Dragon Age 2 - First Impression

Man have I been busy. I've been trying to find time to dig into Bioware's latest epic, but have found myself pulled in a lot of directions lately. I did however manage to get a few hours with Dragon Age 2 over the last few days and I'm ready to talk about some of my early impressions.

First, the combat is, well, I'm not really sure. I'm playing on casual difficulty and it doesn't seem too hard or too annoying. However from what I've heard, the harder difficulty settings will increasingly require the insanely micromanaged combat experience I found so frustrating in the first game. A similar form of pseudo-programming for establishing party AI is back, which while I've tinkered with it a little still seems labyrinthine and frustrating to me.

Second, this game surprisingly feels kind of like Fable. The cartoonish antics and animations may not be present, but the story telling techniques seem very Lionhead-esque. The story focuses on the hero, and the hero's relationships with their family and party members. The use of time lapse events (like the year of indentured servitude your hero endures as the game opens, or the 3 year gap that occurs between the end of the games first and second acts) reminds me very much of the sequences in Fable where the hero is sent to prison, or a citadel, only to return to see the impact their previous decisions had on the world in their absence. The similarity of the animations used to depict the events of these time when they are narrated will also probably look very familiar with anybody who has played the Fable franchise.

Anyways, I'm not sure if I'll have it in me to finish this title, but I am anxious to get back to it and see what happens in the second act.