Dragon Age 2 - Demo Released

Originally Posted by JDR13
Unleash your anger… the disappointment is strong within you.

And your Path to the Dark Side will be complete !!!

Originally Posted by Pessimeister
P.S: How many others reacted to seeing Flemeth with "Hey, aren't you meant to be dead?" (I know, easily rationalised/explained..)

Didn't you listen to her, she had an appointment.

My verdict of the demo. They probably should have called it a combat demo, but then most demo these days are combat demo… I liked the mage and my fav spells from DA:O are back with cooler animations. I played a bit of the rogue (up to first boss) and I actually like the jumping around, perfect to move around the battleground. I haven't tried the warrior yet. So far I was a bit surprised by the speed, but I don't mind it, I will simply use pause a lot more then in Origins on Normal.

And I really like Varric and Aveline so far…

Originally Posted by huggster
Ahh okay - probably the other way round then! I still found it odd for some reason.

I think The Witcher 2 only did it for the trailer. Unlike DA2, I don't think the game is actually designed with a framed narrative.

I'm not gonna try the demo, but will get the game. Because:

Originally Posted by rich ruffo
Just as i thought ,the game is for little boys that want to see big boobs.

Thumbs up!

Originally Posted by JDR13
I thought it seemed like that meeting took place shortly after the fall of Ostagar. Speaking of which, I didn't like the change in her appearance. I thought it was a bit extreme.

If the first quote is true… You saying they overpumped granny's… Lungs?

I really liked the demo.

The main thing I would like to say is that the demo is forced on normal mode and normal is meant to not require tactics. You CAN play tactically though, especially at the start when you have a lot of abilities, and it works very well. On nightmare difficulty I am sure it will be the tactical RPG many of you seem to think it is not.

Anyway I really liked the combat. The fast pace really makes it exciting while the controls, pausing and abilities really make it a tactical RPG the same as the original. The new art style looks lovely in-game, a lot better than screenshots. I skipped most of the story and dialogue to save it for the full game and I really doubt I have cause to worry since I like Bioware's stories and dialogue.

The only real big change in my opinion is the pre-created character and Mass Effect style dialogue, but as I have said in other threads I think that style works best for Bioware games. Bioware are more about presenting an interactive story than a fully player-driven world.

Now, there's a shock

darkspawn look awful. doesn't feel particularly good in terms of gameplay but i'll still probably buy it.

Originally Posted by Maylander
By the way: Are Rogues still needed to open chests? I couldn't find the specific ability used in Origins to open chests.

I´ve noticed it´s governed by cunning (if the character is rogue), skills are definitely out.

Finished the demo once as mage, once as rogue.

Locking inventory, combat feedback etc. made the demo far less informative than it should be. It´s still better than no demo at all, but from a 2GB download I´ve certainly expected more features.
It´s also rather unoptimized - loading pauses in dialogues/cutscenes have been mentioned, I´d add bad compression of voice files resulting in a pretty poor audio quality.
Also, there seemed to be a cooldown on potion consuming (which is a good thing), but it wasn´t displayed anywhere.

From what I could gather, most improvements are just "improvements".
Dialogue wheel could barely be any less different than in Mass Effect and it didn´t really improve transparency of what pc´s going to say. Yeah, intent icons, but no info on how strong the actual intent will be, so in the end it´s less transparent than in DA:O.

Combat looks bad. Animations are nervy, over the top and attacks feel very unconnected to opponents.
Animations are also basically the only aspect that´s been sped up compared to DA:O - considering this is normal difficulty, enemies still have a lot of hitpoints and basic attacks do jackshit, to me it seems like an average fight will take just as long as in DA:O, only there´ll be 4x more attacks executed. By a player party, that is - it also seems that enemies attack at about the same frequency as in DA:O, which in DA2 results in a glaring discrepancy.
Camera is also quite restricted (wasn´t there supposed to be a possibility to free the camera to move over the battlefield?) and doesn´t offer a good view when executing AoE´s from a distance … all in all the combat feels like it´s less controllable than in DA:O.
Also, what´s with the "here comes another wave" thing? If the game uses this extensively, that´s another minus.
Playing with this clusterfuck on nightmare with FF now seems like a chore.

Environments, at least those used in demo, felt sterile and rather bare bones, including the city. Making the area around Lothering this kind of wasteland was lazy and quite lore-raping (as was the new design of Flemeth, the old VA didn´t really fit here either).
I don´t like the new design of darkspawn, ogres especially.

Music and VA mediocre overall.

