Dragon Age 2
 

tomorrow (tuesday 22nd Feb) the demo for DA2 will be released
personally I'm looking forward to the game despite a little scepticism about a few of their decisions, overall it looks like being pretty bloody good

Remember to at least download the demo; if we reach 1 million downloads, Bioware will unlock to items for us - to be used in the game. Remember though that the demo will be released between 4 PM and 8PM in Europe (depending on your timezone).

Reports on the social site suggest yanks with 360 gold subscriptions have played and finished it (in english) already.

There's been copies of the german version on PC floating around for a week, but the english release might not appear till 'tomorrow'.

hmm i guess im just not a demo person. If im going to play a game at all id just prefer to play it in a short burst. And i still havnt gotten around to playing the first game.. which im sure i should do.

demo's up but predictably the website keeps going up and down due to high traffic
guess it's safe to say their marketing is doing well at least

If you've seen the more recent gameplay videos you've seen the demo. So much is locked out or buggy the only reason to really play the demo is see if it'll run on your system.

No character customisation, the difficulty is locked on normal, no friendly fire. Apparently the console demo also suffers from manual attack being stuck in the on position (have to wail on your A button).

Fighters have the cool moves this time around :( Soo many crowd control options. They really felt overpowered and at a guess they won't have to worry about causing friendly fire damage either on the higher difficulties.

it's a good preview of the combat and a little peek at the dialogue system but yes, there is a lot locked out. while I enjoyed the demo I do hope there's more to it than just that in the full game, I'm hoping for the same kind of story and character depth Origins had and maybe some puzzles (there were a few easy ones in Origins)
but it's BioWare and so far they've delivered on every game I've played so despite a little remaining scepticism I'm getting this game

:D I hope this will take at least a little more than 3 days to play through :p
Otherwise I would have wasted my time since I always find that pretty disappointing if I finish the game this quick

It took you 3 days to beat dragon age origins? Was this not stop or in bursts?

if you mean the demo I'm pretty sure you'll be disapointed :P

kidding aside, if you finished Origins that fast I'm sure you missed out on a lot of content. firstly there's a lot of optional side quests, and while some are generic "go to map point, kill stuff, come back and get reward" variety there's also some with a lot of depth and story to them
it's also one of the most replayable games I've ever played. six different Origins (human noble, city elf, dalish elf, dwarf noble, dwarf commoner, mage) which as well as having unique prologues also have an impact (some minor, some rather more significant) on later parts of the game and different epilogue possibilities
then there's the fact that there's so many decisions with multiple choices which can make subsequent playthroughs very different, plus all these decisions are imported into future content (causing some minor changes in Awakening and Witch Hunt and promising a lot of variety in DA2 imports not to mention future DA titles)

also thanks to the toolset there's a huge collection of player made mods (shame our console brethren miss out on these though) many of which are very high quality

I've been trying to find a worthy fan made mod, but haven't found many complete ones. What do you recommend?

ah you've probably been browsing BioWares official site for projects? the problem with that site is that there's no option to only show completed projects and too many of them are never updated. best place to look is the Nexus
depending on what you'd want I'd recommend

Sir Gilmore - fully voiced additional companion
Baldurs Gate 2 Redux - a very ambititous and thusfar impressive remake of BG2 using Dragon Age (project was given permission from BioWare so no copyright issues, later parts will require having BG2 installed to run)
there's also a few other dungeon/quest mods (I haven't tried all of them yet), lots of mods to add more customisation options (more hairstyles, colours, tattoos, new faces, etc), bug fixes (some of which have since been made redundant by official patches) and so on. a good starting point is probably either to search Nexus by the category you're interested in or check the top 100 list

awful demo. I'm sure it won't be all that bad once it's released and I get to play the rest, but I won't be buying this until the inevitable ULTIMATE-edition released later on with all the DLC is really cheap. And it will be on 360, because all that "REAL-TIME" clicking was just annoying and badly done. It didn't feel right at all on the PC anyway.

^ I totally agree, there wasn't much difference for consoles.

