Dragon Age II

[Sombre]

I played the PC Demo as a rogue earlier.

It made me sad that I'm broke at the moment.

[syntheticgerbil]

I'm excited for the release of this game.

Haha you were ALMOST real, but then you were advertising male sex toys. For shame.

[Kolzig]

I played maybe 40 minutes worth of the demo and decided that this is just not for me.

Horrible controls on PC by the way, or I'm not just used to that kind of controls.

I never played the first one and I've never really played any Bioware games before so this was a pretty late first dip into the world of Bioware.

Pretty interesting characters, all women were quite well equipped and all the male characters seemed to be short haired Schwarzeneggers.

[Gwardinen]

Pretty interesting characters, all women were quite well equipped and all the male characters seemed to be short haired Schwarzeneggers.

There is a pretty funny play on that going on, though. Disclaimer: I heard this from the PC Gamer UK podcast and haven't yet replayed the demo to see if it's true or they were just imagining it. In the first scene, which is the over the top heroic mode of the opening story, Bethany has larger breasts than she does in the later "real story" of the family's escape. That's pretty neat, that not only are their powers exaggerated in-character, but so are the T&A.

[juv3nal]

So I finally got around to trying the demo on PS3.

Although I've already pre-ordered it and I'm sure that this is just a unrepresentative chunk of the game, the demo feels a bit like...Final Fantasy 13.

Linear corridors punctuated with combat: check.

Chunks of non-interactive exposition: check.

If they keep that junk up for 20 hours I will cry, but I've mostly liked everything Bioware have done so far, so I should probably give them the benefit of the doubt.

[mikemariano]

If they keep that junk up for 20 hours I will cry, but I've mostly liked everything Bioware have done so far, so I should probably give them the benefit of the doubt.

I basically just hammered the A button for the entire Xbox demo, which as a mage became amusingly stupid.

This demo really isn't built to show off any depth at all. They might as well have kept the Marilyn Manson song in.

[brkl]

They cut out most of the talky bits and exploring and replaced them with FMV. Not very representative of the game.

I played the PS3 demo, and hated the actiony combat at least at the start. It was okay when I picked up a bow, that was more enjoyable than archers usually are in these games. Still, I wouldn't recommend the console versions.

[Kolzig]

I remember one weird technical bit about the demo.

I set up the settings in the first game menu to 1680x1050 at first and the native resolution of my monitor is 1920x1200. The game started for some reason in 1920x1200 and there wer black bars around the screen and the game area then with 1680x1050. It was also really sluggish frames per second. Then I changed to 1920x1200 and it took it to the whole screen and everything looked great, the fps went up and everything was really smooth.

[CaptainFish]

I'm watching the live GB quick look, and the Diamond thing keeps coming up. It seems generally hard hearted, but not all that consistent.

[Forbin]

I've been playing for about an hour now, and first impressions are that it's still basically Dragon Age. Some things have been up-res'ed, the UI and story telling are very cool, but I'd be surprised if this was a different engine from the first game. It feels like they've iterated on a few graphical components, but the core game mechanics are prettymuch identical.

Friendly fire doesn't seem to happen, and you can't zoom out as far as before, but the changes seem minor.

Story wise, you're no longer a mute protagonist, which is great. But it's not the DA/ME hybrid I was expecting yet. Maybe I need to make it further to see how my choices can effect my path, but I haven't felt the diverging paths that permeated Origins. Within the first few minutes the selection of your player class seems to alter the story in a meaningful way, but I feel like they've streamlined the decision tree and are going for something different. Time will tell.

[Gwardinen]

There's a little bit more branching stuff once you hit Kirkwall, but I'm about 8 hours in and still no decisions that I can see being really major. That said, I do tend to go for side missions a lot and avoid the main plot for as long as I can, so perhaps if I did more of that I'd be getting more pivotal choice moments.

[brkl]

Man. I received my download code today, only to be foiled by a release date check. I'll be able to actually start the game in about four and a half hours.

[Forbin]

There's a little bit more branching stuff once you hit Kirkwall, but I'm about 8 hours in and still no decisions that I can see being really major. That said, I do tend to go for side missions a lot and avoid the main plot for as long as I can, so perhaps if I did more of that I'd be getting more pivotal choice moments.

Yeah the branching out has started, I guess it was more of a lull during a tutorial phase.

I get the feeling that the combat would be more fun it I could resist hitting the spacebar every 2 seconds, but it's hard to tell when a fight is going to be hard enough to need pausing.

[brkl]

I'm getting crashes to desktop every fifteen minutes.

Also, customizing my appearance was good, but for some reason it's not as powerful as Mass Effect's was. I loved my Sasquatch Shephard That was his name, he didn't look like a Sasquatch, he looked like a gargoyle. But in a totally realistic way, he was a very realistic ugly bastard I thought.

[Sombre]

I'm getting crashes to desktop every fifteen minutes.

