Dragon Age 2

Downloading now to try it out. I never played the first one so it will be a new experience.
 
Well this could be the make or break decision on whether I preorder. I am kind of glad they didn't do a "deluxe" version this time so I won't have that horrible decision of whether or not to get tha or normal one. Too bad I have to wiat til work is over.
 
Already finished it, had 5 MB/s so the download went pretty fast :p. I liked the storytelling but I had a little problem with lag during cutscenes. Overall it was an enjoyable experience though and I'll be picking it up right after I finish Awakening.

Edit: I'm having lag during cutscenes where it just pops up "Loading..." from time to time and right before a cutscene aswell. It's really annoying. I have a pretty good computer but I guess I have to turn down the graphics even more. Also, it just crashed on me.
 
Wow, two triple A demos on one day. Me rikey. Downloading both this and the Total War demo atm.
 
StarBob said:
Well this could be the make or break decision on whether I preorder. I am kind of glad they didn't do a "deluxe" version this time so I won't have that horrible decision of whether or not to get tha or normal one. Too bad I have to wiat til work is over.
Click to expand...

You must have missed the whole deal about the signature edition then right?
 
**** dick sucking ass! Stupid demo doesn't ****ing work. It keeps telling me that some shit is missing or whatever. Man, **** dragon age 2.

Edit: So I got it working. It was alright. But the ingame cinimatics are ****ed up. The video is much faster then the audio. I had the same problem for a while with Dragon age 1. It just sort of went away though.
 
I am not really into Bioware games and judging from the demo this game won't sway me either. Standard RPG fare really. The fans will probably eat it up though.
 
its kinda different from the first but not in any real negative way for me personally, however I was not a big fan of the first and not a fan of the demo :|

biggest change was the combat; on pc it required me to click for every attack (console i assume it would be buttons and more suitable for that sort of thing) and just reminded me of why i hate games like diablo -_-

I never played DA1 on pc either so the change to the different camera system threw me alittle aswell.

Ont he whole though still not particularly impressed. The first at least kept me invested enough to put a good few hours in it as for DA2 i had enough of it half way through the demo.
 
aside from the weird mid-cutscene loading (lots of people are reporting it on the forum), I am really enjoying the demo
I think the combat is alot more exciting, without losing too much of the strategy from the original; you'll still need to pause and issues orders to other party members, especially on the higher dif settings
it does look better than DAO, and I can't wait to see it in dx11 :)
also, I am in love with Bethany
 
It was enjoying while playing, but upon reflection it wasn't that great. I may still buy it because of a current RPG shortage (until ME3 and DS3 come out), hey I'd love to be proven wrong on this.
 
Just quit the demo, couldn't be bothered to finish. Normally I would explain why I dislike something, but I'm tired and my head hurts so I will just say this, the 'new' Darkspawn look stupid.

PS: That Templar's face is gaunt as f***.
 
Combat's okay. Dialog is laughable. It seems like they're trying to construct a story composed almost entirely of one-liners. Ugh.
 
I ran was surprised how well it ran on my computer given how the original ran. I think they did whatever they did with ME2 to Dragon Age because it looks a lot more crisp and isn't bogged down in the least. The combat seemed a little lighter but I'm sure it's tuned for demo power so it's a lot friendlier. I remember the initial DA combat being easy at first too and then the difficulty being ramped way the **** up later in the game. I think they overdid it a little on the blood effects. I guess maybe that's more like what it would be but it's like... everything is covered in blood after a fight. Really overall I think it feels a lot like the first one. As soon as I started fighting I was doing things about like I normally do. The only difference I noticed is that you don't "stick" to your enemies like before. For instance if someone got knocked back you'd autorun to them and keep attacking. Now if someone moves you have to move with them
 
When I played the first part, I thought they had really wrecked the game. But once the fantasy sequence was over, I found it was a pretty streamlined version of the original game (I noticed they took some cues from Mass Effect 2; if they added kinetic barriers, this would've been a very good total conversion mod).

