Dragon Age II Previews

A handful of sites got the chance to sit down for a hands-on session with Dragon Age II, with a bit of attention paid to the female Hawke revealed at PAX. FileFront.

So, wow, the graphics. It’s such a huge improvement it’s kind of funny. (Crisp) is the word I would use. Everything is so much crisper, from the new explosive Talent animations for warriors, to the particulate splattering of blood, to facial animations during cutscenes. Dragon Age 2 is beautiful, and it’s a welcome change.

VG247.

Things were going grand at my end. I was enjoying the hell out of myself, and about to unleash all fury upon this massive hurlock headed my way, when I was irrupted by a pesky cut-scene. This annoyed me at first, but as I saw what was happening, I quickly changed my mind.

It’s called a framed narrative, and this allows BioWare to take you in and out of different points in your character’s life, not only to give you his or her history, but to provide you with other skills and levels to have fun with.

This also allows the developer to tell a larger story within the game without breaking the current timeline. To give you an example of how this works, think of The Princess Bride, and there you have it sans Fred Savage and Peter Falk.

So, when this (framed narrative) popped up, my fight with the demon monsters zoomed out a bit, and you could see an older looking couple chatting to one another in the cutscene.

Gaming Angels.

Fight like a Spartan I did. Hawk’s agile fluid movements cut through Darkspawn like light sabre through a Clone. The radial tactics system is still readily available but it’s no longer as necessary as it used to be. Instead, it’s useful to plan out your party’s actions while your blades dance like a whirling Dervish. Your comrades in arms (your brother the warrior and your sister the apostate mage) are just as powerful. I’ll be interested to see just how many improvements will be made to the Mage class, as I often found mages wildly difficult to control in Dragon Age: Origins.