Gameguru Mania

[ggrobot]

The Dragon Age website now offers downloads of
the promised playable demo for Dragon
Age II, BioWare\'s RPG sequel. In the demo, players will
venture through the game\'s prologue, choosing from three different
character classes. They\'ll also learn more about Hawke and hone their
skills and abilities that

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Source: GGMania headlines
GGMania.com - Daily Gaming and Tech news

[Koogle]

The outdoor environment sucked..is the rest of game like that, complaints it were heard when they first released screens/video of development.. it look like just blocking in, yet this is final stuff.. I've seen more interesting and skyboxes in 10year old games.

I think the min requirements were targeted at the wii.

Can't stand the characters, the ridiculous attacking animations, bah

Everything about the UI sucks bad, they've done nothing to improve it, would have been better just leaving it alone.

Some of the player attacking/casting is stupid.. one example is spells that need to cast on ground.. the AoE radius will show on the ground where mouse is, but if you want to cast and another character/npc gets infront of the pointer it will block casting ..that is just dumb.

No way of seeing enemy hp unless they are being attacked.

Its just stupid shit design all round... I should actually stop calling these games consoletarded, because I don't even think they are designed for any intuitive experience especially for players with limited controller input.. level up abilities screen what joke.. casting bar item descriptions bottom far right of screen(instead leftside), player hp/mana character bars bottom left instead at the top...

Really its all just a bit hard to take this game as a followup from DA1, what were the improvements, just dumb changes that make it worse...the initial character selection screen is a joke.. they all look the fucking same. Its making question if I even liked the original.. I thought I did, but this demo of DA2 makes question if I did at all.

[JamieKirby]

Just don't see it as a followup.

10 year old games? you serious, cause to me, they looked pretty good, but i am not the elitist gamer type or bitchy about graphics.

The only downsides to this demo is the lack of inventory, difficulty setting and the lack of character customization, none of these would ruin the demo, probably bioware getting lazy.

Overall, the demo looks good, runs good and is fun to play, for the most part, just wish there was one time options for difficulty settings every time you started a new game.

[psolord]

I'm afraid I'm gonna have to agree with Koogle somewhat. The game seems quite inferior to its predecessor.

I cannot know what the final product will look like, but they shouldn't have released a demo in this condition.

DX11 is there but runs like 20fps even on a GTX 570. Same on the 5850. Textures are OKish, but model complexity is totally fucked up. DX11 does not add one bit in that department. Maybe it's just not ready yet, so let's give it the benefit of the doubt.

In DX9 it runs like hell, but the settings are locked to medium! Oh really? So all people with non DX11 hardware are supposed to bend over and take it, while their hardware can perfectly run those graphics? DAO1 looked much better in its DX9 form. How can they do such things? How can they be so shameless?

At least on the sound department things are looking good. The music is solid and the voice acting is decent.

As for the demo itself, why on earth did they have to cut the inventory? Why on earth didn't they allow saving? I mean seriously, would these hurt in any way? The battles are faster paced, which is OK in my book.

All in all, I am not impressed one bit.

[JamieKirby]

I am thinking the release version of the full game will be more better, the demo is mostly meant to show off the combat and conversations, not the beauty.

[Sabot]

What i nice improvement over combat from Dragon Age 1.
I like the fact that you no longer have to jump into an ally to use their specific powers. (or rely on scripts) By pausing the game mid combat you can select their icon and select a power and target, then press space to enable it to be played out by your whole party.
As JamieKirby has said, it's a taster and i'm into a story and game mechanics rather than quad bloody graphic card sparkles!
I mean bloody hell it plays on our Acer Aspire pentium T4400, Radeon 4570 512mb, 4gb DDR3 laptop in medium resolution and smooth framerate.
Not bad seeing as the whole laptop would cost the same price as ONE CPU to run Crysis in highly recommended settings!!..... maybe