I was also surprised at how similar the PC version and console versions were, and I was even more surprised at how much better the Xbox 360 version controlled over the PC version. The wheel and face button action selection works pretty well. I think that's a result of how this game is more action-oriented than the original. That being said, if I am going to buy it, I'll probably get the PC version, and I'll miss the overhead camera mode from the original.
 
I'm not impressed. The new combat system feels unresponsive, and combat animations are exaggerated and stupid looking, a huge step backward from the believable ones in the first game. I was also surprised at how mediocre the dialog and voice acting were; that was the one aspect I thought I could always trust BioWare with, and so far it is disappointing. On the plus side the graphics are pretty good, at least on main characters and environments. The new art design is decent enough, but I really dislike how it doesn't feel at all like it takes place in the same world as the first game because of the change. The darkspawn just look ****ing terrible, too, they barely resemble the ones from the original and have very poor models and flat textures. The game is technically solid and everything works (except for the godawful loading, which often pauses to load right in the middle of someone's sentence in cutscenes), it looks good and runs well (outside of DX11, which is completely broken), but almost all of new design decisions are questionable at best.
 
So does anyone know if the whole game is going to take place at the same time as the original or was that just something to bring everyone up to speed? I assume you get to the present where that guy's telling the story since they're looking for you, but I'm curious mostly to find out how much important stuff you can do that would somehow have gone unnoticed in the original game. I do kind of agree that the attack actions are a bit too exaggerated, but thinking back to the original - there were a lot of times you aren't even looking at what's happening because even the most explosive non-spells are merely a slightly wider swing. I think they're just trying to make sure non-mage classes have all the flair mages had.

I'm still debating preordering it... that price tag still sucks though.
 
They've said the plot takes place over ten years, with shifts in time occurring throughout. It was a bit weird starting near Ostagar though, especially since nothing looked familiar from the first. I mean, they talk about going to the wilds, but was that it? It wasn't exactly, uh, wild. :|
 
Someone commented that the area looked nothing like Lothering did from DA1 on the Bioware forums. Another poster responded that it was due to corruption of the blight and a dev agreed. However, Lothering is wooded farmland, you'd expect to see browning grass, dying fields and trees... not a freaking barren desert a day after the darkspawn arrive. And then there is the "new" darkspawn, which look ridiculous. Their art department seems to have taken off for cuckoo land.
 
Destructo-Bot said:
Someone commented that the area looked nothing like Lothering did from DA1 on the Bioware forums. Another poster responded that it was due to corruption of the blight and a dev agreed. However, Lothering is wooded farmland, you'd expect to see browning grass, dying fields and trees... not a freaking barren desert a day after the darkspawn arrive. And then there is the "new" darkspawn, which look ridiculous. Their art department seems to have taken off for cuckoo land.
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This is one of my main gripes with this DA2. Continuity problems aside, I just don't like ANY of the art direction in the game. Everything looks worse than it did in Origins. I don't understand this at all.
 
VictimOfScience said:
This is one of my main gripes with this DA2. Continuity problems aside, I just don't like ANY of the art direction in the game. Everything looks worse than it did in Origins. I don't understand this at all.
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seriously? character models look way better and there's more variety
whereas in DAO everyone looked like a slight variation of a base model, like a bunch of clones
outfits/armor looks way better too, especially for mages
the environment at the beginning was a little dull, but maybe it's just another part of Lothering that looks like a barren wasteland? who the hell knows
besides, I thought Kirkwall looked great, and that was just at night with no one around
 
So I got to playing it,

The animations look stiff as hell. It feels like there's no emotion. Even older games did this better.

