Dragon Age: Origins was a great game. Many people were very excited about it prior to its release as they believed it marked a return to BioWare doing what they (arguably) did best: traditional fantasy-themed RPGs in a Dungeons and Dragons style. The Baldur’s Gate series is one of their most beloved creations, after all. The recent explosion of interest in the series thanks to its re-release on Good Old Games is testament to this.
Despite its excellent story, quality voice acting and immense replayability, though, Origins wasn’t perfect. The graphics were seen as below-par by many, with character models particularly suffering from blurry textures on the Xbox and PS3 versions. The game was not really optimized for console play, being still very much a PC game first and foremost. And there was this other upcoming game from BioWare out there called Mass Effect 2 that looked rather good, too.
So, BioWare obviously thought when planning this sequel, why not take on board the feedback received from the first game? And then couple said feedback with the lessons learned in the Mass Effect series? The result is Dragon Age II. And it’s looking great.
We had the chance to sit down and play a substantial chunk of the game’s opening at the Eurogamer Expo. The sequence on display showed a good mixture of the different elements of the game, and does a great job of introducing newbies and veterans alike to what’s new and what’s old.
The demo opens with a dramatic stand-off. The player character (named Garrett or Marian depending on gender) and their sister are confronting a large group of darkspawn. They’re thrown immediately into combat and you get the chance to try out the new combat system. Unlike the first game’s “target and order” system, Dragon Age II’s combat is much more immediate and action-based. Pressing A swings the character’s weapon once, rather than initiating an auto-attack like in the original. Skills are still assigned to a two-tier Battle Menu in the corner, allowing quick access to up to six at once. Combat is much faster-paced, active, and bloody. The characters the player controls in this initial sequence are very powerful, so they can rip through the Darkspawn with ease. It’s an immensely satisfying experience.
As this sequence ends, we see a dragon swoop down, burn the Darkspawn away and save the intrepid duo’s lives. But then we cut to another sequence.
“Bullshit. That’s not how it happened,” comes the voice of a character we quickly learn to be part of the now-collapsed Chantry. She is talking to a mysterious figure sitting in a throne whom, it seems, has been telling her his version of the story of “The Champion.” He then promises to tell her the truth, and the sequence begins again, but this time with a difference.
This time around, Garrett or Marian are still accompanied by their sister, but also their mother and brother. The player also has the opportunity to tweak their appearance at this point, using a face generator rather similar to Mass Effect 2′s system. This feature was unfortunately disabled in the demo, but it certainly seems that players will be able to model their own Garrett or Marian as they choose.
The other difference is that unlike the ass-kicking hero the player has control of at the very opening, they’re now a lowly level 1 warrior, rogue or mage. Mages weren’t playable in the demo, unfortunately, but it was clear that warriors and rogues both play very differently. Warriors have a lot of powerful moves that can batter enemies aside with ease. Many of these can also attack multiple enemies at once. Rogues, on the other hand, are a lot more agile and can nimbly dodge around the battlefield with a variety of acrobatic moves that makes them hard to hit. Like the previous game (and unlike Mass Effect), players can also switch between their party members at any time and control them instead. It’s also possible to pause the game by pulling up the radial menu, issuing orders to party members and then unpause – again, much like the original.
The difference the action-based combat makes is astounding. You feel infinitely more in control of your character and less like you’re letting the behind-the-scenes dice decide your fate. The fact that many moves are designed to attack multiple enemies at once also means that battles can be fought on a much more epic scale, with Garrett or Marian and their party hacking their way through hordes and hordes of Darkspawn at once rather than just three or four at a time.
Shortly after the opening battles, you come across a Templar knight and his wife Aveline who are also fighting Darkspawn in the area. It’s here that another Mass Effect influence shows its face: the conversation system. Rather than simply using the Baldur’s Gate-style dialog trees of the original, Dragon Age II takes Mass Effect’s “conversation wheel” system and runs with it. One small addition to the system is a small icon which appears in the center of the wheel indicating what “type” of response the phrase you’re choosing is. Aggressive responses, for example, have a red fist. Questions have a question mark, logically. Peaceful responses have a green leaf, confirming players who seek peaceful resolutions to problems to be tree-hugging hippies. Possibly.
It’s similar to Mass Effect’s Paragon and Renegade system in practice, but Dragon Age veterans will know that morality isn’t quite as clear cut as that. Rather than affecting simple morality meters, your responses and actions in the world of Dragon Age instead affect how party members feel about you. There’s scope for this to become very interesting later in the game, though the demo wasn’t really long enough to show this off fully. There were one or two tricky moral choices for the player to make, though, and it sets the tone nicely for the rest of the game. This is a fantasy world in chaos and on the brink of ruin. It’s clear that there are times where it’ll be necessary to do unpleasant actions in the name of the greater good. The original game featured more than a few big decisions like this, and it looks like the series is set to continue that tradition.
Without spoiling any more of the plot leading up to that point, the demo ends with the party encountering the same dragon seen in the “false memory” at the beginning. This dragon is revealed to be Flemeth, the Kate Mulgrew-voiced Witch of the Wilds, and Morrigan’s mother. She’s had a bit of an injection of “evil sexy chic” since the last time we saw her, though. She’s now clad in a figure-hugging, cleavage-showing studded leather number rather than the old rags we last saw her in. Also, she has horns. She asks the party to do her a small favor – a simple-sounding delivery quest that you can guarantee will be the start of a long and epic journey – in exchange for helping them get to safety from the Darkspawn horde. And at that point, the demo finishes. It was a good primer to the world of Dragon Age II, and just enough of a plot tease to really make everyone who played it want to know what happened next. Can Flemeth be trusted? She looks pretty evil. Why does she want the party to deliver her package? What will happen when they reach their destination?
As for how the game plays, fears that the game has been “dumbed down” for the console audience appear unfounded. While the action-based combat system may appear more simplistic and less strategic, in practice it is just an alternative, more interactive and immediate way of representing battles. There are certainly a wide variety of skills for characters to learn throughout the course of the game, with each appearing to have at least four or five different branching Talent trees to explore. So there’s certainly plenty of depth and flexibility in character development; still, the main difference is that the style of control is now optimized for console play. And a game as cinematic as Dragon Age II practically begs to be played on the big screen, so this is very much a good thing.
Probably the biggest and most obvious improvement over the original is the game’s graphics. The demo was a little unstable graphically in a couple of places but the frame rate seemed much better than the original, particularly in cutscenes. Character detail is immensely improved, too, and now much more on a par with Mass Effect 2′s cast. Hair still looks a bit like it’s made of concrete, but it does at least seem to swish around a bit in some of the cut scenes now. Clothing textures and teeth are no longer a blurry mess. And there’s a lot of fine detail on characters’ faces, such as freckles around the redhead Aveline’s nose.
All in all, Dragon Age II is looking like it’s everything a console-focused second entry in the series should be. It’s satisfying and fun to play, looks great, great and certainly seems to have the potential to tell the sort of epic branching story BioWare are known for. Let’s hope the few niggling little technical issues that were present in the demo are fixed by the time the game is released in March of next year.
For Ferelden!
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