[keg in kc]

Some info leaking out from gamescom. Most of it's a few days old and there are some spoilers, so read at your own risk....

The Interrogation Room: Dragon Age 2

By Will Tuttle & Ryan Scott | Aug 18, 2010

A new age of dragons.

Welcome to the Interrogation Room, GameSpy's signature pre-release game coverage format. Here, a GameSpy editor (typically one who's relatively in-the-dark about the game in question) grills his peers for information on a hotly anticipated game -- hopefully with more entertaining results than the typical boilerplate preview would provide.

Ryan Scott, Executive Editor: We both played this, and we both didn't play the original Dragon Age. We have so much in common! Do you wanna be my e-pen pal?

Will Tuttle, Editor in Chief: Sorry, I'm more of a real-life pal; I was hoping we could spend some quality time catching up on the original Dragon Age. While it's true that I never completed the game, I played through each of the race-specific origin stories (what can I say -- I wanted the achievements) before finally settling on the character I wanted to play through the rest of the game with. It's actually a bit sad that Dragon Age came out when it did, as I was just so busy with the rest of last year's holiday hits that I never got to give it the time it deserved. Although, I could also look at the other side of the coin: Dragon Age: Origins just didn't give me a good enough reason to dedicate 40 to 60 hours of my life to it. Most BioWare games do that, but not this one.


Ryan Scott: Yeah, I know you're more of a Sonic Chronicles guy, so it's all good. One of the big differences with Dragon Age 2 is that it's a much narrower story -- rather than picking from several races and playing through the origin stories you referred to, you're in the shoes of a single character. You can pick his class, but that's it; it seems a bit more Japanese in that regard, which I admittedly like. I much prefer role-playing games like Final Fantasy, where I am being told the story for these specific characters, rather than creating my own guy. What did you think?

Will Tuttle: You jest, but I actually did really enjoy Sonic Chronicles! As for Dragon Age 2's new focus on storytelling, I'm of two minds. On one hand, something's very liberating about being able to go wherever or do whatever you want in a wide-open RPG like Dragon Age: Origins, as some people get much more invested when they're basically creating the story on the fly. BioWare's approach with Dragon Age 2 is no less valid. Good storytelling will never get old, so if the writers can craft a tale that's worth telling (or, rather, worth hearing), I'll be the first to hop on board.

One of the narrative elements I'm really intrigued by is the story-within-a-story layering that could be really cool if pulled off correctly. After some horrible event changes the Dragon Age universe, a Grey Warden named Cassandra has to track down the only hero that had ever faced the same challenge -- and said hero is the character you play. As your heroic tale is recounted to Cassandra by a dwarf named Varric, the playable action is presented via flashback, occasionally showing different versions of the same event depending on Varric's mood. Ryan, I believe you described the dwarf as "a scumbag Scheherazade."

Ryan Scott: Haha, yeah I did. That's totally how he comes off, as Cassandra starts out by questioning whether she can even trust his storytelling. As far as the actual story you play through, one thing I noticed -- mainly because you picked all the evil dialogue responses and I picked all the good responses (and that's mainly because we wanted to see how each way went -- I'm usually a jerk in good-or-evil games too!) -- is that everything kind of led up to the game conclusion. We fought some skeletons and a giant-ass ogre, some people died, we got accosted by a dragon who gave us a FedEx quest, and that was that. I know we saw a pretty thin vertical slice of the game, but I'm hoping the dialogue choices influence the direction of the story.


Will Tuttle: Actually, I generally play as the ultra-heroic nice guy in RPGs, at least the first time through. I'm really not sure how the team is using the dialogue, though it should be noted that it plays a lot like Mass Effect 2. People will react differently to you depending on the types of decisions you make, but it looks like you'll always have a choice between nice, mean, and middle-of-the-road. One thing that BioWare stressed heavily to us during the demo was the fact that the writing team really wants to tell the tale of a major event in the larger Dragon Age world, not just the story of one guy (a la Mass Effect's Commander Shepard). Dragon Age 2 takes place over the course of at least a decade, hopefully providing plenty of context as to why we should care that this presumably bad event happened. I personally like that they're going in this direction; I just hope that they can pull it off.

While some of the core RPG tropes remain unchanged (as you said, dragons give "FedEx quests"), it looks like BioWare's improved the combat system quite a bit. The combat was one of the first game's biggest weaknesses -- so I was happy to see that they really wanted to tighten it up. What did you think? More importantly, what does your Dragon Age-loving dad think about it?

Ryan Scott: Fun fact: My 68-year-old father loves Dragon Age (and Fable II, while we're on the subject). He beat the Xbox 360 version all on his own, multiple times -- so I don't think combat's too much of a problem. I'm not too familiar with how it worked in that game, but I found it fine in Dragon Age 2. What, exactly, are your issues?

Will Tuttle: My first issue is that we're having you chip in on this article when we really should just be paying your dad to ask questions. This would also be a good time to note that you spent the majority of your time playing the PC version of the game, while I played for about a half hour on the Xbox 360 version. A lot of people who played Origins on the consoles felt like it was an old-school PC RPG that had basically been shoehorned onto a platform that is fundamentally different from the PC. The combat was the most glaring example of this; a lot of times, the unresponsive combat controls were more than just a hindrance. Dying because the game didn't register an attack command (presumably because of your distance to the target) was a far-too-common occurrence, so I'm really happy to hear that the dev team wants to move toward a more instantaneous command system for Dragon Age 2's combat.


In a lot of ways, this game felt more like an action-RPG than anything else, as it was really easy to switch between attacks on the fly. Pressing an attack button automatically moved my character into the correct position, allowing me to follow up with a few more button presses that unleashed special attacks. Before I knew it, I was moving quickly around the battlefield, hacking and slashing through waves of foes like butter. It felt a lot more intuitive than the combat in the last game, and I really dug the new tactical view that will hopefully allow you to survey the battlefield from multiple angles while the action's paused. I was also really impressed by how smoothly the game ran at this point, as the first game's slightly dated graphics (let's not forget that Dragon Age: Origins was in development for a long, long time) could be distraction.

Ryan Scott: As you said, I played the PC version -- the real version -- so I have no idea what moon language you're speaking here. You might as well be one of those BUY UGG BOOT $50 spammers in our comments, you heathen. Anyway, I dug the combat, and I really agree about the tactical view -- you can survey the whole battlefield and completely detach the camera from your character's point of view. That, combined with the ability to pause combat at will (another thing I appreciate), is going to result in some beautiful screenshots. One thing I noted was that monsters tended to kind of home in on me quite a bit, even when I switched to the party's mage and stood back a fair bit while my allies beat on them up-close. Stupid aggro mechanics.

Will Tuttle: See, while I think it's pretty obvious that the PC version was the real version of Origins, I don't feel like that's the case here. It's pretty clear that the development team wanted to emphasize the differences between the two versions a lot more this time out, so the console version feels like a completely different animal altogether. It really feels a lot more like a hack-and-slash action-RPG this time out, a fundamental shift that I'm all for -- especially since it means I'll be much more likely to play the game to completion. Dragon Age 2 looks like the game I wanted Dragon Age: Origins to be, and I have a feeling that it'll help to bring a lot of new fans to the table. I'm definitely looking forward to see what hardcore Dragon Age fans think about the changes, though, as I'm sure this game will have a few outspoken opponents.