Dragon Age II Previews
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NowGamer starts us off:
The point that online producer Fernando Melo makes is: (You can make him or her any kind of champion you want; at the end of the day the one thing that you know is that they became the champion somehow and it's up to you to paint between the lines.)
He also talks about the kind of pressures pulling on Hawke that might skew a person's moral compass in an intense and protracted survival situation, which will translate to the player. Dragon Age has a habit of presenting the player with ambiguous choices via dialogue and scenarios. In respect to both, you'll always have at least an inkling as to which proverbial road you're travelling down: allowing an innocent child to die will never be a good thing and with a conversation wheel adopted from Mass Effect 2, you'll know when you're telling someone to go roger themselves up the bum, no matter how tactful the dialogue option presented to you appears.
Then we stop by That VideoGame Blog for some more:
The voice acting is once again exceptional. Most notably, Hawke can actually speak instead of displaying the blank, muted expression like the main characters in Origins. This lends more gravitas to the overall story. Dragon Age II also imports a similar dialogue wheel from Mass Effect where each line can be delivered with varying tonality and intent. This helps add to the fluidity of the dialogue.
The progression of the frame narrative also seems to impact gameplay in a fun way. The first glimpse came when the dwarven narrator recounted a different part of the Hawke's prologue, causing your character's abilities to regress slightly. It's clear how this format will help drive not just storyline surprises, but keep gameplay from getting stale.
Before rounding off our tour at Xbox360Achievements.org:
One of the big ones for me personally was the inclusion of a 5 star system in the inventory screen, which rated equipment and such out of 5 stars, meaning that when it comes to selling or even tagging items as junk, it's so much easier to get rid of the fluff items now. Incidentally, the menu system can no longer be found on the back button and is now accessed by pressing start, which felt a tad odd. There you'll see an almost carbon copy version of Mass Effect's pause menu wheel, which might not be as easy to access as clicking one button, but the transitions from one menu to another are far quicker and smoother.
Even smaller things like having a wider range of mage outfits help to improve what was a successful formula from the first game. Levelling up is something that's been toyed with as well, not only allowing players to improve certain powers, but also being presented in a very different way it's now a variety of tree systems for each sub-section of a class, instead of those numerous 4 x 4 grids. The implications weren't too far-reaching though, and it seemed like more of an aesthetic tweak.