And ughgfshjff gnvjrsf the voice acting sdafghfjnhmk

and thanks bioware you took all the choice from my hands and just straight out told me what the good and evil dialogue options are, i thank you for making conversations so interesting and making choices difficult!
/sarcasm
 
Recently been playing DA:A and frankly I like the more streamlined approach of DA2. Little things such as your healing potions being automatically shown on the action bar are great touches. Like most I initially missed the isometric perspective, but then I came to realise that that was only ever a necessity when AoE spells incorporated friendly fire (still available in nightmare mode though masochist fans) coupled with the fact that all the combat scenarios in DAO & DAA were arenas with fixed levels of opposition whereas (from what I've played of DA2) the opposition come at you in a number of waves. In the same way as ME2 allowed you concentrate on being Shepard and letting the action flow, the same is true with DA2, you can be Hawke doing your thing and not have to worry constantly what your companions are up to. Even with the AI option controls in DAO/DAA you have to baby step your entire team constantly (especially the mages) because invariably if you don't someones going to end up frozen, burn, electrocuted or pulverized after about 5 seconds because they'll stray into a friendly cast AoE. From a mechanistic viewpoint having AI incapacitate each other is a design failure. Ideally of course it would be great if the AI knew not to wander into line of fire in such cases, but removing friendly fire with AoE isn't a bad solution either, as it means that fighters & rogues still play a significant role, rather than being there simply to wade in to administer the coup-de-grace after your mages have battered the bulk of the opposition into submission with AoE (something that tends to happen in the high end play of DAO in my experience).

Ultimately for me I'm more interested in storyline rather than having to strategize every battle I engage in, and at times I often found with DAO that the key to victory in a lot of battles was only discovered by losing it initially and then pre-emptively laying out a counter game plan based on how the original encounter went on the reload. A typical example being the first time you encounter a revenant. Those ****ers were mean (especially with the pull ability), and require a fair amount of effort to defeat if faced early on.

Gabe Newell has always maintained that a player should always feel that if they've been killed it's because they personally made a mistake, rather than that the game threw a challenge at them they were ill equipped to deal with initially, and I kind of think that's a fair point. A game situation that constantly defeats you until you learn exactly how to counter it through trial and error is not necessarily a great game.
 
Kadayi said:
In the same way as ME2 allowed you concentrate on being Shepard and letting the action flow, the same is true with DA2, you can be Hawke doing your thing and not have to worry constantly what your companions are up to.
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Agreed. It's a good mix between the immersive experience of ME2 and the more RPG approach of DAO. We are living in a world of contaminated genres, and I'm fine with that.
 
Paulaner said:
Agreed. It's a good mix between the immersive experience of ME2 and the more RPG approach of DAO. We are living in a world of contaminated genres, and I'm fine with that.
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I don't necessarily see it as a case of contamination, more as of the computer RPG finding it's own legs, based on what it does best, namely immersion, atmosphere and emotion. There's a lot of people who get caught up with the idea that something is only an RPG if it's aping the statistical mechanics of the old P&P systems, but there is a collective failure on these peoples parts to recognise that those mechanics are merely the resolution system of p&p RPGs, not the actual experience.

In the first days of television broadcasting often what passed as entertainment was simply a picture of a fixed head (or heads) reading off a script. No different than what the radio was doing, save that you could see the reader. It took decades before television evolved into the confident and distinct medium that we recognise today. There simply were no maps for the territories that television gradually moved into.

The same is also true with computer games. It made sense initially to ape the RPG styles of the P&P games because the systems were tried and tested, but now the strengths of the computer are coming to fruition in terms of the ability to deliver virtual immersive environments, that necessity to hold to such overt statistical conventions becomes less and less. Now that's not to say that I don't think there still isn't still the space for D&D style RPGs on the PC, but for me personally as someone who loves innovation I want to see more and more developers embrace the unknown.
 
Kadayi said:
...but for me personally as someone who loves innovation I want to see more and more developers embrace the unknown.
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Agreed. I used to be conservative about my gaming experiences. Now I'm inclined to welcome anything that brings innovation, too.
 
Kadayi said:
I don't necessarily see it as a case of contamination, more as of the computer RPG finding it's own legs, based on what it does best, namely immersion, atmosphere and emotion. There's a lot of people who get caught up with the idea that something is only an RPG if it's aping the statistical mechanics of the old P&P systems, but there is a collective failure on these peoples parts to recognise that those mechanics are merely the resolution system of p&p RPGs, not the actual experience.

