Like anyone else who's been following Dragon Age 2, I've been hearing the same quips about, "hit a button and something awesome happens" or how "visceral" the combat is. While I don't adopt the "they're pulling a Mass Effect 2 on Dragon Age: Origins" stance, I still usually sort of roll my eyes and think, "whatever" when I hear those phrases; but after playing about an hour-and-a-half of Dragon Age 2, I have to admit that those sorts of phrases aren't entirely inaccurate. Playing on both the PC and the Xbox360, it's safe to say that Dragon Age 2 isn't a Mass Effect 2-style "strip down the RPG elements and turn it into an action game with RPG touches" endeavor -- it's more of "take Dragon Age, and make it a bit better, prettier, and faster."
That last point stands out the most for me. Make no mistake: Dragon Age 2 isn't suddenly an action game with stats -- you still issue commands to your party members, and you can still pause during combat (easily done on PC by hitting the spacebar, and using radial menus a la like the previous game) to figure out the situation. Though, in DAO, there was a sort of lackadaisical attitude in your characters when it came to combat. The simple act of issuing an attack order usually translated into the directed character sort of lollygagging their way to their target, and then enacting a slow attack animation. Getting a rogue to the proper position for a backstab attack was a pain-and-a-half due to the lack of walking speed. Not so with Dragon Age 2 anymore.
The developers have made a bunch of little tweaks and touches to the battle animations and abilities, which makes combat seemingly flow a lot faster now. A backstab now has the rogue dropping a smoke bomb and then instantly popping up to the victim from behind. A shield bash command no longer has the warrior slowly amble forth and then halfheartedly hit his target -- he now plows forward (resembling some sort of medieval linebacker) and you can see the character model putting his shoulder into the resultant bash. The rogue no longer fishes a grenade and lightly tosses it towards the cluster of foes; she quickly tosses it in the air and then kicks it towards her victims. Another nice touch: in DA, an archer rogue's melee attack was to simply perform the same arrow-shooting animation, but for DA2, the archer quickly takes out a dagger with his offhand and repeatedly stabs the target.
While the combat looks and feels faster thanks to animation tweaks (while still maintaining the core mechanics of the previous game), the main visual change comes from the over-the-top violence. At times, combat resembles a scene out of Kill Bill and Monty Python & The Holy Grail simultaneously. When a rogue uses both of her daggers to chop someone in half, we see a copious spray of blood, flying chunks of viscera, and are left with a pair of freestanding legs. When a warrior delivers a killing blow with a huge overhand strike, the resultant bloodspray looks downright fountain-like. The warrior-specific ability to simply charge in a circle usually results in instantly disemboweling most foes in the area. The way your characters get covered in blood still looks comical, but the amount of sheer bodily carnage that happens during the course of a single battle provides a bit of a better explanation for said appearance now.
Thierry Nguyen
No comments:
Post a Comment