The chances are good I will get a copy of DA II for christmas. So in the mean time, I thought it would be a marvelous idea to replay DAO to get me in the mood. Unfortunately, I patched everything up to date. I say unfortunately because as I've read online, the 1.03 and up version of the game has a lot of bugs that weren't there previously. And my game crashes. And crashes. And crashes. It sometimes have to restart a fight some 4 or 5 times just because of game crashes. I have isolated a particular problem. Consistently, the game crashes whenever I try to cast Mana Clash (and a quick google check will confirm I am not close to being the only one). Which kinda sucks because Mana Clash is a monster of a spell, considering it basically kills any non-boss mages outright, taking out powerful aspects out of the enemy's arsenal with minimal effort.

Anyways, it sucks..

I remember that one of the patches broke stealing.

Get the unofficial patch, it will save your sanity:

http://social.bioware.com/project/2563/

Official patches that cause more bugs? That does really suck.

Happens (almost) all the time.

I have this same crash issue with Mana Clash and a number of other AOE spells. I actually first encountered it with the "Holy Smite" Templar ability, which I had Alistair set to use in his tactics. It took me a while to narrow it down to that. Grenades will also sometimes cause it, so I gave up on using those completely. It's a shame that it will never get fixed, now that Bioware has stopped patching DAO.

Yeah, I agree. It's ridiculous that we have to stop using a weapon / ability because the makers of the game didn't correct their mistakes. And Mana clash, like I said, kills mage instantly,and is an area spell. So if 4 mages are in a tight group, you cast Mana Clash on them and they immediately die. Pretty cool­. So it sucks I can't use it because of a game default. I will try the unofficial patch tonight.

After a google search, some people were talking about how, in a 64 bit windows (like I have), the game doesn't properly use ram. It apparently limits the amount of RAM the game has access to, hence the crash. I tried a patch on the .exe that several people recommended... Didn't change anything...

I had the same crashing problems on my old computer, which was a 32-bit Vista system. They actually seemed to happen less frequently on my Win7 64-bit computer, but that may well be because I avoided using talents I suspected of causing crashes.

Never noticed these crashes. I'm not big on area spells it's true but still I should have noticed that.

Are you using the unofficial patch?

I installed the unofficial patch last night. Well what do you know, it seems it worked! I tried to cast the spell a couple times, it didn't crash. I cast it in a duel, worked too. The real test will be in a full fledge battle with spells, abilities and all that. But so far I'm impressed...

That would explain why I never experienced any of these crashes.

Shame on Bioware for not patching their game and not keeping their word. We were promised extra content and what we got was recycled areas and more bugs.

Yeah. My friend played DA II and told me the game is a bit of a mess. Although on that count, you can hardly blame Bioware. Electronic ''We are Satan's disciples'' Arts decided out of the blue they would release DA II a year earlier than planned. A lot of stuff didn't get made and stuff that was to be in the full game was hurried and released via DLC. I don't remember which module, but my friend played a DLC and said the boss of that module clearly was supposed to be the boss of the game... But I dunno, haven't played DA II yet. Hope I'll get it for christmas...!

Gaaah, I'm almost finished with DAO. I'm down to the final battle with the Arch demon. Only, twice now the game crashed while I was fighting the dragon (and late in the fight too... grrrr...). I decided to screw it and just cheat to kill the dragon outright. I already did the game a few years back and I just wanted to export my character post-final fight for the Awakening game.... :/

It's fair game. The last battle is a bit underwhelming anyway so you don't have to feel bad about it -especially if the game keeps crashing!