That’s not the case at all. Dragon Age was in development on the PC for years. The game was formally announced in 2004 for the PC only, but they’d been working on it for a while prior to that. It wasn’t a matter of coding a different camera for the PC. The camera was always like that since the beginning; the console versions were ports that work began on after the PC was wrapped up. They stripped that camera functionality out.
I played the demo a little this morning and was unable to find any option to turn off “Push X every second to auto attack” mode on the ps3. It is possible i missed it, but i don’t think it is there.
I played warrior and it seemed better done than mage. The streamlined hack and slash gameplay seems to appeal to the warriors style of fighting more than mage. It was nice that mages have scripted finishing moves now, but sometimes the old classics of jumping on an ogre and stabbing it in the eye with a huge, claymore style sword are nice too.
Hehe, me too! And “tactical position” in this case means “make the chick with a shield tank the ogre” and pausing was used to switch my dude between the trash mobs (didn’t really need to pause but it felt right to pause :)). Mage handled herself nicely by spamming fireballs and wand auto-attack, I had to move her 3 steps away from the ogre once though (just so I could see her better). Very deep and satisfying experience! :)
PC demo:
Wow, that is all I can say. This is exactly what the marketing of the original Dragon Age promised us, the marketing we all thought was horrible and over the top. So they had time to implement what they just pretended to have in the first one. So bad.
I imagine the timeline went like this:
Bioware works for years on kick ass Dragon Age game. EA buys them, but comes in too late to fuck up vision of game. Instead, resorts to over the top, juvenile marketing in an attempt to sell something the game as something it was not.
Then, the next dev phase starts. Now EA is in from the beginning and has say in how the game works. So they make Dragon Age 2 match the mother effing marketing they had for DA1. Wow.
I am really really glad they released a PC demo so I can know for sure how much they messed this game up. I do not know who was making design decisions (all just talking out of my ass above of course), but it definitely was not the same people that made the first one.
Dragon Age 1 (on the PC) == tactical battles with a very bioware story line and story options. Poor item system. Plus, EXTREME MARKETING!
Dragon Age 2 (on the PC) == Someone got their God of War in my Dragon Age. If this game had even been called something else, as it is obviously not related to the original except in name, I might be more forgiving. But this is Dragon Age lite. Dragon Age beat 'em up.
PASS PASS and DOUBLE PASS.
EAWare, congrats on being able to make a game that matched your extreme marketing blitz! Too bad that was not the game anyone was asking for…
You are saying that last bit tongue in cheek, right?
Is the interface different on consoles or something? PC demo gameplay seemed very similar to DA1 to me.
Sarkus
2008
So you played the easiest part of the demo and then quit? Good to know it wasn’t hard for you . . .
It’s not in the demo but they say its in the full game.
Bjbrains point about the difficulty level needs to be considered before making big judgements about difficulty. The demo is locked on normal, which as Laidlaw has said is supposed to be for people who prefer to mostly control their Hawke and let the AI handle other party members. People who want to manage every party member and action are not going to find combat challenging until they move up in difficulty.
And the friendly fire thing has been covered before, but to repeat it does kick in on hard (50%) and nightmare (100%).
MattKeil
2009
Speak for yourself. Just based on the demo, the presentation is light years beyond the first and the gameplay is far closer to what I want out of a modern RPG. This is what the game should have been the first time around. All we need are some interesting character arcs and interactions, which will be much easier to accomplish now that the protagonist actually talks, and the game is golden. Keeping my preorder.
Murbella
2010
I never thought it would point it out in a topic about a bioware game, but every developer who has released a demo has claimed that there is a mystical internal version of the game that fixes every problem in the demo and adds tons of features. As we all know, more often than not this turns out to be… less than true.
I want to give bioware the benefit of the doubt because of their record, but it is hard given the very obvious direction they seem to be going with DA2.
Seconded! I think the new demo is a massive improvement over the “press A while you eat a sandwich” first game.
To each their own and all of that.
Myself, I am really glad I did not preorder. So many things wrong with that demo it is not even funny. From the buttons not working (did anyone have to click Back three or four times for it to go back) or the horrible UI (yes, the original UI did not have enough empty black area in it!), to the gameplay just being so consolized it is not even funny. At this point, I would almost rather play it on the console, so I could hit the button over and over and play DA2:God of War instead of whatever shotty system they have put on the PC.
Not impressed in so many ways.
Sarkus
2013
Controversy aside, they are at over 800,000 on demo downloads and the preorder is #2 on Steam for sales.
TimJames
2014
I commented on this before, but I hope they make it extremely clear (perhaps with some tooltips at startup) and not just a side comment during a bearded man interview. They did the same thing to the difficulty levels in ME2. I had no clue I was supposed to play on hardcore for the normal gaming enthusiast experience. Once I switched a third of the way through, it made the game so much better.
I rarely play anything but normal my first time through a game, but Bioware uses those conventions differently. I think their normal is for people who want to get the combat over quickly so they can listen to the dialogue and sex people up. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but they need to make it more clear.
Murbella
2015
Because “Press A every second to auto attack” is such an improvement…
Weird question - is there an .ini file to mess around with the friendly fire? Quite honestly, I like the idea of having to worry about toasting my teammates but I don’t generally care for amped up difficulty levels in most other respects.
Of course! :0 I should have added “/sarcasm” or something.
Care to provide a link? IIRC the only post in this thread that was covering friendly fire percentages you list was about DAO, not DA2.
On the other hand, there were multiple posts stating that DA2 will not have friendly fire on Normal or Hard, only on Nightmare.
Who knows what’s correct though. But it’s not even the point. With a pace as fast as in DA2, friendly fire will be nothing more than exercise in frustration. It’s not just a matter of flipping a switch “on/off”, the entire game’s combat design needs to be developed to support FF properly. That’s why FF is not implemented as a simple switch in the Options screen (shouldn’t be that hard to do technically) and that’s probably why it’s only available on Nightmare difficulty setting.
MattKeil
2018
Yup. It is. More control over my character’s direct actions is a good thing.
zengonzo
2019
You mistake me. Difficulty wasn’t the problem - it was tedium. I play a number of games which are easy, but more interesting.
I played up until you get the weepy Templar and his girlfriend, and by the next cutscene I just wasn’t interested in continuing. Neither the story nor the mechanics could make up one for the other.
I’m still holding out for the choices and story to be potentially a rent-maybe-own, but not for this demo, certainly.
Maybe I ought to try out the PC version.
Sarkus
2020
Yeah, looks like I was mistaken on it being included in hard, though I thought I’d read that somewhere. Looking around it seems confirmed that it’s nightmare difficulty only.
One of the devs said they can’t offer it as a “toggle” option because it greatly impacts difficulty.
