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Demo Impressions: Dragon Age II

March 2, 2011, Author: Michael Charge

When EA first showed off screenshots and mentioned details about the sequel to 2009’s Dragon Age, I was quite worried. As a huge fan of the original game, the details of Mass Effect style combat and dialogue seemed out-of-place compared to the first game’s die hard classic style RPG which was closer to Baldur’s Gate than Bioware’s sci-fi game. However, thanks to the massive demo now available on Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC, my mind is now at ease. That said, there are one or two things to point out before you rush off to fight some more of the Darkspawn.

After a choice of gender and class, the demo starts off with a bare-chested dwarf being dragged before several troops bearing the symbol of the Templars and the Chantry, Dragon Age’s all powerful church. A female Templar soon starts questioning him and he relays the story of a certain Hero of Kirkwall. This is you, and as he tells his tale, you are thrown into a battle with some of the Darkspawn.

Players of the original will soon notice that the combat feels a great deal faster. Characters now have a bit more weight to them and the combat feels great, especially as a warrior when you charge in and knock a ton of Darkspawn over in a single bound. There also seems to be a lot less of the shifting around of units that made the game look slightly messy. However, the game is still all about managing your abilities and using them at the right time with carefully landed blows capable of killing whole swathes of enemies around you. Fighting alongside you is your sibling, either Bethany the mage or Carver the warrior depending on your character class. After you butcher a metric ton of Darkspawn, and as more powerful abilities magically appear in your tool bar, a towering ogre bursts his way into the fight. The battle against it is pretty similar to many battles in Origins which pitted you against these terrifying foes and anyone who completed the first game will feel right at home. Then a Dragon turns up and the game fades to black.

However, this isn’t the end of the demo. The female Templar calls shenanigans on the Dwarf’s story and he retells it properly, with a little more back story and setting. It turns out the battle you fought at the demo’s start was actually taking place during the sacking of Lothering, which Dragon Age vets will know as one of the earliest parts of the original game. At this point, the Hero of Kirkwall is known simply as Hawke, and he (or she) is fleeing the Darkspawn alongside their family. You travel along a mountain path into The Wilds fighting various pockets of Hurlocks in battles, which instantly reconnects those Dragon Age reflexes (the constant pounding of the health potion button for one), until you encounter two fellow travellers that help show off Dragon Age 2’s new and improved conversation system. Anyone who has played Mass Effect will feel right at home, with the hero now being fully voice acted and the dialogue UI looking almost exactly like Shepard’s voice commands. One improvement over Bioware’s other game though has to be a tone indicator, which gives a little hint as to how Hawke will voice it, preventing many an unwanted dialogue choice.

Around this time you also get to look at the levelling system for Dragon Age 2 and another major change has occurred. Behind a menu that looks suspiciously like it was pulled almost entirely intact from Mass Effect 2, the abilities screen is perhaps one of the slickest menu’s I’ve seen in a long time.  The attributes screen now includes several calculated values based on your stats, which work out things like damage with current weapon, health based on constitution and total mana based on willpower. This allows you to easily and quickly work out which attributes to put points into in order to maximise your character’s effectiveness. After working through attributes, there is also your abilities to select. Each classes’ selection of abilities is shown as six separate trees of abilities based around common themes. For example, the warrior has two sets based around different equipment choices (either weapon and shield or two-handed) and four others based around aspects of the class. These are things such as Defender which focuses on raising your own and your party’s defensive capabilities through abilities as like Stonewall and Warmonger, which is about drawing enemies to you and away from weaker members of the party. It’s presented in a better way than previously and makes it a lot more player friendly than the simple list of the original game.

After your tweaking, you eventually get back to the battle you fought right at the start of the demo, except this time you are not quite as powerful, have a few more allies and the battle ends with (spoilers) the dragon turning into a familiar face from the first game, who sets you off with a quest to reach the city of Kirkwall; a place where Hawke has distant relatives and is far enough away from the Darkspawn to stay alive. Another fade to black, another update from the dwarf and suddenly your thrust into yet another skirmish. This time, your characters are at level 6 and the narrating dwarf (with his awesome crossbow) is now a member of your party. You are accompanied by  Isabella, a pirate from the first game you may have met if you visited the tavern in Denerim, as you attempt to find out why her former employer is chasing after her. Playing with some higher level characters shows off a few of the more awesome moves, such as explosive arrows or cones of cold which look better in the new combat engine of Dragon Age 2.

I tried the demo on both Xbox 360 and PC and I’m impressed with the tech side. The new art style is a little unusual; it looks a great deal better but some aspects such as the terrain textures still look bland and the new textures of familiar enemies are a bit jarring. However, the characters look more naturalistic and the armour textures have a huge number of details on them, making each rivet visible. Additionally the graphics are used to great effect, players should look out for a visual embellishment of one of the characters during the first battle due to the narrators exaggeration. The voice acting is usual Bioware; I think the male Hawke voice is a great bit of voice acting but the female Hawke is a little grating. Control-wise, the console edition plays quite differently to the PC version. On the Xbox 360, it feels more like Diablo with the abilities mapped to radial menus and three of the face buttons. It’s a system that works and grants you the same range of powers as the PC user has with the keyboard.

I love just how much Dragon Age 2 links into the original game which can occasionally be a bad thing for a modern sequel. However, it does explain much of the shared lore so if you’re dying to jump straight into Dragon Age 2 and use Ser Issac of Clarke’s armour, this demo makes it seem like you won’t miss out on much in terms of story. For the hardcore players of Dragon Age Origins, mainly those on PC, the worries about simplification are unfounded. Underneath, the slicker, cleaner, more beautiful exterior is the same old complex RPG, complete with the spell combinations, hours of levelling and sometimes punishing difficulties. This demo has done its job for me;  I’m now much more excited about the upcoming release of Dragon Age 2.

Feature Type: Hands On | Tagged Bioware, Dragon Age, Dragon Age 2, EA