Dragon Age II Demo - Feb. 22nd

Something is twitchy about the animations to me. The timing of the movements to the apex of an attack seem extremely fast, then just before the apex they slow down. It's like how anime attacks, adding dramatic effect to the blows, not the swings.

I wouldn't mind it if it happened every once in a while, but its every single attack from all characters. Seeing enemies attacks with this effect while my character does the same thing, but each on their own pace, is awkward.

Just something about the way they are attacking each other that I utterly hate. It's hard to describe, but really uncomfortable to look at.
 
Markkei said:
DX11 is in the demo, however:



I was indeed having framerate issues, so I'll switch to DX9 on my next playthroughs. Just finished a mage run and so far I'm quite impressed. I actually really like the animations and the new skill trees and options. Also, I thoroughly enjoyed using Varric so I will definitely be adding him to my preferred party when the game is released.
Click to expand...

Same here. With GTX580s in SLI I was getting 22 FPS with DX11 cranked up. Glad I saw your post.
 
krameriffic said:
I'm inclined to agree. Now, I thought ME2 was a consolized dumbed down mess, but everybody in this thread is dwelling on the animations in DA2 with little regard for the core gameplay mechanics (you know, the shit that actually MATTERS). The animations might not fit your vision of this universe, but that is an issue of preference and nothing more. I hate to say it, but get over it or don't buy the game.
Click to expand...

The animation system in an RPG is vital in defining what kind of RPG it is.

The style of animation used in Dragon Age 2 is much more in line with what one would expect to see in an action RPG. Clearly, Bioware is merely attempting to please the younger, console crowd with this new system. That's the only way one can make any sense of this.

Regardless, this is no small issue, and telling people to 'get over it' is probably not going to win you many friends. Also, we get it that the core gameplay (the so-called 'shit that really matters') has remained untouched. Nobody here is denying that. What we're discussing is a fundamental alteration of this game's aesthetics. RPGs are as much about immersion as they are about the mechanics behind the game.

You're dismissing something that's extremely important to a lot of gamers. Greg, above, even said he's thinking about canceling his pre-order. I haven't played the demo myself yet, but what I'm seeing on Utube is, as Greg said, is just so wrong. It's extremely disheartening seeing this.
 
I enjoyed it. The pacing with the new combat system isn't that bad and being able to freeze it to issue commands in more hectic moments takes away my fear that it would be too rapid and not well paced in battles.

The story I love from the first game is all there in this one and seems pretty much the same , thats a good thing.

I'm gonna pick it up , just reserved it at Gamestop. I will say that its not as bad as I thought the previews made it out to be. But if I didn't play the first game I wouldn't bother with it.
 
Yeah, everyone is saying, don't bother with DX11, because it gimps the game. That's a demo for you!
 
Markkei said:
DX11 is in the demo, however:



I was indeed having framerate issues, so I'll switch to DX9 on my next playthroughs. Just finished a mage run and so far I'm quite impressed. I actually really like the animations and the new skill trees and options. Also, I thoroughly enjoyed using Varric so I will definitely be adding him to my preferred party when the game is released.
Click to expand...

Appa said:
Same here. With GTX580s in SLI I was getting 22 FPS with DX11 cranked up. Glad I saw your post.
Click to expand...

Could be an Nvidia driver problem? I have a 480 and ran into dx11 issue. Switched to DX9 and it runs fine.

It looks like they made the game more focused on action, which I like because in DA:O it's like watching grandma and grandpa's fight. the UI looks tweaked up better as well.
 
BETA. said:
It looks like they made the game more focused on action, which I like because in DA:O it's like watching grandma and grandpa's fight.
Click to expand...

Because of course classic, party-based RPGs have traditionally been modeled on the style of video games whose chief demographic consisted of 6 to 10-year-olds. :rolleyes:
 
Feels like there's a distinct lack of tactical depth with regards to positioning and spell usage.

