Dragon Age II Previews and Screenshots

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Written by BuckGB on February 9th, 2011

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Though it's more obvious when you play as a melee class character than a mage, there's a new immediacy to combat, which feels more like fighting and less like queuing a command. You hit a face button and deliver a blow, cooldowns notwithstanding, with the punchiness underlined by more dynamic animations. The pause-and-play system is still in place, if that's more your bag, letting you freeze combat and flit between characters, issuing commands before restarting the action. Our Hawke had been levelled as a spellcaster focused on lightning-type magic, with a chain lightning spell and tempest--a stormy, wide-ranging, area-of-effect spell--among her attacks. These looked nice and sparky; we didn't notice any of the slowdown that sometimes troubled the biggest, flashiest spells in the original Dragon Age.

A glance at Hawke's ability screen revealed a slicker, friendlier-looking menu, with spells clustered together into small talent trees laid out on a single page. These trees are grouped by school of magic (elemental, primal, and the like) or specialisation (spirit healer, blood mage), with the latter needing a specialisation point to unlock--granted at levels seven and 14, said the menu. The menu screens are more polished and less utilitarian generally, except for the tactics screen in which you can program party member behaviour (if property X is less than Y, attack A with spell B), which is still on the uninviting side.

BioWare's latest showing breaks down the two halves of the general experience let's call them fighting and wandering around chatting to people. In wandering/chatting sections we're thrown into the game around the end of the first of three acts, picking up with a cast of heroes as they explore stately, sun-baked Hightown and the moody, funereal stonework of some primeval ruins.

The nuances of any overarching storyline are hard to gauge, but the moment-to-moment narrative seems thick with chewy, sugary fantasy soap operas: quest-givers in dire need of a hero lurk around one corner, and sneaky dwarfen (dwarven? Am I being a big fantasy racist?) brothers who can't resist a bit of treachery are waiting around the next.

Besides the look of combat, one other significant change shows up: the tweaking of the under-the-hood dice-rolling which results in physical positioning being more important than before. Simply put: things hit each other not because of a roll of the die, but because the two objects are actually near each other. BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk uses the following example: "In Dragon Age, if a golem threw a rock at you and the die-roll says he hits, that boulder hits you no matter what. You can run into a different room, but it can clip through walls to hit you. Now, you can actually retreat or even get behind something."

This comes up during a boss battle against a Rock Wraith in the Deep Roads; at one point, said Rock Wraith visibly charges up and emits a room-filling blast -- players will have to get their party members behind stone columns to block the blast. Don't assume that this use of patterns, special attacks, and physical position is an action game sort of thing; it's actually inspired from raid encounters in World of Warcraft, and adds an additional tactical layer to combat. Lead designer Mike Laidlaw jokes that a player can simply spam the A-button or the right-mouse button on casual difficulty, but on higher difficulties, tricks like these will call for proper use of party grouping and tactics. BioWare co-founder Ray Muzyka teases that the final boss battle is, "unlike anything we've done ourselves, and it will be too obvious if I name it, but when you get to that final battle, you'll know what game we were thinking of when designing that encounter."

Dragon Age 2 looks brighter and its environments seem far more alive -- it's a quasi cel-shaded look that really makes the game pop and will offer better consistency across all platforms. "Consoles on Dragon Age: Origins were left behind a little bit," Lazin admits. "You could tell the art had been created primarily for PCs and that we'd done what we could to make it work for consoles, but now it looks great across all three platforms." Lazin promises that the game be up to snuff on consoles, and even look better than on most mid-ranged PCs. You'll still have access to the graphical bells and whistles on a more powerful PC, of course, and still have the ability to zoom out the camera.

A night-cloaked Kirkwall, the central city of Dragon Age 2, served as a good demonstration of the game's enhanced technology. I moved between distinct neighborhoods and sections, each with their own feel -- the elvish district's central area featured a large, magical tree, its glowing roots thrusting up from the ground and stealing the scene as I was ambushed by a group of knights.

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