Just finished the PC demo.
The Bad:
A lot of technical glitches:
1. If you have volumes installed on your system that aren't in a file system that Win7 recognizes, you get a bunch of cryptic alerts that say, "There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive \\Device\\Harddisk\\DR1." This happens every time you log into your EA account, which means it happens at startup if you've set it to log you in automatically.
2. It doesn't seem to play nice with Win7's screen-blacking power saving feature. I have my screen set to go dark in after a minute of idle. Most other games seem to disable this. While running DA:O, for example, the screen will never go dark. The DA2 demo will, though. It happened a lot during cutscenes or if I went for a moment without answering some dialog. And after that happened and I did something to un-black the screen, there are garbage graphical artifiacts along the bottom of edge that don't go away until I alt-tab.
3. Once while playing, Win7 interrupted the game with an alert about the graphics running slowly, and asked if I'd like to disable the Aero UI.
4. The Tactics UI gets into a foobared state vey easily. Sometimes, I could only activate the tactics popups by clicking in a very specific spot. Sometimes, I'd pick one item from one of the popups but it would set the value of the popup to some other item. Sometimes, it seemed to randomly change the new values I set right as I was saving changes to tactics. Basically, the only way I could reliably change tactics was to make a single change, exit the tactics screen, and then go back again to make more changes.
5. There seemed to be other UI glitches that were more random/less reproducible. A couple of times, I had party members who had leveled up and I was unable to easily get to their character screens. Clicking their portraits either did nothing or took me to Hawke's screen instead.
Other bad things:
The zoom distance on the camera was too short. I missed DA:O's high overhead camera in some fights.
Cutscene transitions that happened during or right after combat were very abrupt and also sort of glitchy. Combat just sort of stops before a cutscene and then there's a delay of several seconds before video starts, and it's rather disconerting. And Going into one of the Isabela cutscenes, a brief after-image of Varic sitting in his inquisition chair before the Isabela video started.
The Carver/Bethany/Wesley death sequences didn't seem to have a lot of emotional impact. No tears, and Hawke's responses aren't merely emotionally flat, but also sort of weird. I don't think Hawke ever expresses any sort of sadness or even hints that she felt any sort of affection for her dead sibling.
The "Another Wave!" shout for approaching enemies. Really, that phrasing sort of breaks the fourth wall. Who uses the term "wave" to describe a group of enemies? It's like the characters know they're in a video game. It's horribly, horribly anachronistic, given the medieval-ish setting.
New enemy models: these seem like they were changed just to be changed. I mean... I don't hate the new Hurlocks, but the old Hurlocks were perfectly serviceable. Plus, it makes things seem really weird if you played DA:O. A few miles and a few days away from where the Warden massacred a zillion darkspawn to prepare for the Joining, and now Hawke's fighting a totally different looking variety of Hurlock? It makes no sense.
The Good:
The animations. Really, they're hugely improved from DA:O The only one I didn't really like is the rogue's sort of goofy default ready stance, where she holds one dagger behind her and over her head with her arm bent. That looks bad. Otherwise, they're pretty good. In particular, 2H warrior is much, much better than DA:O: no more slow-mo high school band flag-girl twirling of 2H weapons
Enemy health. In DA:O on Normal, stuff died way too fast. It's nice to see some of the enemies live long enough for you to need to use your cooldowns on them in order to kill them decently quickly. I'm hoping the harder difficulties give them even more health.
The skill trees. Very happy to see that there will be a lot more activated skills per character than in DA:O (well, mages in DA:O had a zillion skills. Warriors and Rogues not so much).
The voice acting. It seems generally good. I love LadyHawke's voice. Much like in the Mass Effect games (especially ME1), I have no doubt that some scenes and specific responses will be be badly phrased or emotionally flat or not what I meant to say at all, but in general, the voice work seems to be of a high quality.
The Surprising:
I'm surprised at all the feedback on this thread that says that combat is simpler than DA:O. Just from browsing the in-game skill trees, it seems like there will be a lot more active abilities. Given that and that Tactics are still in the game and that enemies take longer to die, I think combat will actually work out to be more complicated than it was in DA:O. DA:O was horrible for combat complexity. Even at level 15+, rogues and warriors usually only had 3 or 4 activated abilities, and those were sort of pointless to use, because (on normal difficulty) you could mow down standard enemies with just auto-attack once you were high-level.
The Verdict:
DA2 looks like it's going to be great in terms of content and combat. The acting is good, the story seems to have potential. The combat felt like a net improvement over DA:O (the new camera is irritating, but the expanded menu of skills is a huge improvement) and they kept Tactics in the game (when I first read the DA2 announcement, I was convinced Tactics would be removed in the name of making it more console-friendly. I am very happy to have been wrong).
The graphics are better than DA:O but still somewhat disappointing. They're not really as good as other current games or even Bioware's own Mass Effect 2.
And all the technical glitches are extremely vexing. On the one hand, none of them are more than irritations. On the other hand, they give the impression that the game's been rushed, because they all seem like really stupid and noticeable bugs. Plus, BioWare is horrible about patching things in a timely fashion. I expect that the Tactics screen will still be goofed up in June, three months after the final game ships.
That being said, I'll be buying the game. All the negatives I listed are minor technical glitches or irritating but ultimately unimportant cases of poor design. The important stuff about a BioWare game--a great story and fun combat--seem like they'll be there, and there seem to be many obvious and welcome improvements over DA:O. Those factors are what really count. So... I hope the final game will be a little more polished than the demo indicates, but even if not... the content will still make it worth it.
Retour en haut
locked for demo I hope?
