servers were getting hammered. And I already had an EA/BioWare master account before buying DA so all of that might have made it a little easier for me than for other people.
 
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Another problem that happened with DLC, to customers from Impulse at least, was that the installation file coming from impulse didn't/doesn't properly install a service related to the DA updater. That caused (me and many users) to not be able to get the DLC content to show up in anyway under Windows 7 (and possible Vista)…

The way to fix this was to make hidden files visible in your system, search for installutil.exe from one of your system folders, copy it to the electronic arts\dragon age origins\bin-ship\ folder where daupdatersvc.service.exe file is. Then you open your CMD Command Prompt under administrative mode, go to the said blala\bin-ship\ folder and type installutil daupdatersvc.service.exe …and it will install the updater service and allow you to see the DLC. (Actually you could leave installutil where it is and just type the whole path the long way, but its easier like that)

Deffinitely user friendly :p

I spent about an hour with a EA customer rep to try and solve this, but since they couldn't figure out what to do and that their level 3 tech support never contacted me back :p, I ended up poking around and trying stuff and finally came upon this solution heh.
 
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