DA: The Awakening - Hands-on @ GameSpot

The first actual hands-on article for Awakening is up at GameSpot. After the intro, they delve into a description of the early gameplay, so some might see this as spoiler territory. With that in mind, here's a generic feature quote:

BioWare suggests that Awakening isn't about one new whiz-bang feature that totally changes the gameplay, but rather, about offering more of what fans seem to care about most—a deep story with memorable characters and real consequences for the choices you make. The expansion is being developed by the same team of writers, designers, and artists that created the original game, but it will offer plenty of new stuff to play with, including six new characters to join your party, new elite character classes, tons of new high-level skills, an expanded level cap up to level 35, and more than 500 new items, including new, higher tiers of weapons and armor for your adventuring party.

More information.

They didn't mention how long this expansion is supposed to be. The higher level cap and powerful items sounds good, but if this is another short game in terms of hours like the previous DLC episodes I will pass on it like I did the others. If it actually has some depth in terms of play time then I will probably get it. The 6 new characters to take in the party is also enticing.

I thought it was like 30 hours or so?

Desslock said his fairly thorough play-through was 23 hours.

hm, so an average play-through would be ~20 hours? Def better than the dlc times we've had, but still somewhat less than I'd hoped for. It may still be worth it if there is a *lot* of new content - not just story, but new locations, geometry/models, textures, sounds etc. ie. they actually put some effort and money into it, rather than reusing 90% of there existing assets and locales

I never like games with high level characters, so I'm really not interested. I prefer seeing expansions with a new main character. I hoping to get some of these from the mod community in the next several months. Until then, I've got some rpg-lites to play (Torchlight, Armored Princess-if I can get it real cheap, Venetica-maybe). There is also Eschalon II that shouldn't be too much longer till release.