Larian Studios Forums General Chat RPG Chat Well, the Dragon Age II demo was pretty terrible.

"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.