1901

Yes, just about any AoE attack in DAO caused friendly fire, on all difficulties.

1902

Did anyone actually complain about that? I thought it was a highlight of the combat in DA:O. Cleansing someone of debuffs would also cleanse their buffs, and you had to be careful with area attack skills and spells. Pretty stupid change.

1903

Maybe it’s because I only played DA:O in isometric (or did so most of the time), but this camera feels down right claustrophobic and made it more difficult for me to do things like choose enemy targets, etc. It also made the screen feel more messy to me, with all the characters jumbled together. Playing the demo, even though the environments were basically corridors, it felt like I had to rotate the camera 360 degrees and switch between all the characters to get the same information I could get in DA:O more quickly from the pulled out camera and iso perspective.

Consoles I don’t think had friendly fire on normal.

1904

Consoles I don’t think had friendly fire on normal.

1905

Personally, the way the combat flows in DA2 makes me happy that FF is out except on nightmare. It’s too difficult to tell when and where the AOE effect of something like Miasmic Flask will be applied.

This is one way that the responsiveness of combat kind of fails; attack animations are instant and swift, but special powers still go through a bit of a warm-up animation before they happen. Combined with the speed of the combat (which I hate), you end up having to “lead” targets a bit.

One other thing I haven’t seen anyone mention is the sound of combat, which to me is outlandishly bad. It’s like a goddamned ginsu infomercial on cocaine. SHINK SHINK SHINKITY SHINK.

Oh and Flemeth? I so would.

1906

Not quite. From this wiki:


Friendly Fire Damage:

Difficulty         PC         360/PS3

Casual            0%          None
Normal           50%          None
Hardcore        100%           50%
Nightmare       100%          100%
1907

Kill her, you mean? I have to get this game (at some point) just to smack her around again.

Speaking of which, I hope they don’t cheapen the experience of fighting the high dragons. The cutscene in the demo lacked any impact at all. Compare that to the first time seeing one in DAO, where my eyes bugged out. It had better not be a victim of over-polished modern AAA game design, where there can be no peaks and troughs in the level of excitement and intensity.

1908

Ah, I guess I misremembered. I had friendly fire in my game, at least. And actually, that chart for the PC side seems perfectly reasonable to me. Why move FF to Nightmare-only?

1909

Flemeth is by far and away the most interesting character in the DA2 demo, and she kind of highlights just how shitty the writing/voice acting is for everyone else.

So no, I don’t mean kill her. Flemeth is the new Helen Mirren!

1910

Thoughts on the PC demo:

  1. It’s clearly not a demo that, er, demonstrates, a lot of the things I care about in an RPG. You don’t wander a town talking to people, you don’t have access to your inventory, can’t customize the way you look, etc. It’s not that those things aren’t in the game, they’re just skipped or disabled in the demo. In fact, they deliberately have a “and then you do a bunch of RP stuff and meet Isabella” scene thrown in, and they show you the disabled inventory screen, so I’m not too worried.

  2. My fears about the PC-ness of the title are alleviated. It looks and feels like a PC game interface. It’s leaner and slicker than DA:O’s interface, but it doesn’t just look like a console port.

  3. Combat feels faster and more fluid, and more dramatic by far. The opening scene is intentionally exaggerated, so you’re mowing down darkspawn with a giant-busted sister…then you replay the “real” scene at level 1 with a more modestly endowed sibling. Even so, the action feels more like action and less like sliding around tactical ability-turrets. Auto-attacking seemed enabled by default - if I right-click on something, I attack them over and over. Using the abilities feels more immediate. Pause and give orders works just fine. Combat is the area I was most worried would feel totally console-ified, and it doesn’t. It’s faster and more bombastic than DA:O, but it still feels like a PC RPG to me.

  4. I love a lot of the interface touches. Moving the character portraits, health, and stamina/mana bars to the lower left, for instance. During combat, I have my eyes down there to watch cooldowns on my spells/abilities, anyway. It actually makes sense to put the party status stuff there. I like the new tree designs for selecting abilities when you level up.