Can´t say much about story elements, but those two deaths weren´t well realized.

The main GUI feels tackled on, has no artistic flair, party portraits and silly bars clog up the view.
Inventory, codex and other interfaces take me out of the gameworld, almost as if I´ve returned to the main menu. With the new talent tree interface, comparing talents to each other will be a hassle. Definitely not optimized for PC.
Also, camera is too high when zoomed-in behind the character.

I liked some art direction elements (the sea cutscene), the narrative may be interesting if it´s reactive enough (though for such a major character Cassandra sure had pretty weak VA), the exaggerated portion was an interesting idea, there´s a good number of skills to choose from.
Right now for me the only really intriguing aspect of DA2 is the 10 year span which may be a good ground for C&C, but seeing how the demo rather reeks of rush job, I´m not sure it´ll turn out well.

All in all, not impressed with the demo.

I agree, the voice overs are no where near two worlds 2 or risen for that matter.

I just finished the demo and I gotta admit that I'm glad they've released one.

To my regret I just can't get into it and I wish it would have been otherwise.
The voice acting I'm okay with and I'm sure the story will be good but I think its the atmosphere of the game in some way that doesn't cut it for me.
Its feels weird but I can't exactly pinpoint what it exactly is.
I'm just not comfortable with it.

I presume that my next RPG will remain The Witcher 2 and it'll be the first time that I won't be purchasing a BioWare game not even at lower price.
My next game from them will be Mass Effect 3, of that one I'm sure its money well spent for me.

Originally Posted by rune_74
I agree, the voice overs are no where near two worlds 2 or risen for that matter.

You know…after playing Two Worlds a while I actually find the voice work and dialog style entertaining.

What I at first dismissed as a pretty big goof up, I now believe was done intentionally. And lends an aspect of originality to it…there no other games I'm aware of that sounds the same or uses the same dialog structure.

Forsooth…I certainly know I'm playing TW when I'm in there

Would love to find an interview or quote from the dev's as to their mind and intention there heh

Anyway, sorry for treading so far OT…

Carry on

Originally Posted by DeepO
Animations are also basically the only aspect that´s been sped up compared to DA:O - considering this is normal difficulty, enemies still have a lot of hitpoints and basic attacks do jackshit, to me it seems like an average fight will take just as long as in DA:O, only there´ll be 4x more attacks executed. By a player party, that is - it also seems that enemies attack at about the same frequency as in DA:O which in DA2 results in a glaring discrepancy.

Yes, I also noticed that. Autoattacks are useless - it's all down to special attacks now. Might as well remove autoattacks and stick with only active attacks it seems.

Probably means we should spend a wee bit more time tweaking the tactics of each character, so they use all their abilities correctly. Either that or manually control them all, but that seems tedious considering the speed of the combat. In DA1 a dualwielder could do immense damage just autoattacking.

For as easy as the demo is I just died on it twice in a row. Second ogre fight, first real one, and I was playing a mage who did not have any healing spells. The mage sister is out of the fight from the start so I had no real healing at all and that ogre and swarm made quick work of us.

I played a little of the demo last night (made it to the second Ogre), so I don't have a fully formed opinion. I'm generally positive towards what I've seen, especially considering this is a demo with many features locked.

Couple things stood out to me as negatives. First, it's just too fast. I know I'll get more used to it as I play more, but it's just a bit silly how frantic it is… battle scenes start looking a bit like those old silent comedy movies from the 1920's.

Second, I found the targeting to be imprecise. Selecting which enemy to hit with a spell or start attacking felt vague, as they barely glow when you mouse over them. I could get it to work, but it felt like more work than it should be to simply select which enemy to target. Also, I'm still unclear on the select vs. target with spell right/left button action, though of course there was no manual to read and I only played a short while. Probably not a big deal in the long term.

On the positive side, my aging 2007 MacBook Pro running Boot Camp plays the game very smoothly at medium quality graphics. I wanted to try out high end, but it was locked at least on my machine.

I like some of the graphic style. I actually prefer a slightly cartoony look over trying for gritty realism. The characters look great. What I didn't like so much is the environments I saw were too clean and sparse, feeling more like strategic "battle rooms" versus an actual outdoor setting.

I plan to play throught he whole thing later today, but those are some initial thoughts.

Originally Posted by Roland
You know…after playing Two Worlds a while I actually find the voice work and dialog style entertaining.

Forsooth…I certainly know I'm playing TW when I'm in there

Carry on

Late in chapter one in 2worlds2 there is a NPC that talks just like the characters in the original game. Our protagonist keeps having the NPC repeat what he's saying because the protagonist can't understand a word the NPC is saying. Finally, as our protagonist is leaving the scene he says to himself out loud "Who talks like that?"

