Just finished Dragon Age 1 and I'm still recovering from the awesomeness of that game. Needless to say, I'm definately getting DA2.
Concerning the pics above; It's a shame there wont be any demon titties (or normal ones) in DA2. Not that nudity makes or breaks the game for me but even so I've never quite understood why excessive violence and gore is ok but not nipples / sex, both of which are probably more commonly occuring in gamers' lives than violence. Atleast put in a parental filter for us over 12 to toggle nudity on and off. It just adds to the experience in my opinion.
+1 to Witcher 2 for this by the way.
Seriously though, I've no issue with sex in games, its just another aspect of making character interaction more diverse. I just don't get why the cant design the women with the same rules as the men.
This turned out to be quite a review of the DA2 demo from my part. I'll just leave this giant wall of text here, shall I?
Words cannot describe how underwhelmed I am by the Dragon Age 2 demo. One can only hope that it doesn't reflect the overall quality of the finished product.
First impressions
Where to start.. Well, first of all they managed to bring it even further away from the whole Baldur's gate and D&D franchise in terms of both gameplay and visuals. Almost every environment in the demo consists of 3 shades of gray and the scale on props and the environment. One thing that bothered me in DA1 was that the environments in general felt small and not as immersive as the previous bioware games(most notably baldurs gate 1&2 but also mass effect). The scale feels off on a lot of buildings in the town, i doubt my character would be able to stand upright in any of those towers on the rooftops and the windows are like 15 cm wide. The world feels even real when there are no buildings or towers what so ever peeking up behind those few boxing you in.
In terms of map design they didn't even have the deceny to block and seal of pasages with rubble/carts/barrels/whatever you can imagine you'd find in a medieval/fantasy city, no, they just added iron bars wherever you weren't supposed to go. Really, Bioware?
Gameplay
I rather enjoyed the conversations between characters in cutscenes in Dragon Age 1 but the demo for DA2 had me shuddering. The conversation between the chantry girl and the dwarf in the chair is all fine and well if it weren't for the choppiness of the whole thing. I know that the ps3 and xbox are limited in terms of resources but WTF if they can run games like uncharted 2 and GoW3 at 30+ fps then they should be able to run this simple conversation without problems or loading screens. Instead were given;
girl - where do you think they went? loading for 0.3 sec
dwarf - you think i'd tell you? loading for 0.3 sec
ARRGHAJS#@HADFUA%&D%&%&"#/"(£@£HDHASHDA!!!"!"!"! It's an insult to my hardware that Bioware thinks my rig can't handle two characters (the girl and the dwarf), one prop (the chair) and a flat floor to be rendered without loading screens popping up here and there. Either that or there's something seriously messed up with their engine.
Almost after every single line or conversation in the demo there's some choppiness or delay and every cutscene or forced camera movement brings a loading screen that covers your screen and fades everything slightly to black.
Bioware seems to have given upp all notions of emulating Baldurs Gate and Icewind Dale in terms of gameplay despite labeling dragon age as a successor to those very games. Instead I'm given this;
"Watchout there's some enemies there!"
loading screen.
cutscene with enemies approaching. a 3 second battle follows.
loading screen.
"Phew, well now what? Ok, this way. Watchout there's some enemies there!"
loading screen.
cutscene with enemies approaching a 3 second battle follows.
loading screen.
OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN. I didn't think I could tire of doing anything in a 10 minute demo but holy mackarel was that annoying.
The constant fast paced action and 'room clearing' mentality of the demo doesn't fit this RPG at all in my opinion. It's more ok for a game such as Mass Effect I think because it has always been a more 3rd person action oriented RPG than Dragon Age with only 2 or 4 skills per character to keep track of but in Dragon age you might have 10 or 15 or even 20 different abilities as a mage.
Animation
The animation is crooked and wierd. All the female characters jerk their hips and bob their heads whenever they run or walk,it doesn't feel right at all. The running animation isn't synced with the current running speed so there's a certain float or glide whenever the characters move around. In the heat of battle (and gods know there's a lot of that) you'll probably wont notice but it's painfully obvious once the battle is done, just look at Flemeth in her cutscene (at first I disregarded it as intentional because she's an old woman and all that, but the player characters suffer from the same bad animations as she does).
I rather like the action and attack animations, they're suprisingly fluid considering how badly the walk and run loops look, but they would probably fit a more action packed franchise better such as Darksiders or God of War. In perspective even those animations would be tiresome to look at considering they're a lot more eye catching and impressive than the animations for special attacks and spells. I mean, who does a double backflip and throw their staff around like a ninja on drugs just to perform their most basic of attacks once? The Hurlocks in the Demo run like crabs and it's a shame that there's no offset or delay in their animations because every time they come at you their animations play perfectly synchronized and it just ends up looking wierd and robotic.
