Dragon Age 2 Demo - First thoughts

I just finished playing through the DA2 demo as a Female Mage, and I have to say, Bioware did their homework when it came to the game engine.

I don't normally admit it, but my computer is starting to show its age. The motherboard (HP Board pulled from a broken computer), processor (Dual Core AMD Athlon 64x2 3200+ @2.01ghz, performance rated equivalent is a dual core 3ghz Pentium D) and 2gigs ram (4 512mb paired Kingston PC3200 DDR1, dual-channel Enabled) are almost 5-6 years old, but when combined with a decent Radeon 4650HD 512mb PCIe card, I've been able to play most games that are coming out on the market, like ME2, Dragon Age, Medal of Honor, ect.

Dragon Age in particular took some creative tweaking to get to play smoothly (turning shadows off and AA down, turning textures down during final battle with the arch demon), but the game itself was clunky, prone to slow downs and what not. Now that I just finished playing the DA2 demo, my suspicions were true, like Mass Effect 2 over Mass Effect, the game engine in DA2 is much more refined and smoother, as I was able to play the game with all features turned on (1680x1050, Max Textures, Max Shadows, Max Anti-Aliasing, Max Texture Filtering), and suffered only minor slowdown when there was a lot of particle objects (IE Smoke).

As for the combat system, its smooth, intuitive, and well, it just works. the mage AOE abilities have some targeting issues (you can't target an enemy with an AOE ability, you have to target the ground or the retical is greyed out)

There was some minor clipping and collision detection issues, especially in the second part of the demo during Isabella's duel were the main characters robe connected with her neck.

I love the addition of the ME conversation wheel, and its nice actually having your character talk rather then having to sit back and read everything that your character says. I was hesitant at first when i heard about this decision, mainly because I couldn't make a dwarf or elf since the protagonist would be human), but now that I've played a bit of the game, they made the right choice.

I can't wait till March 8th when I pick up my Signature Edition copy from Future Shop!

I also played the demo, but I enjoyed the first Dragon Age much more, I don't like the new combat system in the slightest, it felt more like I was playing a button masher (played the demo on the Xbox) which made it feel more like Dante's Inferno or God of War without all the puzzles.

I still might pick it up anyway, or rent it for my Xbox instead of my PC because I have the Dead Space 2 Issac Clarke inspired armor sets for both :D: