Calling down fire storms pummels the ground with molten stones and knocks off huge chunks from enemy health bars. When set to auto-attack, Mages flip their staves around like Olympic ribbon dancers to blast energy at targets. Sword swings have a sense of weight to them. If you don't pause to issue commands, it's really fast. Since this was my first time playing Dragon Age II, one thing that surprised me was the feel of the combat. Across Mage, Warrior and Rogue class types there are six skill trees, not including specializations, so it seems as though there'll be a lot of ways to tweak your character beyond the basic skills.
The Tremor skill causes Warrior characters to smash the ground and stun enemies, and with a few upgrades it can affect a larger area and be triggered more frequently. For some of the base skills you can purchase upgrades. It no longer looks like a boring list, but is presented as branching lines with skills represented as circular icons. Much of the menu system has been overhauled, including a total redesign of the skill tree. Dragon Age II on Xbox 360 looks way better and runs much more smoothly. But there was still a lot of post-release content.) How many people does BioWare actually employ? Are they truly people or some kind of cyborg-wizard-game developer hybrids? These are all important questions, but having played on PC and Xbox 360, none of them really matter because Dragon Age II is looking better than the first.
DRAGON AGE 2 ON PC WITH CONTROLLER FULL
A full sequel so soon? Hadn't like seventy-five pieces of downloadable content already been released for Origins? (Answer: no, I'm exaggerating. When Dragon Age II was announced, I was stunned. That may just be some of my PC elitism bleeding through since I know a number of people who loved Dragon Age on consoles, but it's a perspective that's hard to shake after experiencing the relative convenience of the PC version. The framerate was a mess and, by comparison, the challenge seemed more about dealing with the interface than chopping down enemies. Then I played the Xbox 360 version, and for a moment I looked around as if someone might be playing a trick on me.
That's exactly how I thought it should be. On PC, Dragon Age: Origins was unflinchingly difficult even at the standard setting, which made intelligent party tactics and frequent use of the pause function essential to victory. Though it didn't turn me into the hopeless, bleary-eyed obsessive I became after Baldur's Gate II launched, it still played all the right notes, even if some of the complexity had been stripped out after the Dungeons & Dragons days. I couldn't wait to play, and play I did when it was finally released in 2009.
Since Dragon Age: Origins was purportedly a spiritual successor, I was thrilled. I said the same thing on IGN's top 25 modern PC games list and will probably continue to say it as nostalgia gradually warps my memory. Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn is my favorite role-playing game of all-time.
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