Dragon Age II Preview

If you’re looking for even more information about Dragon Age II, you can head over to 1UP for a quick hands-on preview of BioWare’s forthcoming RPG sequel. “Simplified”, “stripped back”, and “streamlined” are the descriptors for today:

Yes, one of the big changes for Dragon Age 2 is that the combat has been revamped (or stripped back, depending on how you look at it) — turning it into a much more hack-n-slash type of game when playing as a Knight. This is all done through a closer third-person perspective than the first game; think Ninja Gaiden, and how you hacked through dozens of enemies, blood spilling everywhere — now replace ninjas with darkspawn, and you have the basic idea behind DA2. Currently, that’s how it appears your main character, Hawke, a Knight (we’re assuming that’s the default class, like how Shepard defaults to being a Soldier) plays in the game.

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And although the fighting mechanics themselves seem to have changed to a hack-n-slash type of gameplay, players still have the ability to be tactical by pausing the action, and having the different party members perform their special attacks. Such as the unnamed Mage that was on display, who casted some powerful area-of-effect attacks that turned goblins into putty in a matter of seconds; pretty bloody and impressive stuff.

Another thing that was shown was the “new” art style. I couldn’t notice anything that radically different from the first Dragon Age, although it was explained that a lot of work went into making sure the game looked and played the same across each of the platforms. So I guess this means the developers have simplified it away from what made the original so enduring to PC gamers? Or maybe they were talking about how the interface of the game has changed to be much more simplified — the only things displayed on screen are your party’s health and mana in the lower left, and since the Xbox 360 version was being demoed, the cycle of powers is still in the lower right.