So you want to know about the Champion?

The final segment of the demo skips ahead to Hawke’s arrival in the city of Kirkwall, where he meets a dwarven crossbowman and saucy rogue chick. Naturally, you want to help this well-endowed girl with whatever trouble she’s having, so you fight your way through mercenaries in the city streets to confront their captain in the local Chantry. You’ve got a full party now and your skills are nearly developed back to where they were at the beginning of the demo, so you can really get a feel for combat here. While you cannot zoom out quite as far as was possible in Origins, you shouldn’t have much trouble seeing things that are a moderate distance away. More of an issue lies in the sketchy third-person view that results from zooming in close, which makes it rather difficult to see much of your character’s body, let alone other things in your immediate vicinity. Seeing as how your ability to fare well in combat relies on being able to have a clear view of the enemy in order to click on them, the overhead angle is really the only way to go.

Graphics

Unfortunately, some of the higher visual quality options are disabled in the Dragon Age 2 demo… That includes diffusion depth of field and high-quality blur effects, as well as the “Very High” detail setting, which requires DirectX 11 hardware and enables advanced dynamic lighting, contact-hardening soft shadows, improved terrain rendering with tessellation, and geometry displacement effects. Obviously, DX11 compatibility brings some fancy new effects that simply didn’t exist in Dragon Age: Origins, but if the demo is any indication, there are some graphical aspects of Dragon Age 2 that appear to be lacking, even in comparison to its predecessor.


The biggest deficiencies I see are with the textures and particle effects, which may be okay for 720p on a big, blurry TV screen, but simply don’t stand up to scrutiny on a computer monitor running 1080p or higher. To verify this, I also played the demo on the PS3 and found that, aside from a crap load of jaggies (4x AA was used on the screenshots you see here), it looks pretty much the same as it does on PC. In fact, the lower resolution actually helps you not notice how shabby the textures are. On another note, it would seem the UI (or at least the character portraits and status bars) were created for that resolution, and it being scaled to higher ones is the reason it’s almost too small on PC.



Some people are theorizing that the finished game will have higher resolution textures, but they left those out of the demo in order to keep the download size manageable. That may be true, but I would think you’d find a way to put your best foot forward and make sure that even the demo looks as good as it possibly can. After all, this is a free trial meant to entice people to buy the game, so what good is it if it’s not representative of the final product? In any case, it appears we will have to wait until March to see what BioWare has in store for the full version of Dragon Age II. You can bet we’ll have a proper review here on FiringSquad as soon as humanly possible after it releases, so stay tuned!