Models and Art
I think the characters especially in the cutscene with the dwarf and the girl look quite good but the pixel density varies quite a lot between characters and props which is a shame. The only let down was the tanned chick you meet up with in the second part of the demo. I can't understand how Bioware decides to cut nudity and the more mature elements of the game out and then put something like this in the game. Sex and relations ships and even nudity can be done tastefully which Mass effect and dragon age 1 showed us to some extent but her character design just mocks the intelligence of players and women worldwide. Does anyone seriously think that looks good? Apparently it's ok to have enourmous breasts and a butt that sticks out so far from her back that you could start treating her as a piece of furniture with all her racks and angles.
Way to go to cement the the notion that the industry is juvenile and sexistic, Bioware. I hope the shipped game comes with a filter to normalize the character design but I somehow doubt it.
The narrative stylized movies are quite alright. Seen it done before in other games and movies but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Gui
The gui really clashes with the fantasy feel of the genre. Dragon age 1 did it better and I'm struck dumbfounded why they've chosen to take the gui in this direction.
Have we really gone from this, hand drawn with some lore and plenty of info;
to icons that look more like they belong on a fridge as consumer information than in a game;
I dislike almost every icon and piece of gui I've seen so far (can't really complain about the pause menu ui, the ui you first see when you start up the game and the mouse icon but other than those..).
It feels to me as if bioware have opted to go for the easiest possible solution for the gui. Every icon is a square on a black background. No ornamentation or love spent on anything gui related other than the few exceptions I mentioned earlier. Again, these kind of stylished techy icons work well in a game such as Mass effect or Dead Space where you could imagine it being a small icon on a hud or monitor but not so when the story is set in some medieval fantasy world then it just acts as a huge immersion breaker.
I'm not sure if this is a bug or it actually is supposed to work this way. Whenever you want to access the character pages for leveling up and such it access the character's you have selected page rather than the portrait you click on. While in the character page you still see the other party members portraits as you would imagine you would in a rpg based around managing several party members, however selecting any of the other characters closes the character page and brings the player out to the action again. I don't know if you have to double click them the portraits or what that's about by it was something I noticed and eventually was annoyed by.
I also dislike the new mass effectish dialog circle but I guess that's more a question of personal taste than genuinely bad design so I'll let that one pass.
Suffice to say, I've hardly ever seen any game so totally mess up their graphic user interfaces before. It leads me to believe that it was outsourced to someone who never got to see the game he was making them for.
Sound
The sounds and music was ok. I didn't really pay much attention to it so it can't have been that bad.
Tech
I have a quite high end pc and I'm yet to come across a game I cannot max (will it be you, crysis 2?) so I expected to be able to run DA2 on maxed settings without problems but the framerate is suprisingly choppy at times and with dx11 there's graphic errors all over the place (ground is splattered with tiles without textures and other meshes flicker as I move around).
Conclusion;
Dragon age has never been further from Baldur's Gate for me. I was hopeful after finishing the first game yesterday that Bioware might take what was good from DA1 and bring it into their next game and just improve on what was less good but so far I haven't seen anything I'd call an improvment. The game feels dumbed down to fit some audience that obviously doesn't include me anymore.
I hope and pray that I'm wrong because I quite liked DA1 and I'd love to visit that world again but the demo have left me wondering if I ever will.
I start to realise why those two statues you see were face palming when you start a new game.
I don't know about you guys but I didn't experience any loading delays when I played the demo on the PC. There were some slit delays on the 360 but nothing to complain about. IMO I glad that they're diverging from Baldur's Gate. I'd rather have DA O + 2 be good on it's own merits and not be compared to an old game that was made over a decade ago. Nostalgia is a crazy bitch and things always seem so much better when we were younger.
Isn't the beginning of the game supposed to be somewhat exaggerated? I mean the dwarf is apparently making things up thus making the characters look more overdone(Hawke has some scar, looks tougher, the female mage who's his sister or something has a larger bust and they both have loads of more skills).
I thought the first version of what happened according to the dwarf is supposed to be a joke, having it look like Ninety Nine Nights 2 or something. Perhaps they did it as a joke towards all the people who criticized ME2 for all it's RPG element removal.
Also I think Isabella is mid-eastern and not black.
And;
I love the storytelling. Interviewing the dwarf to jump around story plot points is a great idea that Assasin's Creed used to great effect (and skips the drudgery of traveling/camping/etc)
Isn't this specific to the demo? I mean skipping ahead so you can see different parts of the game?
I believe that is correct, Goraaz. The jumping around is definitely overdone in the demo, as in, you skip a great deal of time. I'm assuming (hoping) that there isn't this much skipping around, etc, in the full game. The Dwarf and his storytelling is how the story is presented, however, in the full version as well.
Right?
