Over the eight years since the game's initial release, the methods of purchase, deployment, and installation of the DLC have all changed dramatically. You are having problems getting things working in the current environment. Talking about how things used to work is worse than pointless, it actively confuses things.
I'm replying and heavily Necroing this because this is in the top three results when looking up this exact issue on google. Also, this conversation and entire topic has gone horribly off topic by the end but since it shows up often, a lot of people might still come to look into this.
Here's what I did that managed to get it to work. Not sure if all of these are needed or I just got lucky. These are in no particular order.
I installed the game fully through Origin (discs? ha!)
I deleted all of the previous installation and data that was saved from previous installs, both from other hard drives as well as the data/profile folder in C:/User/Documents/Bioware
I quite literally deleted the entire Dragon Age folder in there.
I went into the install folder after all the downloads finished and deleted a couple of files and did a repair
I went into _Installer in the Dragon Age folder and ran both SetupAddins.exe and Touchup.exe
I also went into Dragon Age/addins and went through every folder. Every single folder that had an _Installer folder I went in there and ran Touchup.exe
After all of that all the DLC showed up under Downloadable Content in game. Again, not sure if all these are needed or just maybe the last step (After the 4th step nothing had changed), and again this was in no particular order. I mention the install because a lot of people are going to have trouble with that I feel as both Steam and Origin don't know what they're doing with the game. Steam had the trouble earlier than Origin from what I recall.
I think the Touchup.exe after doing the SetupAddins.exe goes in and adds the file but I think I had to do all the individual ones to actually get that to work. All DLC show including Awakening variants. Not sure what Cleanup.exe does however but I didn't play with it.
Hope this helps people. I think the big two were deleting the old stuff so nothing got confused.
Happy playing!
Not sure if it is mentioned but to fix the dlc not showing up for me. I had to Locate the offers.xml file in the main origins dragon age folder something like C:\Program Files\Origin Games\Dragon Age\__Installer. Use that file to replace the offers.xml file in [user]\Documents\BioWare\Dragon Age\Settings
Also make sure there is an offer folder with all the data in the same directory from the main origin game directory.
That for me made the dlcs that were triggered by the map to show up.
Hope that helps anyone looking for this.
Note: Origin-only install, no discs
After changing the account to an Administrator account, a repair did the trick with one click. Was able to return the account to Standard user afterward.
This one falls into "The Administrator's Hall of Shame". It fails to request the apparently necessary permissions elevation during installation. Then when attempting to use the elevated-required apps to clean up things while elevated, it also fails to recognize that it is elevated and attempts to install some portions to an environment that isn't really loaded rather than installing it all to the initiating user's environment and it silently fails.
NOT using Administrator for day-to-day activity is a great first-line-of-defense against malware. So, "The Administrator's Hall of Shame" is reserved for day-to-day applications that fail to install under RunAs/elevated permissions or fail to run properly under Standard permissions after installation.
Another EA/Bioware game suffers from a similar shame despite being a currently supported MMO. On that one, one can build an install package that makes Windows 10 "lie" to the application to make it think it has Admin privileges when it does not - meaning the application in question doesn't even need Admin access to run. It even updates just fine without having actual Admin access. It's the hallmark of sloppy coding. One might start to think that care has not been taken with the Bioware properties.