Very precious moment if you've played both games.

Originally Posted by DoctorNarrative
For as easy as the demo is I just died on it twice in a row. Second ogre fight, first real one, and I was playing a mage who did not have any healing spells. The mage sister is out of the fight from the start so I had no real healing at all and that ogre and swarm made quick work of us.

That happened me too. Spent the last half of the fight running around keeping ahead of enemies and waiting for Winter's Grasp to recharge. Amusingly the music seemed to run out part way through and I was left with just the sound-effects for the remainder of the fight. Also, the new staff animations seemed to delay my spell casting at times, frustratingly so on some occasions.

Personally I'm hoping by the time I buy it there's a mod to let you choose which sibling survives. More mages is almost always better than less.

I'm curious as to why, when you get to the Isabella section, I was allowed to allocate the points for my companions' extra levels but the game had seen fit to auto-select skills for my character. Bloody stupid idea.

Ok, here are my impressions from the game from the short amount of time I've managed to spend with it. I started writing this after having spent some time playing it, but then I rushed out to quickly catch a movie at the theater. By now everyone will have played it, but I still wanted to finish what I was writing.

- First some technical things. I was hugely surprised to find out that the game actually ran on my computer (which I recently "inherited" from my brother, it's actually a laptop from 2007, though it was an absolute monster for a laptop at that time). Sure, I couldn't push the setting very high, but with graphics quality on Medium, the resolution on 1280x800 and DX9 as ther renderer, the game ran very smooth. I'll try tinkering a little more later. Cutscenes had significant screen tearing, but that doesn't matter too much. I'm happy to say that I'll at least be able to play the PC version this time around, and I think pretty much everyone should be able to run it.
- I had one VERY significant bug though. The voice acting was almost inaudible. Everything was cranked out to max volume, but I could barely hear any of the voices. Very irritating, as I had to rely almost entirely on the subtitles.
- Speaking of voice acting, I thought it was kind of weak too. Your sister, Hawke himself, the woman questioning the storyteller, and more all sounded relatively bad. The voice actors themselves weren't necessarily bad, but they all felt… out of place. Sure, it's a matter of taste, but that's how it felt to me.
- I still don't get the point of the framed story. For example, the start of the demo: the dwarven guy starts out by telling a tale about Hawke. We get to play a scene were Hawke is supposedly überpowerful. He fights of a horde of darkspawn in a Mordor-like landscape. He is seemingly invincible.
BUT THEN! It turns out that he's making up a story, and he is pushed into telling the "real" tale. Next scene: Hawke is no longer wearing armour and he has lost most of his skills. Nevertheless, he fights hordes of Darkspawn in a Mordor-like landscape and is seemingly invincible. What the hell is the difference between the previous story accept for the cosmetic change of Hawke's armour? How are these supposed to be refugees? How is this supposed to be a "less heroic" version of the story? Put these three characters in front of the Darkspawn army, and they don't even stand a chance! This would have been a good chance to show of Hawke's so called "Rise to Power" as Bioware likes to put it, but instead they made him insanely powerful from the get-go. It seems not only like a missed opportunity, but it also makes me question the storytelling as a whole.
- Graphics. I'm still not convinced of the art-style. Everything looks rather weird and wonky, and the environment looks even stranger. I thoughts the Darkspawn in DA:O looked a bit silly (They looked like the Orcs from LOTR crossed with those monsters from Gears of War), but they look absolutely horrendous here. As I said before, why does the landscape look so much like a DA version of Mordor? Did Hawke and his party land on the moon? And how can the moon possibly be on fire? Find out in the full game!
- And about the art-style, let's speak of the women one last time. First of all, there are some truly amazing cyber-boobies here. Not only do these amazing works of art defy all laws of gravity, but it does also make me wonder how these women actually manage to fight like that! Is it really that hard to make female characters attractive without making them look like models (after Also, apparently the world of DA is based on our medieval times, yet they also managed to invent 21th century cosmetics! They must have some awe-inspiring scientists and a booming fashion industry in Ferelden!)? And your mother. Hawke doesn't very young himself anymore. Judging by the pre-release trailer I would have guessed Hawke is in his thirties. That might have been my mistake. Anyway, I think it's safe to say that Hawke's mother would be in her fifties, or rapidly approaching that age. Boy, she sure looks good for her age! If she wrote a book about how she managed to keep her looks after all those years, she could be making millions (of gold pieces)! Some people will undoubtedly like this, but for a game wearing a "Rated M For Mature" tag, I find this strikingly childish. And as far as I'm concerned I do NOT see that the "industry is growing up", as some have claimed. I think that by now I've earned the right to be treated as the (young) adult that I am. Very few games are willing to treat me as such, and by the looks of it, DA2 certainly isn't one of them.
- Also, why is the local Dwarven pimp being questioned about me? Is Hawke a steady client?
- The combat was a bit awkward. There hasn't been a huge amount of change since DA:O, but the speed has been pushed up, and it's clear that the button-smashing gameplay of the console versions is still alive in the mechanics. The pacing felt very a little awkward, with a huge focus on the "impact" of the attack of each character. Because of this rather odd pacing I still haven't really "adapted" to the new combat yet. What I CAN say though, is that the combat in the demo is very, very easy. I basically didn't need to control my characters all that much, and that isn't a very nice feeling. Perhaps it's just because it's the intro to the game, but I have a feeling that this trend of easiness will continue throughout the game. Let me remind you all of both ME2 and, more importantly, The Awakening. I found it rather odd back then that the expansion back to a rather challenging game was so easy that I could complete it on Nightmare. To me that's a pretty clear indication that there's a huge chance that this game will be easy as well. But we'll see when the full game is released.
- There is definitely something wrong with Bioware's level design. We all know this. We've been through most of their games like corridor-crawlers. The only Bioware game that had some relatively "open" environments was BG1, and that game had very small maps. However, the areas in the demo are some of the worst I've seen from them so far. The made me think of FFXIII, which is certainly not a compliment.
- I never played the PC version of DA:O, but it is my understanding that you were able to pull back the camera all the way on the PC, right? Either I'm doing something wrong, or this feature is not working here. I can pull the camera back ever so slightly, but never so that I get a perspective that allows me to manage my part more effectively. Perhaps I'm just doing something wrong.
- The conversation wheel is what I expected it to be. I'm just not a big fan of it. I never know what I'm ACTUALLY going to say,. They just fixed that by slapping a connotation mark on the wheel. It's a silly solution to an unnecessary problem IMO, but I've already talked way too much about that stupid wheel. I was also unable the judge the delivery of Hawke's lines because of the aforementioned bug.
- I also had the bug where my ability didn't seem to trigger correctly, which made the game feel even more awkward.
- Also, the gore is once again quite ridiculous. Mages getting blood splattered on them from fighting the enemies with spells? I think it's best for everyone to instantly turn off the "persistent" blood.

