Dragon Age 2 - Hands-On @ Greywardens

Greywardens got some hands-on time with Dragon Age 2 at San Diego Comic-Con.  Here's a snip from their preview - a spoiler does follow but this has already been foreshadowed elsewhere in other previews:

The story is told by two different narrators who tend to embellish how powerful you really are, and the intro filled out the story of Ostagar (in the same stained glass fashion of DA:O). The game definitely played a bit more like Mass Effect 2, what with the voice acting, as well as in the general gameplay. At one point, I was offered the chance to utterly destroy mobs of darkspawn that were coming at me, or have the mage that was with me (Bethany, I think her name was) blast them. Mage spells in the demo were crushing prison and mind blast — which worked to marvelous effect, of course. The spellbook worked well, but, at least in the demo, there were no tooltips. When I reached the end of the preview, just as it was obvious everyone was going to die, a dragon came out of nowhere and, graciously, killed all of the darkspawn. The dragon then morphed into a familiar old lady with long grey hair — guess who, anyone?