Also, customizing my appearance was good, but for some reason it's not as powerful as Mass Effect's was. I loved my Sasquatch Shephard That was his name, he didn't look like a Sasquatch, he looked like a gargoyle. But in a totally realistic way, he was a very realistic ugly bastard I thought.

Are you running in DX9 or DX11? I've heard changing to 9 fixes a lot of graphical issues.

[brkl]

11. I updated my drivers (for some reason I was under the impression this was being done automatically, but no) and that fixed it.

I wonder if there's a setting to disable the DOF effects. They just look stupid. Thank god I was able to disable the persistent gore. Hasn't Ferelden developed face-wiping technology? How could I possibly roleplay the kind of person who can have entire conversations without wiping the blood of his previous victim from his face?

[Sombre]

Truly, this is the age of great facial hair.

[Gwardinen]

I just fought that guy and had the exact same thought.

Being in Act 2 now I'm getting a better sense of the effects of choices. There do seem to be a lot of follow-on quests from the first act, and they appear to adapt to the decisions you made, so my opinion of the dynamic story is improving. I'll probably have to replay the game to see how much it truly changes, but so far I'm pleased by the fact that it is at least internally consistent and the world isn't ignoring what I've done or allowing my choices to be bulldozed by the main story.

On a related note, despite the fact that being in (more or less) the same place all the time can get a little dull, it does allow your choices and the general story progression to have more context. When you completed quests in DA:O they were only generally relevant within that area, with the exception of your origin story, so as soon as you left to go to the next major area nobody really cared what you'd done before.

[Sombre]

I made a blog here about how I'm finding the start.

It's pretty great so far. My only problem is the inability to be able to make my team wear custom armor.

[Gwardinen]

Honestly, that doesn't bother me too much. I appreciate not having to deal with giving them different armour all the time, particularly because the inventory system is still missing a few simple features that would make it less annoying to use.

Main one: let me see everyone's inventory! Not just the people who happen to be with me! Do you know what I do when I want to check whether I can better equip my party members with a new weapon/accessory? I go to a "choose your party" area and I just play musical fucking chairs with my party members until I have gone through everyone a couple of times to first re-equip people and then move the unequipped items to other people who now may want to use it and so on.

I don't mind the fact that I can't just change everything everyone in my party is using in the middle of an encounter, but at least let me go home and be able to see everyone's inventory since you don't have a party at home anyway.

[Forbin]

Speaking about armor, the game fixes two messed up things from the first game:

1) shoulder blades don't constantly clip through characters, and in general are more appropriately sized.

2) you can hide your players hat. The headgear seems to be mostly made by the ministry of silly hats still, but at least you can it off.

The item sets are weird though. They tell you that there is a bonus for the full set, but not what the bonus is or what pieces are in the set.

[brkl]

The item sets are weird though. They tell you that there is a bonus for the full set, but not what the bonus is or what pieces are in the set.

Sets are headwear-body-boots-gloves and when you have all equipped you see the effect in the abilities screen.

[lobotomy42]

Is it just me, or is this game really, horribly boring?

As far as I can tell, every single mission boils down to:

1) Talk to someone

2) Go somewhere and fight a thing

3) Return and get paid

Which, for an action game, would be fine. But this is clearly not an action game, since the only "action" you ever perform is pressing A repeatedly until everything dies (and occasionally switching to the other buttons when you want to vary the animation.) There's no real timing or reflexes or combos to perform.

Maybe I'm not far enough along. But so far this seems like a cheap cash-in game set in the Dragon Age universe. (And it's not like Origins was *so good* that the franchise can afford a few cash-ins...)

[brkl]

Definitely too much of that and what really bothers me is going back to the same dungeons time and again.

It would probably be a more fun game if you just concentrated on the main quest, which is what I'll do if I ever play it again.

[Forbin]

Is it just me, or is this game really, horribly boring?

As far as I can tell, every single mission boils down to:

1) Talk to someone

2) Go somewhere and fight a thing

3) Return and get paid

That's because the game really fucks up it's opening. After an abilitease, and tutorial phase, the first thing you're supposed to do is earn 50 gold to get onto an expedition. Which requires you to do any quest you want to get the money you need. Which the majority of people I know have taken to mean, do every side quest and bitch about how the game is really easy and stupid without ever playing passed the first act.

It's Bioware's fault, they should have found a way to pace those early quests better, but to be fair, if you push on you're into a more traditional structure. Their other problem is that they wanted the overarching story to be a mystery, but they didn't give you enough information to care what they were looking for. So they save everything for the last hour of the game, and if you

don't do Anders last few quests

you get an honest surprise. But it wasn't needed then, they should have opened the game with a cinematic with

an explosion

.

The map was also a poor choice. If it were more of a traditional graphic of fantasy world/city it might have hidden the way the levels were stitched together by a system of nodes. But people had that complaint about the first game even with it's larger scale world and fantasy map.

The downsides do highlight the fact that the game may be based off the concepts you're talking about. But you can be reductive about anything. What are 90% of games out there but go from point A to point B killing all dudes in between?