So the highly anticipated and much hyped follow up to Dragon Age: Origins is just around the corner and Bioware released the demo a couple of days ago. I got my grubby virtual hands on the demo yesterday and gave it a spin. I must say I was rather underwhelmed. Granted all character customization and a bunch of in-game options and features were locked in the demo so I couldn't experience the full spectrum of what it had to offer.

The biggest thing that put me off was that apparently the camera always stays behind you and you can only zoom in or out some. Maybe I just didn't find how to do it but there seemed no way to zoom the camera out to the isometric/overhead view. This made the game play a lot more like an Action RPG rather than a Tactical RPG (like DA:O, Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gate, etc...). I could still pause and plan strategy a bit but without being able to go isometric or overhead view it became really tedious to figure out where the enemies are and plan strategy. Now don't get me wrong I don't have anything against Action RPGs, heck I loved The Witcher and that was an Action RPG, but it's just not what I expected and was looking for out of DA 2. Furthermore you basically selected your enemy, pushed a key any your character would continue attacking the enemy by himself (takes the "Action" out of Action RPG a bit) leaving you to either twiddle your thumbs or hit hotkeys for your special abilities/attacks then waiting for them to cool down. It basically played like World of Warcraft.

Now I'm not saying the demo was bad. It looked nice, it had solid voice acting, the storytelling was fine, the graphics were really pretty... It had that whole feel of quality that you'd expect out of Bioware. I just didn't have much fun playing through the demo (by contrast I enjoyed the bejesus out of playing Venetica despite the glitches, spotty voice acting and dialogue, and other shortcomings the game had). I guess I just expected more. Bioware had set the bar so high that sometimes it creates unrealistic expectations. I'll probably still get it sooner or later and hopefully the whole game with all the options and functionality (and hopefully you can indeed go into isometric view and I just didn't find out how to do it) unlocked will be more fun but I'm just not as amped up to get it like I was before.

That sounds disappointing. I'm gonna take a look at it, anyhow. I was hoping the new one might have some more options... more spells, more combat options, a larger variety of armor and weapons... Dragon Age was fun, just limited. I've also been sort of hoping that the DA2 does not get more excessive with the cinematics.

I'm downloading the demo now. Thanks, Sird.

Personally, Witcher II is the only big title I've been looking forward to . . . and even there I'll probably wait until the price drops to $30 and the bugs have been patched.

So I played through the DA 2 demo again and I've softened my stance on the game a bit. Partly I guess it's because it's a game from Bioware, one of my all-time favorite companies, plus I can see all the effort, polish, and professionalism that went into the game. Still the lack of isometric view irks me. The camera angle(s) you are stuck with just SCREAM Action RPG, but you can't play the game that way, you'll get slaughtered if you do. The battles are way too chaotic, there are too many allies and WAY too many enemies. You have to approach the game like a Tactical RPG. I've grown more accustomed to the camera angle and controls but it's still tedious to rotate the camera around, assessing the battlefield, with each party member to formulate a strategy. If you could only zoom out to isometric or overhead view you could do all that strategizing (which is not only helpful but essential) in one shot without constantly having to rotate the camera around to get a look at the entire battlefield. One simple omission makes the game 300% more tedious than it needs to be.

Otherwise the game is great. The production value is excellent. Not quite at the Mass Effect level, much like DA:O which had great production value but again not at the Mass Effect level, but at least at the level of most AAA titles. Slick, well animated cutscenes, solid voice acting, cool special attacks/abilities. It just kills me that a really small and simple omission, not being able to go into isometric view, makes the game so much more tedious than it needed to be. The instinct is to blame it on laziness/cutting corners, but the game is so polished and professional that lack of professionalism isn't plausible. Bioware I guess just made a consciouss effort to do away with isometric/overhead view and I can't for the life of me figure out why. It's such a simple subtraction but it takes away so much. Ugh.

On a different note, somebody at Bioware has got themselves a serious big breast fetish. Holy smokes Hawke's sister's bosom is freakin' GARGANTUAN! Isabella is pretty much in the same boat. I kinda feel bad for these ladies as they must have back problems from straining to keep upright and not fall on their face. I can't imagine they had breast implants in that world but maybe they had magical breast augmentation? Let me put it this way; picture Salma Hayek catching a glimpse of Hawke's sister's cleavage and instinctively yelling "DAYUM!!!"

Strangely, Bethany's bosom actually shrinks a bit after Varric stops exaggerating so much.

But yes, Isabella was almost funny in her appearance.

And what of Hawke's mother? A grey haired woman with a rather massive chest? Geez, Bioware.

I know that violence and sex sells, and it's what the people want, but I feel like my intelligence and maturity are being insulted a bit in that demo.

Ditto on Sis's bosom

Anyhow, having gone through the game (only once, since saving/quicksave and loading/quickload were disabled ), here's my quick assessment:

+ The minimap! Gorgeous. Extraordinarily well-designed & well-integrated.