I greatly enjoyed the spell casting with FF mechanics of the BG games and DA:O and I'm disappointed at them being missing, at least in normal difficulty. The game seems much less thoughtful overall due to this decision.

Textures and spell effects are laughably bad in DX9. The art direction in the first was exceptional and in this one it's come across as utterly bland so far.

The UI has some irregularities I don't particularly care for (it lists HP number in the attributes screen but gives a bar of variable length in the game, same with stam/mana).

Finally, the gore effects are too over-the-top for me with blood bursting from enemies the moment a fireball hits them, etc.

Here's hoping the FF is on while playing higher difficulties and the game doesn't look like warmed over dead ass in the full version.

ETA: If the story is started in the same manner in the retail game that will be a disappointment as well. Someone who's supposed to be important dies and I don't give a single shit about it because there was no connection built beforehand :eek:
 
This really seems more like an E3 tech demo polished up for a quick release; although fun, I was close to dismissing this as a DA:O game due to the 1st battle sequence. But after you get though that things just settle in and it feels like DA:O with the combat stuck on fast forward.

I still have some worries or bad vibes about DA2, the 1st being the camera, which I'm hoping in the final version will allow you to zoom out further. And some of the problems from DA:O still carry over such as, difficulty being too easy on normal so you'll have to turn it up to get any challenge out of it. Last the mage class still seems to be OP though the rogue class has improved and is more fun to play IMO.
 
I must be playing a different demo or something. The spell effects, visuals, animations and characters all looked great to me. Especially when compared to Dragon Age: Origins.

My demo said it was in DX 11 mode, but that some effects were disabled.

Loved the fire blasting spells, they looked great. You could position them pretty well. Not sure why a poster above says you lose some tactical abilities when casting spells. You are free to move the character and spell blast wherever you wanted it. Maybe he meant there is to much freedom and not enough restrictions?

Two handed warriors and archers have some great abilities and animations this time around.

The camera view looked great to me as well. I find the camera is just high enough to still feel useful. I didn't miss the extreme overhead/isometric view.

Anyway, I had a blast playing the demo on my PC. I highly recommend everyone give it a try.
 
Played a similar, but older demo at PAX. It was on the X360 so it had me worried as it came off as more of a hack and slash. This demo started out the same way, but after the first part the full party is enabled and seemed mostly the same as DA:O.

The limited zoom out is a minor complaint.

Surprisingly, Eyefinity is somewhat supported as the movies and game menus all seem to work correctly. The game interface (HUD) isn't optimized for Eyefinity though as the HUD info are on the secondary screens and the abilities aren't showing up.

Overall, I'm pleased that not too much has changed. I'll be buying the game at release.
 
Yeah, DA:O with faster animations. To be honest, this game is making me more excited about Skyrim. I think I can be patient.
 
oneils said:
I must be playing a different demo or something. The spell effects, visuals, animations and characters all looked great to me. Especially when compared to Dragon Age: Origins.

My demo said it was in DX 11 mode, but that some effects were disabled.

Loved the fire blasting spells, they looked great. You could position them pretty well. Not sure why a poster above says you lose some tactical abilities when casting spells. You are free to move the character and spell blast wherever you wanted it. Maybe he meant there is to much freedom and not enough restrictions?

Two handed warriors and archers have some great abilities and animations this time around.

The camera view looked great to me as well. I find the camera is just high enough to still feel useful. I didn't miss the extreme overhead/isometric view.

Anyway, I had a blast playing the demo on my PC. I highly recommend everyone give it a try.
Click to expand...

I pretty much agree. Just nonsense hate imo.

Also. The game is not more zoomed in than DA:O. Off the top of my head there's the top down and the more zoomed in third person "new age" look. It's the same view distance.
 
Okay, I just played it.

Felt much more like Star Wars than it did Dragon Age. My character animated far more like a Jedi Knight than a... well, a knight.

Wow. Just... wow.