In the first days of television broadcasting often what passed as entertainment was simply a picture of fixed head (or heads) reading off a script. No different than what the radio was doing, save that you could see the reader. It took decades before television evolved into the confident and distinct medium that we recognise today. There simply were no maps for the territories that television gradually moved into.

The same is also true with computer games. It made sense initially to ape the RPG styles of the P&P games because the systems were tried and tested, but now the strengths of the computer are coming to fruition in terms of the ability to deliver virtual immersive environments, that necessity to hold to such overt statistical conventions becomes less and less. Now that's not to say that I don't think there still isn't still the space for D&D style RPGs on the PC, but for me personally as someone who loves innovation I want to see more and more developers embrace the unknown.
Click to expand...

I love you.
 
BabyHeadCrab said:
I love you.
Click to expand...

*blushes*

Seriously though. Even if a game isn't entirely successful (like Mirrors Edge for example), it adds to the fabric of what is achievable in terms of evolving the virtual game space. Without Mirrors Edge it's probably unlikely the Brink with it's free flowing movement mechanic would of come about. What's going to be interesting to see is how that aspect then plays off with other games. Prior to Half-life 2 albeit physics engines were in existence, no one was really using them for more than rag dolling. Valve came long and actually started using them to impact game play, and it completely transformed peoples way of thinking about what was possible using physics.

I think this is going to be a bumper year for games. Possibly one of the best on record, there's a lot of exciting titles coming out and personally I'm psyched for a number of them.
 
how a RPG which has been system of rules is now by a lack of such and is if is on such. Even now era are now being failing to are failing miserably and coming and incorrect the inhibition to immersion as well to a being unable totwo

*sorry to collective circle*

Butthurrt is suprrersion to advancementtion.

Problemication???
 
Cornerstone, no one knows what the **** you just said so I don't think you need to apologize.


Concerning DA2, I'll likely buy it at some point, but I don't really care to try the demo right now. From the screenshots posted earlier in the thread, it looks like they've put in approximately zero of the improvements I was hoping for. For example, in DA1 you had like 1 or 2 mage robes in the entire game, and they were all ****ing ugly. DA2 screenshot of a mage has him wearing... the same ****ing robes. :LOL:
 
Letters said:
Cornerstone, no one knows what the **** you just said so I don't think you need to apologize.
Click to expand...

Indeed, Dude needs to lay off the meth before posting for sure it seems.

Concerning DA2, I'll likely buy it at some point, but I don't really care to try the demo right now. From the screenshots posted earlier in the thread, it looks like they've put in approximately zero of the improvements I was hoping for. For example, in DA1 you had like 1 or 2 mage robes in the entire game, and they were all ****ing ugly. DA2 screenshot of a mage has him wearing... the same ****ing robes. :LOL:
Click to expand...

The inventory is locked in the demo (as is character customisation), so probably best avoided if that's what you are after anyhows.
 
Cornerstone said:
Funny how a RPG which has always been based off a system of rules is defined now by a lack of such and is considered a "collective failure" if it is based on such. Even worse is now is "talking heads" of old era are now being compared to television where gaming is failing to compete as such examples in gaming now are failing miserably and coming off as stale and incorrect to the setting. Statistics of being another character being replaced are now an inhibition to immersion as well to a being unable to comprehend the 4th wall separating the two.

*sorry to separate your collective circle jerk here*
Click to expand...

Say what?
 
morgs said:
Say what?
Click to expand...

I think he's attempting to disagree in some fashion. Maybe when he's feeling a bit more lucid he'll come back to us, no doubt to tell us that we are all heathens and that Fallout 1 represents the absolute pinnacle of the computer cRPG or some such, and that Vince Dwellers 'Age of Decadence' will herald the triumphant return of the true cRPG and the Dragon Ages, Witchers and Oblivions of this world will be smote down forever.
 
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