Dragon Age 2 - demo

If you have been paying attention to my twitter feed, then you will already know that I tried out the PC and X360 demos of Dragon Age 2. The game itself looks good (or as good as it can look after just mucking around with a demo) but the problem is that I am just heavily disappointed with the direction that BioWare took with the Dragon Age franchise.

With that said, I wanted to make it clear why I thought the demo was disappointing. Bear in mind, this isn't a full review of the game (obviously) or of the demo. This is just an explanation of why I'm disappointed.

In the interest of full disclosure though, I should mention that I was expecting to be disappointed even before I started the demo. Dragon Age 2 has gotten a lot of press and from reading previews and interviews, I knew about some of the changes that BioWare had intended to make.

Console focus
I'm not going to say that the game has been dumbed down for consoles because that statement is patently ludicrous. Having played plenty of console games, I know full well that console games aren't dumbed down. However, there is a clear difference between a gamepad and a mouse/keyboard which fundamentally impacts how you design a game. In most cross platform games which I have played, you can tell which control scheme the game was designed for.

In the case of Dragon Age, the game was clearly designed with a mouse/keyboard in mind. In the case of Dragon Age 2, it feels like the game has been designed with a gamepad in mind. What this means is that some of the design decisions, from my point of view, result in a game which I am less interested in.

Action RPG
Possibly, the first casualty of the change in focus is that the game feels like it has been designed as an action RPG (and I say this knowing full well the PC history of the greatest action RPG franchise of all time - Diablo). In itself, this isn't a bad thing. The problem is that one of the reasons I loved Dragon Age was because it was one of the few tactical RPGs that had been released in recent years.

Now, with BioWare seemingly abandoning the genre (a genre which they once ruled supreme during the days of the infinity engine), this is seriously depressing for me as the only outlet for this kind of RPG looks to be indie developers. I guess I know what people who like playing point n click adventures feel like now...

Limited tactical control
The change in focus means that it feels like you no longer have the same level of tactical control as in the original Dragon Age. To be fair, this may just be a result of me not having enough time to get used to the fact that there is no longer an isometric tactical view of the battle. However, I don't think this is the case as the loss of that isometric view has several knock on effects.

Its amazing how much the lack of an isometric view changes the experience. In the original Dragon Age, I always felt like I knew what was happening. The difficulty in the game came about from finding the best way to deal with some very difficult tactical situations. However, without an isometric view, I feel like I'm always reacting to the battle instead of directing it. Several times, additional darkspawn had respawned from somewhere and the only time I knew about it was when they streamed past my mage from behind (they were going straight for the fighter as he was drawing aggro).

On other occasions, the spells were actually getting in the way of the game. I had cast a cold spell which had resulted in spikes of ice shooting out of the ground and killing the darkspawn in front of me. I went to target the darkspawn who my fighter was attacking and realised that I couldn't actually see it. I had to wait for the ice spikes to dissipate before I was able to see and target the darkspawn. With an isometric view, this just wouldn't have been an issue.

Another problem which constantly reared its head was that its much harder to effectively stack your damage in this game. I generally have my fighters stacking damage on one darkspawn while my mage deals heavy spell damage to the more dangerous darkspawn (such as enemy spellcasters or other ranged attackers). In some cases, this means that we are all targeting the same enemy. In other cases, we are targeting different enemies.

The problem arises after my fighters kill off the darkspawn and then target different darkspawn for their next attack (so that they were no longer stacking damage). Naturally, unless I was attacking the same darkspawn, I had no idea this was happening as I didn't have a broader view of the battlefield. Without an isometric viewpoint or some sort of autopause, the only way I could solve this issue was by constantly jumping back and forth between the different members of the party to see what they were doing. Not fun.

Conclusion
By now, you should know that when it comes to RPG combat, I'm a big fan of the party based tactical RPGs. One of the reasons for this is that I like the tactical options which present themselves as a result of having a party instead of having one main PC who can handle everything. Unfortunately, the extra difficulty in getting the same level of tactical control in Dragon Age 2 means that this itch is going to be left unscratched.

At this moment in time, I will not be getting the game at launch (which will be the first game from BioWare that I haven't bought at launch in a long long time). Although it does look like it might be a fun game, the problem is that I can't decide if I should buy it for the X360 and treat it like an action RPG or buy it for the PC and try and eek out a tactical RPG from the ashes of the Dragon Age franchise.