Dragon Age II Demo
 

Greetings Ironworkers

The demo for Dragon Age II is now available from BioWare's website. Here's the link:

http://dragonage.bioware.com/da2/demo/

Just finished the demo as a mage. Didn't particularly like it. Major complaints:

- Mass Effect dialog wheel aped/inserted into Dragon Age, creating the Dragon Effect. Dialog options are imprecise and don't fully detail what will be said, making the character feel much less like your own. Shortened responses and lack of text feedback is highly noticeable to the detriment of the demo.

- Combat is definitely faster and feels as others have said, over the top. It's rather easy to be lulled into the speed of activity and simply let things happen.
For the most part, it seemed to play itself with only one or two fights (notably the last Ogre/darkspawn one) requiring any real degree of thought. I found very little need to think tactically and you could easily argue that the demo doesn't offer a great deal of motivation for doing so.

- The lack of a tactical view (which I liked from DA:O) sometimes makes the camera view manipulation a tad frustrating. I got used to it I suppose, but it wasn't especially pleasant.

- I also couldn't find the 'select all' button for an option that is usually easy to spot in Bioware games and needed to be told via a loading text that a shortcut was CTRL+A.

- Awkward silences amid painful, hammy dialog which the cinematic approach fails to conceal. I guess it's possible that the content won't be the same in the full game, but this general feeling of a hollowness in the writing was strong to me.

It's clear what the market demographic is and unfortunately those of us seeking a refinement of the Baldur's Gate experience will have to look elsewhere.
This will be a bargain bin purchase for me.

This was taken from my response to a thread over at the 'watch, where you can get more responses from playing the demo:
http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12732

EDIT: You can make a comment guys, I won't bite! :D (Noticed the amount of people viewing the thread, but not saying anything!)

Cheers

Re: Dragon Age II Demo
 

I liked it.
Most of what you said is true, but that seems to be the direction bioware is headed. It takes less effort to do voice acting for everyone if they dont need to say *exactly* whats written so i can understand why they decided to mass effect the dialogue.

As for the action, i think that if you put the difficulty level up higher you will end up having to use much more in the way of tactics. That being said, the game does play itself if you write up custom tactics for all of the characters well enough, but that was true of DA:0 as well, i ran a few playthroughs of that with the dog companion just sitting in a corner and letting the tactics win all battles.

Re: Dragon Age II Demo
 

I liked it better too. I love how they streamlined the UI, and sped up combat. I even like the radial menu...But, I do miss the old camera. It seems to play well too, smoothly. Personally, I get tired of being interrupted by a cutscene every 10 seconds (like in DA1), so I dunno if I will get through this game. I just wanna wander and play, the way Baldurs Gate would let you. The story is rammed down your throat with these games, and the characters are horribly cliche at times.