Play Test: Dragon Age 2 PS3 Demo

I finally got my hands on the demo for Dragon Age 2 on the PS3, EA and Bioware's latest RPG, and I've written here a quick rundown of the demo itself, and a glimpse of the game's various improvements from its predecessor, Dragon Age: Origins. 

If you look closely, the dragon wings actually trace silhouettes of people.

Upon starting the demo via "New Game", you'll be choosing your character's class and gender. Your choice of classes are as follows: Mage, Warrior and Rogue. After you've chosen your class and gender, you will be taken into the intro scene, wherein a Dwarven character is being dragged in for questioning by a Chantry Seeker named Cassandra. Wanting to know more about a certain "Champion", she asks the Dwarf to tell her what he knows about this Champion. In Dragon Age 2, you'll be playing as Hawke, either a male or a female, the supposed Champion, who rose to power starting out as a refugee from destruction of Lothering (an event that occurred during DA Orgins time line.)

One very noticeable difference from its predecessor is how the story is told in the game. In Dragon Age 2, the story is told in a framed narrative style, in other words, a story is told within a story. The Dwarf character, later revealed in the demo as Varric, one of the Champion's companions, serves as the narrator for the story.

After the quick intro from Varric, you will be taken to the gameplay itself. Combat is now much faster, and much more fluid than Origins. No longer will you be awkwardly sidestepping around enemies to gain that additional backstab damage. Movement and combat are now seamlessly executed in Dragon Age 2, while still bearing the same mechanics such as stamina, health and mana maintenance and the tactical aspect of the game. Heck, warriors are now as fast as the rouges in Origins even with giant double handed swords, and rogues now are just insanely fast!

Another significant change I noticed was that dialogues are now selected via a radial menu, a la Mass Effect, another Bioware game. Each dialogue option has an icon representing the intent of the dialogue, such as aggression and sarcasm. Mass Effect's radial pause menu is also brought into this game.

Graphics have been improved and the visual art style was quite different from Origins. Character faces seem to be more detailed now, however, I seem to notice that characters sometimes tend to feel lifeless and dull with their lack of expression in some crucial scenes and dialogue, which is also quite apparent in both Mass Effect and DA Origins. Darkspawn are now rendered differently. Aside from that, each race is modeled differently to accurately distinguish each race, as the human, qunari and elven races are almost identical to one another with only a few noticeable differences in the previous game. Environmental textures have noticeable improvements in terms of details, and the backdrop are kind of breathtaking, as it features the desolation and destruction left behind by the Darkspawn in Lothering. Rendering is smooth, and FPS (frames per second) is mostly consistent, but I did experience a few graphical and FPS hiccups.

Leveling the characters are somehow similar to Origins, but with more drastic improvements on how skills are developed. Skills are now developed via skill trees instead of a linear path. This gives players options on how they want to develop their character. Aside from this, some skills of support characters are unlocked depending on their disposition towards Hawke. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to fully explore the skill trees as most of the skills are locked, and unavailable in the demo.

Is this the new ground and pound?!

Dragon Age 2 seem to have improved a lot on the unpleasant quirks that DA Origins had, while retaining the fun and epic appeal of the franchise. (Persistent gore anyone?) I'm definitely looking forward to playing this game when it comes out March 8, 2011. Dragon Age 2 will be available for the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. By the way, if you can, download the demo for this game and Bioware might just throw in a few freebies for this game when it comes out once the download count reaches a million. More info on Bioware's Dragon Age 2 forum site.