I had these daft pauses everytime the camera changed aswell. oddly it didnt happen on my first run. only runs after than. It's exceptionally distracting.
Tried the demo, first time ever playing a dragon age game. I was pretty disappointed. Didn't think the art was all too hot either. Just not for me I guess.
Game is good, I had fun, but it really felt like an expansion pack they decided to make into a full game through copious grinding. I see what they want to set up for DA3, but they could have done it in a much better way.
I like it a lot, but it's fairly obvious this was rushed along. Dev Cycle was 1 year, about.
Would have gladly waited another year or two for them to make this game what it truly deserved to be. Still, enjoyable, anticipating DLC and DA3.
Replies
OK, I found the tooltip, but you can't really access any of the dx11 settings and I found this.
Which pair?
does it matter? they look more like holes than tits.
I think awakenings had it beat
Concerning the pics above; It's a shame there wont be any demon titties (or normal ones) in DA2. Not that nudity makes or breaks the game for me but even so I've never quite understood why excessive violence and gore is ok but not nipples / sex, both of which are probably more commonly occuring in gamers' lives than violence. Atleast put in a parental filter for us over 12 to toggle nudity on and off. It just adds to the experience in my opinion.
+1 to Witcher 2 for this by the way.
Seriously though, I've no issue with sex in games, its just another aspect of making character interaction more diverse. I just don't get why the cant design the women with the same rules as the men.
Sometimes life isn't fair.
edit: oh wait, they already did in dragon age.
You will be missed!!
we can only hope
Bioware RPG's aren't for me, I guess.
Words cannot describe how underwhelmed I am by the Dragon Age 2 demo. One can only hope that it doesn't reflect the overall quality of the finished product.
First impressions
Where to start.. Well, first of all they managed to bring it even further away from the whole Baldur's gate and D&D franchise in terms of both gameplay and visuals. Almost every environment in the demo consists of 3 shades of gray and the scale on props and the environment. One thing that bothered me in DA1 was that the environments in general felt small and not as immersive as the previous bioware games(most notably baldurs gate 1&2 but also mass effect). The scale feels off on a lot of buildings in the town, i doubt my character would be able to stand upright in any of those towers on the rooftops and the windows are like 15 cm wide. The world feels even real when there are no buildings or towers what so ever peeking up behind those few boxing you in.
In terms of map design they didn't even have the deceny to block and seal of pasages with rubble/carts/barrels/whatever you can imagine you'd find in a medieval/fantasy city, no, they just added iron bars wherever you weren't supposed to go. Really, Bioware?
Gameplay
I rather enjoyed the conversations between characters in cutscenes in Dragon Age 1 but the demo for DA2 had me shuddering. The conversation between the chantry girl and the dwarf in the chair is all fine and well if it weren't for the choppiness of the whole thing. I know that the ps3 and xbox are limited in terms of resources but WTF if they can run games like uncharted 2 and GoW3 at 30+ fps then they should be able to run this simple conversation without problems or loading screens. Instead were given;
girl - where do you think they went? loading for 0.3 sec
dwarf - you think i'd tell you? loading for 0.3 sec
ARRGHAJS#@HADFUA%&D%&%&"#/"(£@£HDHASHDA!!!"!"!"! It's an insult to my hardware that Bioware thinks my rig can't handle two characters (the girl and the dwarf), one prop (the chair) and a flat floor to be rendered without loading screens popping up here and there. Either that or there's something seriously messed up with their engine.
Almost after every single line or conversation in the demo there's some choppiness or delay and every cutscene or forced camera movement brings a loading screen that covers your screen and fades everything slightly to black.
Bioware seems to have given upp all notions of emulating Baldurs Gate and Icewind Dale in terms of gameplay despite labeling dragon age as a successor to those very games. Instead I'm given this;
"Watchout there's some enemies there!"
loading screen.
cutscene with enemies approaching.
a 3 second battle follows.
loading screen.
"Phew, well now what? Ok, this way. Watchout there's some enemies there!"
loading screen.
cutscene with enemies approaching
a 3 second battle follows.
loading screen.
OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN. I didn't think I could tire of doing anything in a 10 minute demo but holy mackarel was that annoying.
The constant fast paced action and 'room clearing' mentality of the demo doesn't fit this RPG at all in my opinion. It's more ok for a game such as Mass Effect I think because it has always been a more 3rd person action oriented RPG than Dragon Age with only 2 or 4 skills per character to keep track of but in Dragon age you might have 10 or 15 or even 20 different abilities as a mage.
Animation
The animation is crooked and wierd. All the female characters jerk their hips and bob their heads whenever they run or walk,it doesn't feel right at all. The running animation isn't synced with the current running speed so there's a certain float or glide whenever the characters move around. In the heat of battle (and gods know there's a lot of that) you'll probably wont notice but it's painfully obvious once the battle is done, just look at Flemeth in her cutscene (at first I disregarded it as intentional because she's an old woman and all that, but the player characters suffer from the same bad animations as she does).
