Dragon Age II Preview
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Playing as the male warrior, we were able to slice through these Darkspawn with style and flair, dashing from one cluster to the next while leaving little more than blood and gibs in our wake. Console controls work the same as Origins: you pull one trigger to open a radial wheel of talents, spells, items, and whatnot. This screen freezes time and lets you fine tune your aim on a particular enemy. But playing as the warrior, we favored running around, using the talents mapped to the face buttons instead. Overall, the sense of movement is less clunky, the animation more fluid, and the blood more plentiful.Everyone seems to be coming to different conclusions.
Switching over to the mage resulted in a more tactical style of combat along the lines of the first game. With the mage, we preferred pulling up that radial menu and finding the best spell to cast in a given situation. Our favorite quickly became inferno, which lets you rain fire on a radius of enemies as though you'd just called a mortar strike from the heavens. According the Laidlaw, they've worked to make sure the mage has more "wow" moments in combat like the weapon-based classes. To demonstrate, he showed a mage finishing off an Ogre by lifting him up into the air, surrounding him with a dark energy, and then exploding him into nothingness.
Overall, the combat didn't feel remarkably different from the first Dragon Age. It flowed a little more smoothly and moved at a quicker pace, but that was mostly because our talents and spells recharged quickly after using them. That could very easily have just been something BioWare tuned for this public demo--likely a lowered difficulty to help ease players back into the experience. After this admittedly brief demo, we're confident that BioWare knows what they're doing. This isn't going to be a hack-and-slash game.
