Is cheese bad or good? I am not down with the kids lingo these days.

In this instance, it would be a bad thing.

Thanks. I swear the kids these days with their intertubes and their pornography...

Difficulties have been rebalanced. Normal is now equal to normal DA:O on consoles which was easy on PC. Hard is equal to PC's normal DA:O and Nightmare is equal to Nightmare on DA:O. Basically all levels are now easy compared to DA:O's hard so if you want the real challenge you have to play on Nightmare.

Cheese as in easy. :) Not a kid lol.

Then again I'm playing the full party in Nightmare. I'm pretty sure there are people who have completed the game in Nightmare, solo.

Why does it matter? That would be my retort. Mass Effect 2 is damn easy on normal mode so I played it on insanity and suddenly I needed to use my part members, use my skills and stay on my toes. Normal is there for people who want to mindlessly hack through the game and I would guess easy is there for people that just want the story.

If you want to be challenged play on nightmare. Everyone wins!

Fair enough, I guess, but that begs the question: why are there 4 difficulty settings if there is basically little to no difference in the first three (all three of the lower settings have no FF and presumably zero need for tactics - yes, I know I'm assuming). Wouldn't it make more sense to have the difficulty actually scale? I don't know, I guess it's just me, but I've always thought 'normal' should be challenging. And maybe it will be. After all, as I've noted, I've only played a few minutes of the demo. Bah, I'm waffling.

But I like waffles...

I want a proper playthroguh combat wise but i also want to pay attention to everything else.I don't want to start right off the bat worrying about perfect gear combinations, perfect char development, perfect skill trees picks, etc because i'm playing nightmare. Combat is important but is not the only thing in the game. So most likely i'll do a couple of gimped playthroughs first and then i'll move on to nightmare for a proper playthrough, but that's assuming DA2 has enough replay value to make me want to play through it more than a couple of times, because let's face it, replayability wise DAO wins hands down.

FF as an option instead of FF as in 'yet another choice taken away from me' would've suited me better.

Oh yes, I want to have FF as an ACTUAL option, that I can toggle on and off anytime. I find DA: O incredibly hard to control, I would KILL to get the old interface from Baldur's Gate back, and that makes Area of effect stuff unusable

I had my second go on the demo, tried a mage this time and got my ass handed to me by the Ogre. Maybe I just suck...

Oh also enabled DX11 in the launcher and it allowed me to use AF x16 and high graphics settings. No issues I could find.

To people pointing at harder difficulties bringing great rewards... where is it? I can't raise the difficulty to test your claims with the demo. Its stuck on normal for me.

After coasting through as a fighter (mage first time), I have to say fighters have been seriously beefed for dragon age 2. They do all the stuff you needed mages for in DA1, short of healing.

So many crowd control options. Lacking the harder difficulty test, I can't tell if any of their moves inflict friendly fire. I'm thinking they won't, making them the super easy class. Just scythe, whirlwind, slam etc to your hearts content.

Money down, one of the earliest mods will be shared cooldown. Something else DA2 could have nicked from ME2.

Wow the replies in RPS made me emoish:

[i]Nimic: Well this thread doesn’t give me much faith. It sounds exactly like what I feared it would be (essentially an action RPG with very much focus on the action and very little on the RPG. I’m not sure I even want to play the demo, I’m afraid my fears will be confirmed.
Mayjori: the demo will make you cry :( [/i]

[i]bascule42: Just tried the demo. Oh dear. They’ve Jar Jar Binksed it.
“Made it more appealing to a wider player base.” Bullshit for; “Console is the primary platform for this release”. Well, I hope the xbox kids enjoy it. It looks nice, plenty of hack n slash, rather simple , and has a nice Press X to start, oh sorry did I say “x”", of course I meant “any key to start”. What am I thinking. And of course, the lovely, simple charactor selection. Choose your hero. Is there an RPG/fantasy version of “America, Fuck Yeah”? “Ferelden, Fuck yeah. Darkspawn your days are through. Now you have to answer to…” etc.[/i]

[i]cjlr: The ugly – DA2 is to DA what Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance was to BG2.
But hey, Dark Alliance was fun. It gives me and my friends something to do while we drink beer. It’s dumb and shallow, but at least it’s fun. Maybe DA2 will be fun. I don’t think it will be what I was hoping for, but maybe it will be fun. Tits.[/i]

And to me BG: DA and Simcity Socities are the greatest shit on the Earth for using the name of a legendary game and turning it completely different from the original games.

I'm not big on the RPS community. The writers are amazing, but the commenters are much too cynical.

There is no such thing!

I assume I got 99% through the demo and then my computer decided it hated me and crashed the game. :) Oh well...

Thoughts:

I like the fact that for the most part the combat really is basically the same as DAO. The zippy combat styles really threw me off at first but I got used to it. I plan to play a rogue first cause that's my go to class as far as the DA universe is concerned.

Aesthetically, I don't really like the way the hurlocs now look, but I LOVE how Flemeth looks. <3 The rest of the characters look fine so far.

Dialoguewise I really like the fact that the wheel has the icons to give us a good idea on how the line will be delivered. I love ME but a lot of the time the dialogue tree text and how the line is actually said is so different that it's ridiculous, so I'm glad this is mostly fixed. Oh and I'm satisfied with LadyHawke's voice.

Even though I didn't complete it tonight thanks to Direct X 9 deciding to freak out, it's relieved a lot of the things I was worried about from a lot of PC blogs initially blowing things out of proportion. Very much looking forward to release date now.