- When you move the camera up into isometric view (no overhead, if I remember correctly), it always reverts to behind-view when you move. A variation on what Sird was saying.
- The whole superhuman leap-into-battle thing? Eh... no. Please, no.
- The cartoony pause-after-every goddamn-lightning-quick-swing styling? Are our characters robots? Hell... this is annoying.
- I'm not so sure I'm down with the whole cutting-people-in-half-thing. If there's such a thing as 'too much persistent gore', I think maybe this qualifies. I know there've been fans wanting more decapitations, and I think someone made a mod to increase the number of decapitations . . . perhaps Bioware has been listening to them?
- Too much action. Too much fighting, no atmosphere, no interaction with anyone/anything, no perceivable story except "Let's get out of here!" and "The order dictates!"/"You leave my sister alone!" (And how quickly Unreasonable Templar dies without our getting a chance to do the honors... sigh... .)
- All this 1v500 superhuman hack&slash, through hordes and hordes of darkspawn, SWISH! SWISH! SWISH! -LEAP! -JUMP! SWISH! SWISH! -LEAP! -JUMP! SWISH! SWISH! SWISH! SWISH! SWISH! is really, really, really boring.
- It's boring.

Honestly... I really, really hope that this is just a combat demo. If the whole game turns out to be Bioware's answer to Diablo... I won't bother buying it.

...All that said, I was thinking of going back into it last night... decided I really didn't want to. Does that say it all?

The breasts were actually a clever story tool, it had everything to do with the dwarf exagerating. I have yet to play a bioware game without a good story, so I'm ok with what I saw in the demo.

If that were the case then it would have made sense to have Bethany with the ginormous "I've never had to pay for a drink at the local tavern" breasts in the brief and exaggerated first story where Hawke & sis are uber-powerful and have her with more reasonable proportions in the second "true" story, yet she still had the massive breasts in that story. Oh I have no doubt the story will be good but it was the gameplay itself that put me off.

...Don't know why I didn't realize at first that, yes, the reason for the superhuman-jump-into-battle stuff and the slice-all-your-surrounding-opponents-in-half-with-one-swing move was because this was part of the dwarf recounting the
'legendary' version. Silly me.

I do have to give BioWare credit: it is an interesting way to begin a game.

...But I did replay the demo, and... well... it's still boring. I'm supposing the game picks up when you finally get through all the action and the 'actual' story begins.

Yes, precisely! I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought so.

I mean, at first, I thought the combat was really cool--exhilarating, even. But after fighting the same damn mobs spawning (pardon the pun) again and again, it got old fast. Part of the problem was my demo kept crashing, so I had to fight the same battles again and again and again.

If I buy the game, it'll be a little while before I do (I'll wait until the price falls to $35), so there'll be plenty of time for me to learn what the game's like, watch video clips and such . . . but I suspect I'll end up buying it. The tricky collaboration between dwarf-recounts-his-story and the gameplay, at the very beginning, bodes well. I've never seen this before (although, granted, I'm not much of a gamer and haven't played a whole lot of games... but you all knew that).

Rune mentioned the writing strength/dedication of BioWare as a sort of guard against passing judgment too soon, I guess . . . I dunno, while I'm there with him in spirit, I guess I just don't have that much faith. Maybe it's jadedness, but I've seen too many reputable artists devolve their art into crap too many times, and we're not even talking an artist here, but a corporation. Corporations are only in the business to make money, so... call it cynicism, jadedness, whatever, but I'm still waiting for BioWare to drop the writing and just go with action and graphics.

Really, all it really takes is new management.

Still, despite the actiony demo, that little "I want the real story, not the legend!" play is promising. That says more to me than anything else in the demo.

(Well... actually it's really the only thing that says anything to me, in the demo.)

Oh... and it just wouldn't be right not to mention that, however big her breasts are, Sis really doesn't look at all bad in her mage's outfit.

It got a bad review on www.jeuxvideo.com (12/20) , the french biggest video game website.

Yeah the combat being super exaggerated in the dwarf's first story was a clever plot device. Once the "true" story starts it's toned down a bit though the moves do still look a bit exaggerated like it's a bunch of anime characters fighting or something. I'd prefer more realistic looking combat but I'm alright with that. This doesn't change the fact that it all felt boring. I went through the demo a couple more times, mainly because I was using it as a stress test for overclocking my video card, and just couldn't really get into it even once I did figure out how to change the camera angle so you can look at the battle field from a more isometric view (it still doesn't zoom out far enough to make it as effective for tactical play as it could be as I still have to keep rotating the camera to see the battlefield). I will give Bioware credit in one area though, at least they made the armor look like actual functional armor and didn't go with the chainmail bikini look that seems to be all the rage these days.

The game just feels like it was dumbed-down, sorry I mean STREAMLINED, for consoles then ported to the PC. Were this a year with a skimpy crop of RPGs I might cave in and get this but we have a wealth of RPGs coming out this year and I've got plenty to keep me occupied until The Witcher 2 comes out. I may still get it eventually when it hits the bargain bin and I can get it on the cheap.

Actually, I've been watching a Let's Play of DA2 (yeah, there's all ready one out) and once you gain a few levels, that 'super exaggerated' combat surfaces again. Not the constantly regenerating health, but for example, shooting a guy with an arrow and he then explodes into large sized chunks.

Hey, guys, also be warned. The PC version has SecuROM on it, even though Bioware specifically said there wasn't, and it's not mentioned at all on the box or in the 28-page EULA.

Here's what I'm thinking: If this is really what DA2 is going to look like: it'll probably sell better than any of BioWare's previous games, and this will tell BioWare...?