It's been officially announced. From the slashdot article


It links to Kotaku's coverage of the Bioware announcement at: http://kotaku.com/5582305/dragon-age-2- ... -different
And the official site at: http://dragonage.bioware.com/da2/

Moved it to RPG

And yeah, while I am happy to see that there will be a DA2 soon-ish, there are some worrying things already. For one you'll only be able to play as a human - no other races. This is probably done because they want full voice-acted dialogue for everyone. I think they're also ditching the isomatric camera view, but that is just something I vaguely heard somewhere.

So yeah, more DA2: YES PLEASE - but i'm a little worried regardless.

Hmmm. We'll have to see. The expansion for DA1 wasn't all that awesome. Maybe they're about to slide the franchise into doom. Ah well, whatever, I'm still ok with it.

there's a fairly brief hands-on DA2 preview up on Gamespot.

http://comic-con.gamespot.com/story/627 ... i-hands-on

Myeaaah..."better graphics", "better combat mechanics", "new visual style"...I dunno.

It sounds like they're trying to push the game in a direction that doesn't necessarily do it for me. I'd rather see them talk about story and immersion. What's probably going on is that Bioware is trying to make the game more attractive to consoles because the original didn't get received very well on those (because classic RPG's are quintessentially PC-based, I suppose. They just don't work on consoles). Which, I don't need to tell you, may not be very good news for us.

yea, that's what I was reading into it as well. "ME2 did so well, we're going to make DA2 more like it". Meh... they're different games, different styles... I want DA2 to be hard core RPG. Hell, I want it to be more hard core than it was in DA1.

What? More blood? I was hoping they wouldn't go so much overboard with that this time. I even turned off gore because it was just stupid.

Haha, what, you didn't think it was realistic for your entire party to be soaked in blood after killing one wolf? Yeah it was pretty dumb. It made it seem as if every fight you did was some sort of ritual slaughter where everyone bathed their faces in the enemies' blood.

(well ok that may have been the case in my games, but still)

yea, I agree, pretty silly. I don't have an aversion to blood by any means, and some of the corpse explosion spells probably should cover everyone nearby in blood, but it was certainly over done.

Pretty awesome cinematic. Usual thing, no gameplay but looks cool

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gc-10 ... e-2/702959

cool... looks interesting. I'm still not going to hold my breath that they didn't dumb it down to oblivion.

Well I did find something that basically seemed to say you don't choose your character anymore, you play *whoever with set background* so that's put me off somewhat. But as I haven't finished the first one still, or the expansion, I'm not gonna worry about #2 for a while anyway.

The first one is pretty great. The expansion, not so much.

The more I read/hear about DA2 the less I feel like it's something I might be interested in. I bought a gaming mag in which they talked about the game and did an interview with the design lead (or something) and he was like "DA1 was confusing and had too many different styles clashig" or whatever and how they'd go for a different approach in DA2. They showed a comparative screenshot of an Ogre in DA1 and one in DA2. Essentially the same creature, but the new one looks way more cartoonish and just...meh. I can't believe he thought that what he showed was an improvement over the original. It's like he was trying to see what shit he could pull until people stopped lapping it up...even the gaming mag was hesitant about the changes, and if there's one thing gaming mags are not known for it's being not very excitable about new AAA games.


DA1 Ogre:

http://www.betasjournal.com/medias/img/ ... re_025.jpg

DA2 Ogre:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_X1vrNCw4VzU/T ... een2v2.jpg

wtf?

err...that looks like a lower poly count version of the original. How is this an improvement?