Also, after all this time, why can't Bioware just allow us to click on the ground and have the character walk there. I can't believe that the party members are still doing that shuffling thing, where they all surge forward and bump into your back when you walk forward. You walk, but they run. Just bizarre that that's still there.

This game doesn't want me to go slow. It's forcing me to play it like a 6-year-old kid who has no patience and wants to break all his toys as soon as he gets them.

Wow. Just... a huge turn-off. And yes the view distance has been gimped. The look of the original Baldur's Gate is gone, since the tactical view has now been completely removed. Any trace of any type of link this series once had with Baldur's Gate has now been cut dead.

The spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate? This is more like the spiritual successor to Super Mario. Laughable.
 
I love Origin's interface way better than the piece of crap in this demo.. It's terrible..

The game play is about the same as first, but the animation is like hack/slash crap... Don't really like it..

And wtf is that Mage normal attack? Is that Harry Potter with Bruce Lee style or something?

I really hope they put back the old styles, but I doubt they will.. Not going to pay 60 dollar for a rip off signature edition..
 
Not digging this whatsever. I read the comments about DX11 being a resource hog for this, but I tried anyway. Even with an overclocked i7-950 and a gtx 580 with no AA, the dx11 version ran like crap and looked like vomit. I was appalled at how lousy the textures were. I'll try tomorrow when I feel like playing the dx9 version, but all I am expecting is that it will run smoother if even that. This feels like one of those hasty "made for dvd" movie sequels, I could almost not stop myself from exiting the game during the initial fight. I will try it over tomorrow when I have more energy and time.
 
Fliff said:
...I also took a look at the companion AI Tactics and it looks like it hasn't been changed much, which is great because i used custom AI tactics alot.
Click to expand...

This worries me as there were HUGE changes and improvements that should have been made to the tactics system.
 
The Hawke character must be the great great grandkid of Morrigan. The main female looks and sounds like Morrigan ... but not in a pretty way. :p
 
Also, I'm curious about a post that said Textures and Anisotropic Filtering were linked to DX11 mode. These two settings should definitely be independent of DX levels!
 
BETA. said:
Could be an Nvidia driver problem? I have a 480 and ran into dx11 issue. Switched to DX9 and it runs fine.

It looks like they made the game more focused on action, which I like because in DA:O it's like watching grandma and grandpa's fight. the UI looks tweaked up better as well.
Click to expand...

Yeah the dx11 ran at like 6fps for me. Ran like crap. Switched to dx9 and got 90+fps at medium settings. THEN went back to DX11 at medium and got 60fps solid. Switched to high DX11 and got ~30fps.Visually i noticed practically ZERO difference. Even after taking a screenshot in dx9 and dx11 i could barely tell the difference except for slight texture changes and a 50% fps hit.
 
I think what's bothering me the most is that I feel betrayed by Bioware. DA:O was very much an old school PC RPG (which is why DA 2 had to be redesigned, I suppose). It made me reminisce of the days and nights I spent playing Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and yes, even Neverwinter Nights. DA:O was a breath of fresh air, a return to the glory days of epic squad based, tactical RPGs. PC gamers loved it, console gamers did not. Why settle for 1 million sales on PC when you can have 4 million on console? All you have to do is sell out.
 
Just played through part of it again. Messing with the video settings. I was just playing dx11 and it seemed smooth as butter. Well mostly. avg maybe 50fps. vsync on so it capped at 60, which it hit often. I'm sure even in most of the battles it was high enough to be considered smooth play, or very playable.

Again with these complaints about the change of direction. I thought I read elsewhere that this game was never really intended to be a direct sequel of DA:O, but they threw the name on there to boost sales and recognition.
 
GregP24 said:
I think what's bothering me the most is that I feel betrayed by Bioware. DA:O was very much an old school PC RPG (which is why DA 2 had to be redesigned, I suppose). It made me reminisce of the days and nights I spent playing Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and yes, even Neverwinter Nights. DA:O was a breath of fresh air, a return to the glory days of epic squad based, tactical RPGs. PC gamers loved it, console gamers did not. Why settle for 1 million sales on PC when you can have 4 million on console? All you have to do is sell out.
Click to expand...

