Dragon Age II Preview

IGN has cranked out another one of their “Everything You Need to Know” previews, and this time it’s BioWare’s Dragon Age II being put under the microscope. A little about combat and character progression:

I’ve seen a lot of people voice concerns about the combat being “dumbed down” to be more like an action game. In truth, combat works largely the same actions are mapped to the face buttons and by pulling on the right trigger or R2 you can switch to a different set of moves. There have been some modifications to the action wheel that you can pull up with the left trigger or L2, but for the most part it’s similar too.

We haven’t seen much of the PC version, but I was told that you will still be able to pause with the space bar and issue commands via the action bar. The biggest change is that the attack animations are sped up and much flashier than before, making battle scenes more visually interesting and visceral. So if you like instant gratification don’t want to bother with babysitting your squad, that’s an option. On the other hand, if you want to take a little more control over the situation you can do that as well.

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As with any role-playing game, when you earn experience points in Dragon Age II you will gain levels. If you’ve played Dragon Age: Origins you should feel right at home here the attributes and abilities system makes a return. For the uninitiated, attributes are points you can divvy up between strength (attack power), willpower (stamina), constitution (health), etc. while abilities are specific powers you can choose.

Selecting abilities looks vastly different from Origins instead of a massive block of linear progressions, different spell sets or attack sets are bundled together. As you unlock the skill tree you can either choose to upgrade a specific move to make it more powerful or gain a new one. Visually, abilities are presented in a much more digestible way than they were before, which is a nice change.