I've heard about that, some of the faces look really good and I can't wait until I'm able to come up with an awesome looking face.

Create first face... Splatter with blood.

The first reason I'm so perturbed is it really felt they were using the download counter to work people over. I mean, almost 300k in downloads one day when the previous four days COMBINED had about 200k? Bullcrap. Second reason i'm sick of this is it feels like I won't be getting the BEST Bioware has to offer if I don't check up on the progress of a game every day, jump through a flaming hoop of death, and do the hoke-poke at a dance club. There shouldn't be 500 things you get before the game isn't even out, especially if your game svcks.

I want to know what happens in the rest of the series because I really enjoyed the story in Origins (I didn't care much for the actual gameplay). The demo did not impress me enough to think that this was a game that my friends needed to play. I'll most likely wait a day or two and see what people think (on these forums), before actually seeing if I should buy the one I've reserved or not. But I'm done with the Bioware pre-game dance.

The thing is, there's a scale of marketing "severity". On one end you've got a company just quietly putting out a product and relying on its own merits to sell it, and on the other, you've got basically mugging people. Neither is a great idea from a business standpoint, but there's no clear line on what's acceptable, and when some people think it's still okay, others are going to feel it's going too far.

What they're basically doing is taking their finished game, showing it to people, then removing content from it to try and goad people into giving them free advertising. It's like if Skyrim were about to come out, with the usual ten races, and then Bethesda said "okay, only 9 are playable when you buy it full price, but we'll unlock Argonians if you also tell all your friends to buy our game". Is it "savvy marketing"? Probably. Is it deserving of getting mad at them? Yes, it's that too. Between the release-day DLC and free-marketing bonuses it's not at all far off from EA simply declaring "we're raising the price from $60 to $80." "Why?" "Because we can. Deal with it." It may be a great move from a business standpoint, but that doesn't make it any less bastardly toward the consumers.

No, for your next trick you'll learn to play fetch. Or no treat for you! :rolleyes:

The PC Gamer magazine reviewer claims that DA 2 actually has more use of lore than the first game. He claims that in DA:O, the lore was overshadowed by the standard "defeat the ancient evil" plot. I'l see if I can get the exact quote:

"Once the continent of Thedas was concrete, BioWare forgot it'd invented all that engaging stuff and slapped a typical 'kill the big bad thing' fantasy storyline on top. For all its size and wonder, Origins didn't make full use of its fascinating world.
Dragon Age 2 does it right." (p. 64)

This may be hyperbole from that reviewer, but at least he's not claiming it's only an action game.

Except they are not taking out major game features, but pointless, worthless trinkets.

Edit: not taking out, adding.

And i bet none of those have unique art assets and anyone who has ever used a computer could duplicate them in 5 minutes.

I think one must have run out of options if one starts debating about the advertisemant for the game.

Anyone catch the mod made for the demo? Enables hard and nightmare difficulty levels - which are as far away from "God of War RPG" as they could be. Also facial customisation for Hawke, though the lack of many textures kind of hinders it. Your family has only facial resemblance, the rest of their bodies stays white, many hairstyles are missing, and so on. But you can make awesome Hawkes. ^_^

And again, there's no clear line on where "worthless trinket" is and how much bigger a thing you can remove and have it still be "acceptable". Some of the bigger DLC packages could easily be compared to major game features.

As for taking out vs adding, release-day DLC and bonus items are clearly game objects that are finished before the game is sent out. They're not half-finished features that were cut because there wasn't enough time or extra material they wanted to add but couldn't and had to release later as optional content. It's finished, ready game content that could easily be part of the completed game that they choose not to include so they can either charge extra for it or treat it like a "bonus". The semantics of whether they're adding or removing it doesn't matter, the point is the premise of it.

If they were taking out characters or chapters of the story, then i'd raise some noise, but i really can't be bothered for a Dagger of über Slaying As i said, i suspect their worth (in man hours) is practically non-existant, so i can't really justify an outrage with "i paid for it" either. This assuming time was taken from the deveploment of the main game for these items. Again this would be different if it was something more substansial.

Well, people on the EABioware forums have been playing around with the console in the demo and found all kinds of stuff. Depending on one's tolerance for spoilers, there is a lot of debating going on about stuff.

And it seems that they've tanked the ending of Awakening for more than Anders, if you had certain LI in Origins two of them sort of kind of carried over to Awakening; at least you got a letter from your lover. The epilogue mentioned rumors about your LI and your Warden. And I know what the epilogue was for my wardens, and seeing the spoiler screenshot reinforced my earlier feeling that my playthrough of Awakening really didn't matter.

It will be interesting to see where the story will go. for me it will be someday, when the super compilation uber edition is out on steam.

The skin colors will match the faces. The demo didn't have that built it.

That's all we've been getting from Bioware. Oh that was an old demo that was leaked from GDC last year, this one will be better trust us. It's practically the same [censored] thing this new demo. So now the base game is going to magically change again? Yea, ass pull. What's the point of a demo if it's not representative of your product, seems like a scramble from Bioware.

Use spoiler tags, I want to know about just how meaningless my characters choices were.

For starters:

:tops: I just tried the demo again using the mod to enable nightmare level. it's pretty hard and a lot more fun than the demo's default difficulty setting - also allows you to change inventory and customize character faces

you have to extract them to C:\Users\Admin\Documents\BioWare\Dragon Age 2 Demo

http://mod.gib.me/dragonage2/demo/chargen.7z

http://mod.gib.me/dragonage2/demo/inventory.7z

A dev said that the nightmare mode wasn't finished being balanced by that demo, so it's not what you'll get in the final game. But is there friendly fire?

Lack of friendly fire in non-nightmare diffculites is a thing that bugs me in this game. I see shooting a fireball at area with friendlies in Dragon Age as good idea as firing a missile into area with friendlies in Fallout. [censored] stupid. (Of course given the power of explosives in New Vegas, both would do about the same amount of damage ).

I want a FF toggle option :stare:

That's not going to happen. The reason being is that the computer keeps launching fireball and you take full damage on Nightmare. Even if they lowered it to half as much damage as Nightmare on the lower diffiucltys it's still going to be too much.

That's why i never set tactics for mages to use AoE spells in Origins, i aimed those myself. Enemies bombarding their allies with spells in Origins was stupid, but the answer is to improve AI, not to cut FF. It can't be that hard to make the AI target fireballs so that their allies aren't in it's area of effect.

Let me guess, the only M/M romance option in this game is a twinky elf, right?

I think Bioware hired a bunch of yaoi fangirls to oversee all the gay aspects of their games.

Actually, there's speculation that they all go both ways

Nope, only two from what I'm reading.

The twinky elf and some other guy who also seems to have been inspired by some yaoi fangirls wet dreams. And neither of them are actual gay, only bi.

Got kind of excited when I saw the Dwarf guy. Thought for a moment some people at Bioware had actually met a real, flesh-and-blood gay person and realized we don't all look like extras from Queer as Folk, but alas...

:rofl: Yes, all the LI's are definitely lacking. You have a Bishi elf, a psycho with multiple-personality disorder, a [censored], or some under-aged-looking girl.

Debating the Steam pre-order. Someone convince me.

You can pre-load it, and it has nothing else than Steam as it's DRM.