Call To Arms

Normally I wouldn't bother with a demo of a game which I have already decided to buy and have already pre-ordered. However for Dragon Age II the developers at BioWare and the marketers as EA have come up with an extra promotion. The idea is that anyone who plays the demo (with their BioWare account logged in) will get an additional in-game item available in the full game. Also on top of that if they can amass one million downloads two further items will be added. I've just finished downloading the demo and I'm writing this intro while I'm waiting for it to install. The website has an nice counter and map showing the downloads and at the time of writing this it's showing 161,774 downloads. That's after only 2 hours and 20 minutes of the being available, so I suspect that hitting the one million target by March 1st probably won't be a problem. The demo has installed now and apparently the play-time is only about an hour, so I'm going to play now and will finish this post with a quick review afterwards.


The first attempt was not so good, I got a DirectX error and the demo failed to load. The demo installer had warned me that I didn't have the very latest version of DirectX and told me that it would update it. Yet even after a reboot it would not work. So I manually installed the latest version and that got it going. (As usual, screenshots can be clicked for larger versions)


All of the character customization options have been cut out of the demo. This means the only choices you get to make are class and gender. I decided to with the standard male warrior which BioWare/EA have been using in most of the promotional screenshots and videos. After a brief intro video in which a women of the Chantry is interrogating a Dwarf you are thrown straight into the action. You are immediately fighting waves of Darkspawn with one companion, your sister. I have to say I was expecting her to die, but it turns out that was not the case. After a few waves the game cuts back to the Dwarf as at this point the action is representing him telling a story. He begins the story again from an earlier point and the game becomes a more standard format. Eventually this leads you back to the battle you started with.


The path you have to take here is very linear but this is only the prologue to the story. There are lots of cutscene interruptions and character introductions but I guess it won't all be like that. One thing that I was surprised about was the dialogue. When I first heard that the system from Dragon Age: Origins had been changed to one more similar to Mass Effect I was worried it wouldn't work as well. I believe I devoted an entire post to the subject. Yet now I've actually played it I've changed my mind. It worked nicely and the voice actor behind the male version of Hawke did a good job. After the prologue the story jumps to another short section from later in the game.


Although the HUD has a different layout from the first game the combat in general is pretty much the same in terms of mechanics. There are new talents and powers to be explored but if you've played the first game you'll pick it up in no time. One thing I noticed though is that it seemed to be a lot faster. The animations seem faster and so combat seems more frenetic. This made me pause in combat to issue orders more than I did in the past and I lost track of my mouse cursor a couple of times.


The graphics for the environments appear to be much improved and look really nice. The character models on the other hand have not changed as much. This does however help to make it feel more like the game is still taking place in the same universe rather than all being new. Although the new Qunari horns and backwards Elf ears might change that, but they don't appear in the demo.

The demo could have been a disaster for sales if it had been bad but I'm looking forward to the game even more now. It looks like I'm not alone either. The download count on the website after only five hours is now showing 242,598! Three weeks to go...