It's still the same game...just a new coat of paint to lure in console gamers who are dazzled by shiny things.
 
Ryom said:
This worries me as there were HUGE changes and improvements that should have been made to the tactics system.
Click to expand...

I understand, some triggers were either not descriptive enough or didn't work as intended, and I had difficulty get my triggers linked together until I looked up guides.

The Tactics interface looks like just like DAOs, which is no problem with me as I had no trouble with it, and you are given more slots to use rather than DAO limiting you at the start until you levelled up the skill to increase it, which I thought was lame.

I didn't play around with the tactics as you're stuck on normal and cannot save the game, so unfortunately I don't know whether they improved the triggers.
 
Seems smooth enough for me ~30fps at 6048x1080 2xAA, DX11, High... BUT: You cannot see your abilities HUD in eyefinity mode :(
 
The camera fights you... it always returns to its default zone when your character moves, which thoroughly annoys me as it will move things out of view that I was looking at. I really wish devs would learn to leave free cameras in the player's control.
 
GregP24 said:
I think what's bothering me the most is that I feel betrayed by Bioware. DA:O was very much an old school PC RPG (which is why DA 2 had to be redesigned, I suppose). It made me reminisce of the days and nights I spent playing Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and yes, even Neverwinter Nights. DA:O was a breath of fresh air, a return to the glory days of epic squad based, tactical RPGs. PC gamers loved it, console gamers did not. Why settle for 1 million sales on PC when you can have 4 million on console? All you have to do is sell out.
Click to expand...

Yeah. Agree.

I'm disappointed from what I've seen so far. I've been waiting for feedback from a few forum people here and there that loved the first game also, to see what their thoughts are on it.

I don't really have time to play the demo, but I'll try to download it this weekend and get a feel for it. But at this point, I really don't think I'm going to like it.

And the friendly-fire splash damage is really gone? Really? That's terrible. Any idea if the demo is just on easy mode or something? Maybe it comes back in hard mode?
 
Played through as a warrior. I think it fits better when played as a warrior. The camera deal is definitely an issue. I also downloaded it on PS3. It seems more at home on the console to be honest, though I will buy it on PC.

This game feels too cartoony. Origins felt much more gritty. I really don't see how this could be better than Origins in many ways, but Bioware puts out a lot of quality products so I'll wait to pass judgment.
 
GreenMonkey said:
Yeah. Agree.

I'm disappointed from what I've seen so far. I've been waiting for feedback from a few forum people here and there that loved the first game also, to see what their thoughts are on it.

I don't really have time to play the demo, but I'll try to download it this weekend and get a feel for it. But at this point, I really don't think I'm going to like it.

And the friendly-fire splash damage is really gone? Really? That's terrible. Any idea if the demo is just on easy mode or something? Maybe it comes back in hard mode?
Click to expand...

I don't mean to be offense but .. how come you don't "have time" to play a 35-50 min demo? It doesn't take long and it will save you money if you aren't into it.

I guess I don't understand your path of logic , you've got time to post in a forum .. you should have time to try a demo.
 
The demo has a few bugs - characters sometimes refuse to take healing potions when you tell them to, and the buttons on the level-up screen are unresponsive, requiring several clicks before you can go "Back" or "Confirm" something.
 
Plague_Injected said:
The demo has a few bugs - characters sometimes refuse to take healing potions when you tell them to, and the buttons on the level-up screen are unresponsive, requiring several clicks before you can go "Back" or "Confirm" something.
Click to expand...

Haven't experience those problems. All I noticed was my chick looking kinda weird while running. The relaxed run, not the "combat time" run.
 
Godmachine said:
I don't mean to be offense but .. how come you don't "have time" to play a 35-50 min demo? It doesn't take long and it will save you money if you aren't into it.

