Dragon Age II Demo Impressions

Some last-minute impressions of the Dragon Age II demo have surfaced, which you might find to be reasonable reading material as you wait for your copy of the game to arrive this week.

Lazygamer:

The demo kicks off in cinematic style. Varric, a dwarf, is being interrogated by a templar, one of the religiously aligned mage hunters . She’s trying, in a rather impolite and unfriendly way, to convince the aforementioned Dwarf to give up the whereabouts and identity of your main character, Hawke, (the Champion) of Kirkwall.

Varric serves as an unreliable narrator, retelling his version of your rise to power, possibly embellishing or telling outright lies. Your story, as relayed, begins with you and your family fleeing the destruction of Lothering, set for Kirkwall. you’re unfortunately surrounded by Darkspawn, and the demo takes this opportunity to teach you the basics of combat. It’s quite simple and streamlined; the (A) button serves as your primary attack, with the rest of the face buttons used for assigned abilities. Holding the left-trigger brings up a radial menu from where you can issue commands to your squad, heal, use potions, assign abilities and the like. So pretty much just like the first one then? Well yes only much tighter, slicker and infinitely more polished.

And Bits ‘n Bytes:

After playing through both battle scenarios offered, I feel somewhat more satisfied with the combat in Dragon Age II. Let me say that most of the combat seemed very similar to the way battles played out in the previous game: you control your character while the AI issues commands to your allies, which you can influence by setting up battle tactics for each of them for given circumstances. Should you wish to switch your control to one of your comrades, you have the option to do so (just don’t forget to set your main character up with some sort of battle tactics so he doesn’t stand waiting impassively for you in the heat of battle)! The one difference, which I liked quite a lot, was that now having your character engage in combat feels more like a good action game. Instead of choosing a target and entering an attack command at the onset of battle, then sitting back and watching it play out on-screen, the player is now pounding on buttons continuously throughout the battle to perform standard attack swipes as well as special abilities. Movement and locking onto enemies also seems ten times more fluent than in the previous installment. These may be small changes, but they made me feel much more in control during combat.

A few other differences were noticeable. For one, even based on the short sections of plot I saw, I got the feeling that the story is a little bit darker and more dramatic that’s not to say that the first Dragon Age was a kid’s tale, but I quickly felt empathy for one character as I watched a reluctant wife deliver a merciful killing blow to her husband. On the whole, the characters seemed more relatable, and there was even a playful, not-so-subtle reference to members of your party becoming romantically entwined with one another. The conversation and menu systems seem largely unchanged, although I would seriously expect BioWare to release the retail version with a much larger font-size! Unless you have a 72’³ screen to play on, the conversation choices, journal entries, and dialog subtitles will be all but illegible! Seriously, I don’t understand why I see any games ship that use fonts so tiny you have to get up and walk close to the television to read what’s on-screen. Even ONE game like that is too much! Get on it, BioWare!