  5. Lots of data! yay! I love how you can see your damage, health, dps, crit %, and other stats change as right there in the attributes list as you assign attribute points. Tooltips for spells and abilities seem to provide plenty of detail about exactly what they do, how much damage, chance of stun, etc. I hope items have a similarly rich set of tooltip data, but with inventory disabled, I don’t know.

  6. It’s quite pretty. Environments, characters, enemies, are all considerably more detailed than DA:O. And the demo has the very highest graphics setting and a few of the DirectX 11 effects disabled, even. Flemeth looked awesome.

  7. Some of the dialog and scenes are a bit hokey. From the “they shall not have you” stuff to stabbing the corrupted Templar guy to end his life…somehow through his massive metal breastplate. I mean, take the armor off, or cut his throat, or something.

DAMN Isabella’s got a rack though. Jeebus. I mean, she was a busty saucy captain in DA:O, too. I like her updated look - looks more exotic, like someone who is the captain of a foreign ship. I think she has a different voice, too. All makes sense, since they’re upgrading her from a bit-player NPC to teach you a skill to a full party member and love interest.

Oddly enough, my girlfriend, who was big on DA:O, is less into this one, based on the demo. Again, the demo itself is missing a lot of the parts of the game she liked most about Dragon Age, and the choice of environments left her really cold. She really wanted to see some more beautiful scenery and stuff. She also found all the characters totally generic. “Isabella’s the only one I really like. Everyone else is just a cookie cutter medieval person”, she said.

Stuff the demo tells me nothing about:

  • Curious what the variety of locations and environments is like. The blighted land and generic city didn’t do anything for me in the demo.
  • Overworld travel. How will it be handled? How much freedom will I have to go to different places out of order and do what I want, where I want? How have they changed this from DA:O?
  • Crafting. It was kinda lame in DA:O, and I’d like to see it improved here. The demo’s ability trees didn’t seem to have crafting skills, or am I missing something?
1911

We can use each other, then. She’ll use me for her little quest, and I’ll use her for the voice acting and story. When we’ve each hit the end of our usefulness, we can fight to the death.

1912

So I could’ve been using Morrigan’s big AOE spells whenever I wanted in DA:O? Argh! I feel like a foolish fool!

1913

Did they remove the Arcane Warrior spec for mages? I was checking around the wiki pages and there is a new one called Force Mage but there is no info about it.

1914

Could’ve been tearin’ it up with the cone of cold!

The friendly fire thing in DA2 is weird, but I plan to play on high difficulty anyway, so it’s not a big deal to me. Still, I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t make it just a checkbox in the gameplay options.

1915

Yep, no more Arcane Warrior.

All Warrior attacks are AOE now too, which means there’s so much AOE going on that they decided to only put FF on Nightmare. People asked for it to be a toggle, but Bioware decided that would make selecting difficulty level too complicated and people wouldn’t understand why the game gets dramatically harder on Easy with FF on. That sounds ridiculous to you and me, but there will be a lot of people playing the game who are not people who generally play RPGs, so there may be something to it.

1916

Oh yeah, I thought I had read warrior sword-swinging was AoE now. Forgot to look for that when I played the demo.

1917

Angie–That makes sense, but the question is, is the game as difficult as DAO? Because I found DAO to be very challenging on Hardcore, and if DA2 is similar, I doubt I would want to play it on Nightmare. But I also don’t want to play it without FF, so that presents a bit of a dilemma…

When you say that Warrior attacks in DA2 have AoE, do you mean just the multiple-target ones like Whirlwind, or all Warrior attacks?

1918

One soul-sagging moment was when mighty Flemeth said ‘Perhaps you could make a delivery for me…’

1919

All warrior attacks unless specifically stated otherwise are AOE, including auto-attack. Two-handed warriors get a wider arc and more reach, but sword and board warriors also hit multiple targets with each swing.

I haven’t played the game so I can’t say how the difficult the levels are, but I am heading that Hardcore and Nightmare are comparable to DAO, while Normal is a bit easier.

1920

That was just Flemeth getting her coolface.jpg on.