Dragon Age II Previews

The San Diego Comic-Con has given birth to two more hands-on previews of BioWare’s Dragon Age II, including this piece that covers a little extra over at GreyWardens.com:

The story is told by two different narrators who tend to embellish how powerful you really are, and the intro filled out the story of Ostagar (in the same stained glass fashion of DA:O). The game definitely played a bit more like Mass Effect 2, what with the voice acting, as well as in the general gameplay. At one point, I was offered the chance to utterly destroy mobs of darkspawn that were coming at me, or have the mage that was with me (Bethany, I think her name was) blast them. Mage spells in the demo were crushing prison and mind blast which worked to marvelous effect, of course. The spellbook worked well, but, at least in the demo, there were no tooltips. When I reached the end of the preview, just as it was obvious everyone was going to die, a dragon came out of nowhere and, graciously, killed all of the darkspawn. The dragon then morphed into a familiar old lady with long grey hair guess who, anyone?

I also had the chance to play a new DLC that is coming out soon. I didn’t get the name, but it was one of the hardest dungeons I have ever played, even on easy at least in the pre-build that I was playing, anyway. In my chat with Chris Priestly, he told me that BioWare is going to keep making downloadable content for Dragon Age: Origins, and that they are planning to keep the DA:O franchise going for as long as they can so the changes in Dragon Age 2 aren’t necessarily the end for more traditional roleplayers. There is also likely to be a third full Dragon Age game and Chris told me that they are not yet done with Morrigan’s story.

And then we have another take from Nerd Reactor:

The controls feels more action oriented, leaning more towards action games like Devil May Cry and Fable. You attacks are limited to time, meaning that each time you use a certain attack, it will need to replenish before you can use it again. Each attack is unique, so that means some attacks will take longer to replenish. Think being able to command while being a Spartan from 300 at the same time.

After looking at the graphics, I can say that it’s a big improvement over the generic look of the first game. The character models are more stylized, and in turn makes the characters look more unique. The closeup of the skeleton baddies was pretty impressive. And the finale of the demo ended with an awesome showcase of flames and dragon power.