That's pretty much all I can think of right now. I had plenty more thoughts on the game while playing it, but I've forgotten them by now. I'm planning on playing more this evening.

Also, keep in mind that while most of my comments were negative, that's pretty much because the negative points always stick out more than the positive points. It's the niggles that currently stick with me. My overall impression of the game wasn't nearly as bad as it was for some other people.

Overall, based purely on the demo I'd say this will be a decent game, but not nearly as good as Dragon Age: Origins, which I thought was a great game despite having numerous flaws as well. I'm still sort of hopeful that this demo is also part of the pre-release hype, and that the actual full-game content will be more interesting. I think I'll be picking up the game, but unless the game turns out to be more interesting than what is showcased in this demo, I won't be picking it up for anything close to the full retail price.

Originally Posted by JDR13
After playing some more, I did notice a few glitches. Sometimes when trying to switch characters in battle it would go to their character screen instead of just controlling them. I was also kicked out the menu a few times when trying to select NPCs to level up.

Also couldn't figure out how to select the entire party to move as a group…

There's many glitch in selections in menus, the characters icons but also the whole tactical menu.

For me for the character icons before to click you need see the icon highlighted, sometimes it takes some time. Also if you enter above icons from left the bug occurs rather often, but not from the right or bottom.

For the tactical menu the trick if to position the cursor not above the menu buttons but only above their texts.

Have any of you noticed that the unlockable items are - in fact - books? Granted they'll give yousomething extra when read. Bu they are not armour or weapons, but books…proving that the pen is mightier than the sword - maybe…

After finishing the demo I think it looks okay. Looks like plenty of game for your money.
But I agree combat seems very frantic and there are odd spawning issues (Hurlocks popping into existence, some extra guys appeared at the end from some door and they were dazed for some reason … may have been a special attack.)

And the rogue … crikey. Hardly the kind of person to go "unnoticed" in the underworld. If your gonna put that much effort into the texture at least animate them! Maybe they will be in DA3.