If you enjoyed Dragon Age at all (most people I know either said it was boring as fuck or they absolutely loved it; I absolutely love it), then you'll enjoy Awakenings.
It's a little pricey for an Xpac but I think I've put about 12 hours into it so far and I know I've probably missed some things. The accomplishments tab says I'm 37% through, but I have a feeling it's a little further along than that and is possibly bugged. So probably a 20-25 hour Xpac.
The new class abilities are pretty awesome. If you want comparison, think of DA:O as Vanilla WoW in terms of HP, DPS, gear potential - and think of Awakenings as TBC. My tank right now (which I'm not really using one anymore, but I have him sitting in Vigil's Keep all decked out) is sitting at 1,000+ hp with immunity to knock down and 80% fire/frost/lightning resistances and super high hit rating, etc. Compared to DA:O where you have like 300 HP and shitty stats. Plus you can enchant your chest and create your own runes (the weapon augments) with their new tradeskill (which is probably the biggest pain in the ass in the world).
DPS wise the weapon jumps are pretty huge. The Xpac really loves the rogue class as the upgrades for rogues are simply insane. There's a vendor dagger for 180ish gold with 100% crit / backstab damage (where as in DA:O you get 15% on your MH / 10% OH / 15% gloves gloves etc - I might be missing a few things but I think you cap out around 60% crit / bs damage). And the rings / amulets / belts are awesome as well.
And mages are ridiculously overpowered (which is a nice change for the genre in general as they're normally fucking impossible to play in these games without feeling like a glass cannon). The new abilities are really fun and open up enough utility where you don't really *need* a tank to be successful on Nightmare. The raw DPS and pseudo tanking ability for dex based rogues / dw warriors with double mage damage is plenty to stabilize your party in intense encounters.
The boss fights also added a few new elements to them that require decent strats to optimize your party for. They're still pretty easy but it has a more epic feel than the bosses in DA:O did.
My only real complaint so far is it feels a tad bit too easy. You get insane new DPS abilities, raw stats and weapons / gear / runes, and if you import from DA:O you're probably at least level 20 (I was 24 without cheating for my first import - PC version. Yeah I liked this game so much that I beat it like 5 times on Nightmare on PS3 (which is night and day difference compared to PC (PC being easier)) and then downloaded it on Steam as well for PC. Yeah, maybe I wanted to play on my new PC - just a little, lol. Anyways, the experience for quest turn ins and mob deaths was increased by a pretty good bit - so you level up pretty quickly. They probably made those changes because non imported characters start at 18 and would be at a slight disadvantage with the first few encounters and quests. So about 12 hours in now my characters are all about to hit 32 and just completely plow through the game on Nightmare with very few incentives to be methodical with your group strategy (and even comp).
Another plus though is that along with all the new abilities, they really bumped up the number of tactics slots available. I think each of my characters are sitting at 15 slots right now, so you have a lot of ways to tinker with custom AI builds.
My biggest piece of advice if you play on PC is to go ahead and just cheat as far as gold goes. I'm not one to cheat in games - even in DA:O during the fade where you get permanent stat increases, my game glitched somehow when clicking one of the dex boosts and I got like 50 dex out of one click and hadn't saved in something like half an hour, so I reloaded to that save and went back. But with gold I feel like they really capped the amount of gold you can ultimately earn by not having places you can repeatedly clear / permanent death to mobs, etc. So I brought over 5000 gold to my Awakenings import and have already spent around 3000 of it on gear and runes.
If you don't know how to do this it's really easy and can ask me.
Besides that though this Xpac kicks a whole lot of ass. I really wish in a future DLC they'd add something like - a really hard dungeon that's repeatable with random drops. Something to allow you to just keep running for the fuck of it to not only give you something to do, but to allow you to continuously build up your official characters. They probably won't but they need to being that this is supposed to be the last installment for the DA:O story line. The next game (due out Feb 2011 I believe) is just supposed to be DA2.
Final note: for PC users this doesn't matter at all, but if you played DA:O on console, you can now respec your characters (any character, not just your own) as many times as you want for 6 gold a pop. That's a huge, huge change (so good) as it allows you to redistribute all stat points, all skills and all talents / spells.
DA:O and A
DA:O and A
Big dicks in your ass is bad for your health
Re: DA:O and A
lol I couldn't wait and wasn't even sure if you were serious :(
Big dicks in your ass is bad for your health
Re: DA:O and A
Well if you could get it for me on PS3 I'd S mad D. I'm sorry bro I really wasn't sure if you were serious and would have felt like a huge dick to ask. It's such a good game. :(
Big dicks in your ass is bad for your health