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So I got a chance to play Dragon Age 2 at the private showing at Comic Con today, and figured I'd write up my impressions. Note that we were not allowed to take any pictures or whatnot, but they said to talk about as many details as you like. The first 10 minutes was a presentation by the lead producer of DAO1&2 talking about the major changes from the previous game. This was followed by 10 minutes of the same guy playing through a level to introduce more of these features, followed by 15 minutes to try playing the same level ourselves. The lead designer was also present (along with many more of the devs), and were all very open and friendly when it came to questions and feedback.
At any rate, there were four main changes presented in detail as bullet points in the presentation portion, so I'll post my impressions in a similar format.
Graphics
They said the #1 negative feedback from the first game was the quality of the graphics, so that was a large area of focus. One of the developers in a sidebar conversation was saying that they spent a lot of time working on book cases, tables, vases, and other random crap in the other game that the player largely ignored - so in DAO2 they removed most of those objects to focus on higher poly counts for the character models and things like castles/terrtain/etc.
Another big point was that for a casual playing watching DAO1, it looked similar to almost every other fantasy RPG out there (WoW, others were mentioned) so they intentionally were changing the art style to be unique and make the game stand out so that "when players see screens in a magazine or in a commercial, they can tell it is EA/DAO2". That said, I was kind of unimpressed. Yes, the characters were much more detailed and it was a big leap over DAO1 (which isn't saying much), but based on the limited demo I saw I don't think it's anywhere near Mass Effect 2 in terms of graphics fidelity. Also, the art style didn't really look that unique at all - most of the players had enlarged chins/foreheads but it made everyone look like WoW dwarves. Also, you could only see the art style during cut scenes - during normal play it really didn't look much different outside of the killer new combat animations, which brings me to....
Combat
By far the biggest change, they felt combat felt too slow and unresponsive in the first game so for this one they basically made it into a quasi-action game, at least from the standpoint of attacking with the main character. You are now actively doing various combos and special moves, which are basically the same talents and spells from the first game but the combat moves so fast it does seem more akin to an action game. That said, you can still pause the game and give orders - their big tag line was "Plan like a general; fight like a Spartan". Spells are now all instant cast, and your warriors go into talents immediately as well - I guess the common theme here is that technically it kind of plays out like DAO1 just at 3x the speed.
Animations were great, and each class has unique finishing animations for bosses. Whereas the warrior would crawl up to the head of an ogre and stab it in the face to finish it off, finishing the same fight with a mage would cause her to summon giant hands to come out of a portal and pull the ogre to shreds.
I asked the producer if they were making it more RPG Lite similar to Mass Effect 2, and he said it was quite the opposite - all the same leveling/etc. from the previous game is there, but now with even more customization. He mentioned you can actually customize and level up individual spells such as the fireball as well.
Time will tell how the system works, but it definitely feels different than DAO1.
Silent Player/Dialog
Rather than being the silent protagonist, the main character has a voice this time. The dialog system has changed to be extremely similar to Mass Effect, which is a good thing. One additional thing they added which I liked a lot is an icon next to each dialog choice to indicate the 'type' of response it is meant to be - helpful, diplomatic, angry, etc. The producer said that the icons weren't necessarily going to be there for every response, but definitely for any crucial decisions.
Also, while the main character from DAO1 will not be in this game, you can still import your save game from DAO1 and all the decisions from that game will carry over. "Mass Effect focuses on the story of the main player, Shepard, while DAO focuses on the story of the world".
Framed Narrative
The game's story will take place in the context of different people 'retelling' portions of the main character's life over a 10 year period. They are going to use this device as a way to skip forward in time at certain points to see the effects of previous choices. Also, one interesting thing is that the game seemed to match who was telling the story - so for example, in the demo the storyteller recounting the part of the game we were playing was an old warrior who tended to exaggerate his stories a lot, which meant the levels you played and some of the over the top things your character did matched this. It will be interesting to see how this plays out....
I also tried Dead Space 2 at the same event, and while I was a huge fan of the first game I just couldn't get into it as much for some reason....
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