Dragon Age II Previews
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GamesRadar starts us off:
The engine is redesigned from the ground up to basically work better with consoles. So if you played it on the Xbox or PS3 [version], you see that it looks much better. But that doesn't mean that the PC can't play to its own strengths it just means that we understand how the engine works better. For the most part, we wanted to reach a parity, in terms of design,) explains Laidlaw as he boots up an early build of the PC version of Dragon Age II.
He zooms in and out to demonstrate how certain camera angles with the old system could complicate matters for some of the encounters featured in Dragon Age II. (So we basically said, '˜Okay. That is a problem.' I don't want to end up playing a game where I could not know there are archers shooting me because I'm looking the wrong way. So the camera doesn't do quite the same thing it did, but still what's very, very important, is that element of being able to maneuver around the battlefield,) says Laidlaw.
Laidlaw pauses the battle he booted up and pulls the camera back. Way back. The camera is no longer locked to a unit on the battle, so we didn't see any panning about in this build, but all the functionality of the old camera system remains intact. You can pause and resume battle at will, queuing orders as you sweep across the battlefield as you did in the original.
And 1UP follows close behind:
The scene is once again in the mountain canyon, but Hawke is far weaker this time around. This is part of the framed narrative device that BioWare has been touting, which is the means by which they intend to tell a story spanning ten years. Hawke is a hero with what Laidlaw calls "good PR," so it's only natural that he should utterly obliterate his foes in the storyteller's recollections.
It's a two-way street though. Decisions made over the course of the game will affect how the narrative unfolds, and ultimately defines how Hawke becomes the Champion of Kirkwall, "We kind of play to what I see as the key strength of videogames. Where instead of it being the locked down history of the character, certain elements are locked, like you always become the Champion of Kirkwall. But how you get there, and how these storytellers reacts, is based on your decisions."
The unreliable narrator component is probably the most intriguing element though. It plays out to a degree in the second part of the demo, when the narrator offers a more honest account of Hawk's escape from Lothering. This time around, it's much harder to bring down the Darkspawn, and he lacks abilities like Whirlwind.
