Zitat
More info from Comic Con. Sounds like they took a lot of the good stuff from Alpha Protocol
Dialog System:
-IGN got a whole lot of things wrong about this. While the dialog system is now in a wheel, the intention of the wheel is to retain Dragon Age's dialog system while adding voice acting. Firstly, there are up to five response slots and five investigate slots on each wheel, and none of the response types in this wheel are static. There are a lot more response types than the three IGN listed, and the idea behind the symbols is to show the intent, not the result of your actions. Since there are only five response slots and more than five symbols, the types of responses you can make in each situation change as well. To give an example of how this works, you might be talking to a bandit who stopped you on the road and have the response types of friendly, aggressive, sarcastic, and flirty. Instead of defusing the situation, choosing the friendly option might result in you getting robbed since the bandit isn't scared of you, while choosing the aggressive option might scare them away. Since there is no morality meter, there is no arbitrary penalty for choosing one option over the other. However, if you're say, talking to a ten year old boy, some of the options like flirty might disappear while others are added in.
-The other thing they wanted to do was make your personality very mutable despite having voice acting. BioWare views Shepard as having a very pre-defined personality, where he is a stoic marine no matter what type of dialog you choose. With Hawke, they implemented the intent icons so you know what your character will do when choosing a dialog option. One of the issues with Mass Effect is that choosing the paragon option might result in you punching someone in the face, which could be the exact opposite of what you intended to happen, even though it would ultimately be the paragon choice. With Dragon Age 2, only the aggressive option would result in you punching someone in the face, but the morality of that decision won't be indicated. However, since you always Hawke's intent, you can choose to make your character have the same generally friendly demeanor to both the kid picking flowers and the serial murderer if you really want to.
Combat System:
-I'm not entirely clear on what they changed for the console version of the game, so I can't really shed any light there.
-For the PC game, it largely plays the same, but so far they have announced three notable changes.
* The first change is that they wanted to remove what they viewed as the "Dragon Age Shuffle". When playing the game near release, they started to notice several issues with their combat system, and they gave three examples of the types of issues they wanted to solve. The first is that, after shield bashing someone, it would take so long for your character to get into place to attack again that the person you shield based would already be getting up, causing you to only get one hit in before they got back up. The second is that you could get into situations where your warrior would try to attack an enemy, but that enemy would be going for you mage, and your warrior was so slow at attacking that the enemy would be able to just run on past them. Once your mage started fleeing the oncoming attacker, you would end up with a situation where the mage, the enemy, and the warrior would run around in a train chasing each other, with none of them being able to attack or use abilities fast enough to change the situation. The third they listed was that after telling your rogue to shoot someone with a critical strike arrow, your rogue with start to pull an arrow out of the quiver, but in that time, the enemy may have moved out of range, causing your rogue to move back into range and then start pulling an arrow out of the quiver again. By the time your rogue was finally ready to fire an arrow, the target might already be dead. Their solution to this was to make all the abilities much more immediate and rework the engagement system so that you don't walk around until you're facing one of the exact angles the game expects you to be in to actually attack. If you want to fire a critical arrow, your arrow will actually fire instead of having a 1+ second warm up time, and instead of spending shuffling into position, your warriors will just leap into battle and start attacking.
* Another thing they changed was that they felt that almost all the interest of the battle system revolved around controlling your mage, so in order to try and make the other classes more interesting to use, they added combination attacks to the other classes as well. For example, sundering armor now increases the damage of backstab. Combined with the previously mentioned change, they feel that the other classes will be more interesting to play now.
* The final change they listed was that they felt there were a lot of mage spells that were either clones of other spells, pretty much useless, or so situationally useful that they were pretty much irrelevant. So for Dragon Age 2, they lowered the total number of spells with the goal of making a larger number of useful spells, and they also added a customization system to each of the spells allowing you to make fairly large changes to the way they work over the course of the game.
Companions:
-BioWare felt that in Dragon Age 1, when talking with your companions, the game penalized you for choosing any dialog options except the one that would make their reputation go up, causing players to always choose the dialog option their companions preferred, even if it disagreed with how their character acted during the rest of the game. In order to address this, BioWare changed the dialog system so that you could have an antagonistic relationship with your companions while still unlocking bonuses and not having them abandon you solely based on their reputation. However, having an antagonistic relationship with a companion character will change their combat behavior in ways they haven't revealed yet.
-However, companion characters can still abandon you based on the actions you take.
Story Format:
-The game's lead writer has promised that there are no secret/exclusive organizations (like the Wardens, Spectres, Jedi, etc), there is no ancient evil, and that at no point do you save the world.
-The game takes place over a 10 year span of time, and it's not just a situation where "you see something happen ten years ago and then you're in the present", but rather you will continually shift in time, and they've implied that sometimes those shifts won't happen chronologically. The thing they really liked about this was that they felt it let them put the consequences of your actions directly into the game instead of just showing you a slideshow of what happened after the game had ended. So instead of hearing "and so and so has become a drunk while city x took over city y because of the things you did," after a time shift the results of your actions will actually be reflected in the game world and change the game.
-The story is actually told from the perspective of narrators in the present recalling events from Hawke's life. One of the interesting consequences of this is that the person's perception of you can effect how events unfold. For example, one of the first scenes in the game is told by someone who really thought highly of you, so when you're playing through that section, you're chopping darkspawn in half in one hit and doing all sorts of crazy things you could never actually do in reality because the person is greatly exagerating your story. Of course, this opens the possibility that if some really hated you, you might suddenly find things quite grim.
-They did remove the origin stories and the ability to change your race.
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