"We saw a lot of people disengaging at hour one, hour two. Not pursuing it, right?" explains Laidlaw. The Dragon Age team might have chalked some of those lost players up to rentals, but the statistics didn't back it up: a significant number of people simply stopped playing Dragon Age: Origins after a few hours.

"I think what it really spoke to is something RPGs have been wrestling with for a long time: that first impression," says Laidlaw.

So they fixed it.

"You get to an RPG and fire it up, and ... it hits you in the face with a thousand stats. Those stats are very cool, but you may not be mentally or emotionally prepared to deal with them as your first thing to do in the game," he says.

I've talked to a lot of people who quit playing Dragon Age within a few hours.

Every single one of them quit because OSTAGAR WAS BORING.

And, we have to keep a few things in mind :

- what is a demo trying to achieve ?
- what kind of "image" or impression on the player is it designated to create ?
- what parts of the full game were actually chosen for the full game ?
- why did they chose THESE parts and not others ?
- there was another thing I wanted to add, but I suddenly forgot it

IF a demo is designated to make an impression on player who is trying out a demo (I'm explicitely *not* saying "this demo" !!!), THEn the question is, WHICH kind of impression should the player have ?

To just put an example into the discussion : It would imho be just nonsense to have an dialog-heavy game, and release combat-only sections of the game s a demo.

But on the other had, this could also be part of the what i call "Black Marketing" : Tricking people into believe that certain parts of a game were more important within the full game than they actually are …

This is an interesting thought. Could the maklers of the Dragon Age 2 demo do this kind of marketing as well ? Use combat-heavy portions of the game, but the game has much more dialog instead ? Kind of "luring" gamers who love combat into a game that has in fact not so much of it in it ?

We are just presented a demo. Full stop. We can only speculate on which approach was used by the "makers" of this demo :

- the "traditional approach" = the demo is actually meant to be typical for the full game
- the "Black Marketing" approach : what the demo presents will not be typical for the full game, or even rather the opposite

And this is quite a bunch of unsolved variables, imho.

Me, I don't think - trying to put the overall marketing regarding the game which I've seen this far into the context of the demo - that the people at BiowEAre use the so-called "Black Marketing" approach. Given what I've read and heard about this game so far, I'm rather leaning towards believing that the demo will be rather typical for the rest of the game.

On all platforms, Dragon Age II caters to an audience that didn’t connect with Origins, while alienating those who did. This may result in a better console experience, but considering that Dragon Age: Origins was a love letter to old-school PC RPGs, BioWare’s neglect of the sequel’s PC release is tragic. I appreciate the technical refinements, but improving the polish doesn’t do much good when the basics still need work.

Hi everyone, have any of you played the demo that released today? What do you think?

I'll put down some issues that I have, and they're as follows:

- The gameplay is just bad. The combat is faster paced, though it doesn't have a 1:1 feel. I know that Dragon Age Origins didn't have this either, but it seems worse in Dragon Age II. It looks as if you should have full control of your character, but the combat is dull, boring, and I can hardly tell what's going on. On top of that, I hate that control still isn't 1:1, as I was fighting a large group of enemies and one enemy started to run away, so I was trying to attack the enemy closest to me, yet I couldn't attack the enemy because my character kept running after the enemy who was running away from me. Why don't I have the control? Why is my character like a magnet to the other enemy that's further away? So they took away the more strategic combat, yet they still left these issues. Do note that I've only played the Xbox 360 version so far.

- The graphics are super ugly. I'm not a graphics whore. I think Divinity II is a beautiful game. However, Dragon Age II has piss poor art direction, bland and muddy textures for environments, armor, etc. I like how expressive your main character can be, though. He doesn't look too bad, I guess.

- Linear point A to point B gameplay. This is supposedly an RPG, but there's like no exploration. The first one was linear, yes, which was one of my main complaints with that game, but this one seems like it holds your hand way too much. It's almost like they took the Final Fantasy XIII level design and copy & pasted it. Disappointing, to say the least.

Well, those are just a few of my concerns. Of course, though, this is just a demo and could change, but it's disappointing nonetheless.