Dragon Age II Preview

Should you be in the mood for another Dragon Age II hands-on preview this evening, the folks over at VideoGamer have you covered. It’s all pretty standard stuff at this point, though:

To start off with, the game’s combat system has been reconfigured for a wider audience. DA2 now opts for a more inclusive approach to cater to the gamer not bothered with tactics-based gameplay. You’re still offered the standard tactics menu that you saw in the original game, giving you the ability to pause mid-combat and plot out your next move. But now it’s served alongside a helping of quick buttons. If you’re not interested in queuing up actions on a pause screen and watching as those moves trickle out of your character’s arms then you get the option to fight in the moment with a few basic combat actions without breaking away from the game. Enemies will begin streaming toward you and you can dive straight into them without pause.

BioWare has been scrubbing away at PC combat as well, implementing a PC-based “Tactical Camera 2.0” that allows your camera to freely roam around the battlefield mid-combat. Previously your camera had been fixed, stuck to your character and the area surrounding them. Now you can make use of the entire relevant area to plot the placement of your characters.

But the most significant change for the franchise is how the narrative has been remodelled. Dragon Age: Origins was a story-centric game that was so incredibly long you would make decisions that 20 hours later you wouldn’t be able to actually remember. The remedy to that involves using a different method of storytelling. Now we have a framed narrative: a narrative takes the form of a story within a story.