One Hour With: Dragon Age 2

Dragon Age 2 is the new role-playing game from developer BioWare and publisher Electronic Arts that takes the world established in Origins and builds a new narrative built tightly around Hawke.

Here's how my first hour with the game went.

14:00. BioWare did a very smart thing by opting to have a rather short introductory sequence and then throwing the player into the middle of actual combat.

This quickly shows what Dragon Age 2 has to offer on that front and will serve to dispel the fears of some Origins fans.

14:10. It's not a good idea, however, to have a fairly short introductory battle with a lot of skills only to see them taken away shortly after that without even seeing all of them in action.

14:15. There are quite a lot of options linked to characters’ creation in Dragon Age 2, but the fact that players are limited to boring old humans is still a big letdown.

14:18. I wish the developers spent more time crafting more diverse options linked to how Origins ended.

The three included ones feel rather limited compared to the wealth of possible choices.

14:25. The combat feels much too quick in Dragon Age 2, with characters moving constantly about as fast as they did in the first one when sped up.

14:31. I expected more of a chilly reception for the Templar the party finds early on, given the magic powers that are part of the family heritage.

14:39. The speed makes my Flask ability as a rogue all but useless at the beginning of an encounter as I can only hit someone when they stop to attack one of my party members.

14:43. The interface is very clean and functional but the fonts used seem somewhat ugly.

14:45. BioWare made significant changes into how the game looks and some of them are for the worse, like most of the terrain, from the ground beneath the characters feet to the boulders seen when entering Kirkwall.

14:51. But the company also made the characters better looking and managed to add more color to the game.

14:57. Unfortunately, the large nature of the arms of male characters often leads to them getting lost in the texture of the armors, something which breaks the immersion in pretty significant ways.

Expect to see more Dragon Age 2 related content on Softpedia in the coming days, including a review and Gamer Diaries.