Dragon Age 2 Introduction:
Like most fantasy novels the story starts out being told from a third person limited point of view, Varric a dwarf in the main character’s party, is being interrogated by what is soon identified as a lady seeker who’s dressed in full armor and is questioning the dwarf about the exploits of the “Champion of Kirkwall”.
The first time you get to control your character you have several abilities and are able to take on foe after foe by yourself, you soon learn the Dwarf is actually embellishing the story a little and it does another flashback where you get to play the opening scene again with other characters helping you through the first stages to escape the darkspawn that are closing in as you and your family try to escape.
Dragon Age 2 Gameplay:
Plot
Without going into too much detail as to spoil the game for anyone looking forward to getting their hands on Dragon Age 2, its enough to say the game has a very strong plot that’s so gripping you’ll find yourself not wanting to stop playing unless work or some other necessity is calling for your attention. I like to think of myself as morally responsible, yet I found myself wanting to call in sick to work a couple times just to finish the storyline. Truth be told, very few games will give you the feeling of anticipation and yearning for more as the plot in this game does. The in-depth feeling of changing the storyline with each action and reaction, gives you a sense of telling your own story, and may even cause you to pause quite a few times as you contemplate what to do next. The storyline portrays about 7 years of your character’s life, and as days flows into years you’ll soon find yourself faced with several moral dilemmas such as having to possibly kill characters that you may have helped in previous years, Bioware does such a good job of telling an intertwining story, that this is easily compared to the plots of several books that I’ve read and couldn’t put down.
Dragon Age 2 Combat
The combat system in Dragon Age 2 is pretty intuitive; you click on your enemies to attack and if you want to use a special type of attack or magical power you simply click on the icon in the taskbar. The Combat skill trees, when upgrading your character, were plentiful, although not as intricate as the original Dragon age. Still there are so many options you could choose such as abilities that are active all the time (sustained), need to be activated at a given time, or are passive and in use all the time. The combat also had further options that allow you to turn on screen displays that can show damage points, a pause feature that allows for stopping the game and directing your character’s actions, auto keys for selecting characters or all characters, and tactic slots that allow you to assign a character’s actions based on friends or enemies’ health, distance, numbers and many more options that help characters become more autonomous if you want them to be.
I found this layout to be quite refreshing as you could choose to let them go at times, or take complete control and make each attack decision for them. With the plethora of options above The combat itself felt very much action-based but still retained the dice rolling and attack vs. defense calculations found in the standard RPG world. The combat encounter is usually enacted by journeying to a specific spot and isn’t a random system of encounters as found in most RPG’s, this led to predictable fights and I felt it took away a little of the experience.