I rather like the action and attack animations, they're suprisingly fluid considering how badly the walk and run loops look, but they would probably fit a more action packed franchise better such as Darksiders or God of War. In perspective even those animations would be tiresome to look at considering they're a lot more eye catching and impressive than the animations for special attacks and spells. I mean, who does a double backflip and throw their staff around like a ninja on drugs just to perform their most basic of attacks once? The Hurlocks in the Demo run like crabs and it's a shame that there's no offset or delay in their animations because every time they come at you their animations play perfectly synchronized and it just ends up looking wierd and robotic.
Models and Art
I think the characters especially in the cutscene with the dwarf and the girl look quite good but the pixel density varies quite a lot between characters and props which is a shame. The only let down was the tanned chick you meet up with in the second part of the demo. I can't understand how Bioware decides to cut nudity and the more mature elements of the game out and then put something like this in the game. Sex and relations ships and even nudity can be done tastefully which Mass effect and dragon age 1 showed us to some extent but her character design just mocks the intelligence of players and women worldwide. Does anyone seriously think that looks good? Apparently it's ok to have enourmous breasts and a butt that sticks out so far from her back that you could start treating her as a piece of furniture with all her racks and angles.
Way to go to cement the the notion that the industry is juvenile and sexistic, Bioware. I hope the shipped game comes with a filter to normalize the character design but I somehow doubt it.
The narrative stylized movies are quite alright. Seen it done before in other games and movies but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Gui
The gui really clashes with the fantasy feel of the genre. Dragon age 1 did it better and I'm struck dumbfounded why they've chosen to take the gui in this direction.
Have we really gone from this, hand drawn with some lore and plenty of info;
to icons that look more like they belong on a fridge as consumer information than in a game;
I dislike almost every icon and piece of gui I've seen so far (can't really complain about the pause menu ui, the ui you first see when you start up the game and the mouse icon but other than those..).
It feels to me as if bioware have opted to go for the easiest possible solution for the gui. Every icon is a square on a black background. No ornamentation or love spent on anything gui related other than the few exceptions I mentioned earlier. Again, these kind of stylished techy icons work well in a game such as Mass effect or Dead Space where you could imagine it being a small icon on a hud or monitor but not so when the story is set in some medieval fantasy world then it just acts as a huge immersion breaker.
I'm not sure if this is a bug or it actually is supposed to work this way. Whenever you want to access the character pages for leveling up and such it access the character's you have selected page rather than the portrait you click on. While in the character page you still see the other party members portraits as you would imagine you would in a rpg based around managing several party members, however selecting any of the other characters closes the character page and brings the player out to the action again. I don't know if you have to double click them the portraits or what that's about by it was something I noticed and eventually was annoyed by.
I also dislike the new mass effectish dialog circle but I guess that's more a question of personal taste than genuinely bad design so I'll let that one pass.
Suffice to say, I've hardly ever seen any game so totally mess up their graphic user interfaces before. It leads me to believe that it was outsourced to someone who never got to see the game he was making them for.
Sound
The sounds and music was ok. I didn't really pay much attention to it so it can't have been that bad.
Tech
I have a quite high end pc and I'm yet to come across a game I cannot max (will it be you, crysis 2?) so I expected to be able to run DA2 on maxed settings without problems but the framerate is suprisingly choppy at times and with dx11 there's graphic errors all over the place (ground is splattered with tiles without textures and other meshes flicker as I move around).
Conclusion;
Dragon age has never been further from Baldur's Gate for me. I was hopeful after finishing the first game yesterday that Bioware might take what was good from DA1 and bring it into their next game and just improve on what was less good but so far I haven't seen anything I'd call an improvment. The game feels dumbed down to fit some audience that obviously doesn't include me anymore.
I hope and pray that I'm wrong because I quite liked DA1 and I'd love to visit that world again but the demo have left me wondering if I ever will.
I start to realise why those two statues you see were face palming when you start a new game.
I thought the first version of what happened according to the dwarf is supposed to be a joke, having it look like Ninety Nine Nights 2 or something. Perhaps they did it as a joke towards all the people who criticized ME2 for all it's RPG element removal.
Also I think Isabella is mid-eastern and not black.
And; Isn't this specific to the demo? I mean skipping ahead so you can see different parts of the game?
Right?
I think I'm gonna cry.
::tears of joy::
I've just finished it and I have to say its the weakest Bioware game I've ever played.
It really felt hurried and shallow
like the Benzin sig
Would have gladly waited another year or two for them to make this game what it truly deserved to be. Still, enjoyable, anticipating DLC and DA3.