Tiresome clicking, plus the very jarring loading of cut scenes in the middle of action has downgraded this game into a bargain bin purchase for me.

And I really did enjoy the first game.

What is this obsession with dumbing down games! I mean, Dragon Age Origins was already a dumbed down version of it's supposed predecessors (Baldur's gate game) in that it was much more battle oriented and that the enemies you fought were all pretty similar, and now DA 2 has even stripped down the strategy elements and added the dreaded Dialogue wheel, or as it should be called "I can't be arsed to read 4 lines of dialogue" wheel

http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/5...9754913574.jpg
"I'm hungry":D

im waiting for intrepid to come in and defend this pile of poo. i watch the forums everyday, just waiting for it.

It's blatantly obvious that the EA buyout has damaged BioWare's integrity ...

even though they promised us this wouldnt happen...

I'm at 10 hours now (PC version) and...well it's better than i feared after the terrible, terrible marketing it had. However it's so bad compared with Origins.

All i'm doing is going on thousands of boring sidequests and i don't really know why i'm doing this... what are Hawke's motivations? Why do the companions follow him? The game seems like a pile of ideas without any thought put into it. It's so souless, its more like a factory product than a labour of love... meh...

LOL @Gabe !!!

That's exactly what I'm talking about!

Unfortunately I don't think we'll ever see games as rich as Planescape torment ever again, unless some indie developers make one.

As for DA2 yes, I started playing the full game and it's not so bad, but it's definetely dumbed down. And yes where are the characters' motives?

Don't get me started about the dialog wheel! They show you a couple of words and you're supposed to guess what the character's going to say from that...I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT!

:)

I've been enjoying DA2, even if some of the flaws are disappointing I find that the good by far outweighs the bad

it's a shame that nobody seems to be making old school RPGs any more but that doesn't mean the modern style RPGs are bad, they're just different. (personally I think RPG has always been a misleading label anyway as most games require you to play a role, same with our beloved adventure game genre, most games are about adventures. however that doesn't mean they are RPGs or adventure games) ideally it'd be great to have games of both RPG styles being released, but developers and/or publishers seem convinced there's not a strong enough market for old school RPGs. perhaps they're right, it's hard to say, but there's no denying that there are some disappointed fans

that aside, I do enjoy the faster paced combat in DA2, but apart from a few boss fights most of the combat consists of fighting lots of weak mobs who attack in waves rather than smaller groups of tougher mobs. a mix of the two in different situations would've been preferable, but maybe that's just me

the writing is everything you'd expect from BioWare, the story and characters are all well written. even Isabella has more depth than is immediately apparent (and she does try to hide it, she wants to be considered shallow) and Merrill is just hilarious in some of her naive comments ("did I miss something dirty again?") there's also some genuinely tear-jerking moments and I'm not talking about the "oh this person I've known for 30 seconds just died" at the start (although it was sad to see Bethany die on my mage since I'd grown fond of her on my previous warrior playthrough)

the inability to change companion armour didn't annoy me nearly as much as I expected it to. their outfits suited them pretty well and did change over time, plus I have to admit in Origins Morrigan did look pretty odd in most of the other mage robes

my two biggest complaints about the game (the rest being rather minor) are firstly the timeskips. I can understand the reason for these but found that they skipped over too much, it would've been nice to have the option to play some of what happened during these. for example

Spoiler:

a few missions for the smugglers or mercenaries during Hawke's year of 'servitude'

my other complaint is spoilerific quest titles. it's rather annoying when you start a quest chain and the title gives away what will happen several quests into the chain

Spoiler:

a chain called Tranquility? and you have to rescue a mage? well I'm just so surprised to discover that he has been made Tranquil, I just did not see that coming at all...

really takes away some of the impact

but still, the good outweighs the bad, in my opinion at least. and I really love how a lot of decisions have unexpected consequences further into the game

Spoiler:

I even had Aveline complain to me that I'd sold her dead husbands shield years ago. love that they thought about that, so many games don't