Dragon Age II Demo Impressions

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Written by Brother None on March 2nd, 2011

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One the main highlights everyone's been talking about has got to be the improved visuals in Dragon Age 2 and yes, it'˜s shiny. Sadly in this day and age, the excuse of outputting a stellar story with great sounds and gameplay to follow doesn't mean you can simply ignore the look. Happily there are definite improvement with the overall quality, from the animations and textures, to the particles and gore, which is simply insane. Unfortunately, player customization was locked out but it looks to be more of the same and improved. Now this doesn't mean Dragon Age 2 is going to be winning any awards for outstanding visual excellence but it's now in the ballpark where it can hopefully be appreciated as the total package.

Trying out this section as Mage Hawke was truly amazing, as the power of a high level mage is awesome to behold. Shards of ice fly through the air to pierce and freeze everyone in front of you and fireballs rain from the heavens to explode upon your enemies with devastating effect. Even default attacks were impressive as your character whips a staff around in a flurry of fantastic blows, bolts of magic flying into the melee. The Rogue class was equally impressive, displaying a mastery of acrobatics and knives, quickly eliminating individual foes with back-stabs, and stunning larger groups with smoke bombs.

There are a few limitations of the demo to take note of. Many of the settings are greyed out so you'll have to wait for the final code to experiment with the full range of different setups. You can't customise your character's appearance in the demo, which is a real pity since it would have been neat to be able to save a character profile all ready to import into the full game. There's also no save and load functionality so set aside at least two hours to play through this sample. The demo crashed at one point late into the second area, forcing me to restart from the very beginning again and making me wish that Bioware had at least put in some sort of checkpoint system to counteract the bugginess of their demo build.

Complaints aside, what I saw and played in this sample was enough to get me very excited about the final product. I had read that DA2's graphics were going to be more '˜cartoonish' than the original's. Let me just say that that is blatant misinformation the game actually looks very similar to the first one, albeit with improved textures and character models. Everything looks more detailed (and stylish) than in Dragon Age: Origins from the enemies to the characters' clothes and armour. The animation is fluid and impressively put together, and the game runs at a smooth framerate even on my geriatric PC.

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