I guess I don't understand your path of logic , you've got time to post in a forum .. you should have time to try a demo.
Click to expand...

Ha! I bet you don't have kids and a busy schedule ;)

I can make a quick post on the forum from work while I'm working on something else in my other window.
I can't sit and play Dragon Age at work, obviously.

I work 10-12-10-10 on nightshift this week, oncall Thursday night for 12 hours, along with a few hours of oncall on a few of those days, and oncall this weekend for 12 hours a day.

For example, I worked last night until 7am, got one hour of sleep, watched the kids for a few hours, went back to sleep for 3 hours, when then I had to help the wife escape from the laundry room (stuck door, long story), got back to bed for 3 more hours, and then got up to head to work at 9pm.

When I'm up a lot of the time, odds are I'm taking care of the kids (5 and 3) or I have stuff to do. My wife has fulltime grad school. Work + kids + wife school makes for a busy schedule. And this is an improvement - I normally have had 3-6 credits of school myself, but I took this semester off.

I may have some time on Thursday or Friday night after the kids and the wife are in bed if I haven't been paged for anything.

Besides, I'm not super worried about spending an hour playing a demo of something I have a feeling I won't like. So far, the youtube videos and forum feedback I've heard have told me they've done most of what I feared to it.
 
Last edited:
The characters have dead eyes, the entire game pauses for a moment to do "loading..." frequently, Isabella and Aveline are just as ugly as everyone thought, the darkspawn look like cartoons, the combat animations are over the top ridiculous, but when you have shield defense active all your character does is stab back and forth the exact same way all battle.

This isn't a "two steps forward, one step back" thing... it's a "ran 50 feet to the side" thing. I'm baffled by some of the changes frankly. No doubt the story is great, but someone needs to grab a hold of the designers and shake.
 
Bioware has pretty much left the gameplay mechanics intact other than disabling friendly splash damage, which may just be for Normal difficulty or even for the demo. It makes looking past the cosmetic and style changes that much easier.
 
Yeah there really isn't any reason to hate this demo. I remember reading somewhere that on hardcore mode (w/e hard is called) there is friendly splash damage. Also, the game itself is fundamentally the same as DA:O. The only difference I noticed is over the top gore/animations and easier to use skill trees.
 
For those having problems with DX11, from what I've read on the DA2 forums, DX11 isn't completely implemented in the demo. It will be in the final version though. I had extremely low framerates and graphical glitches in DX11, but switching to DX9 fixed everything. Unfortunately DX9 is limited to Medium settings since anything higher requires DX10/11.
 
GTX 480 - VISTA 64.

Unplayable with settings on DX11. I sure hope that this is fixed for the game itself. It's just not encouraging when you play a demo, and it doesn't work.

Aren't demos supposed to, you know, demo the game? Again, it would be akin to test driving a car that wasn't working properly, and the salesman saying, guy, just trust me, the car you buy will work fine. Okay, if you have cars that work fine then shouldn't you be allowing people to test drive those rather than the ones that don't work.

Clearly, DX11 is simply not working for a huge number of people. The demo is an epic failure.
 
WabeWalker said:
GTX 480 - VISTA 64.

Unplayable with settings on DX11. I sure hope that this is fixed for the game itself. It's just not encouraging when you play a demo, and it doesn't work.

Aren't demos supposed to, you know, demo the game? Again, it would be akin to test driving a car that wasn't working properly, and the salesman saying, guy, just trust me, the car you buy will work fine. Okay, if you have cars that work fine then shouldn't you be allowing people to test drive those rather than the ones that don't work.

Clearly, DX11 is simply not working for a huge number of people. The demo is an epic failure.
Click to expand...

Bioware has said the demo build has a bug with DX11. Been mentioned a few times in this thread. Demo build is probably an old build. Bioware games are usually mostly stable on release so the bug should be fixed by release. If its not, oh well don't buy the game until it is.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top