Dragon Age 2 - News Round Up # 2

Some news about DA2 has popped up from varying sources on the net, so I'll collect them here. First up is two reviews from German Magazines, then we have a story about a DA2 event in London and at last we have something about a DA2 demo FAQ.

On the Bioware forums, there's a thread about reviews from two German magazines started by Estel1978. Maria Caliban made a post on Obsidian's forums citing the German source. Here's what Estel1978 has to say, first the review from PC Games.

I don't have the print magazines myself, got those infos from a german board. I'm trying my best with the translations.

PC Games gave it 88, pros and cons:

+ very well told hero story
+ varied followers, each with their own stories
+ great dialogs with moral decisions
+ exciting boss battles
+ martial-arts-fans should have great fun with possibly the fastest (or fast paced) battles in a fantasy game

- ...but old-school RPG players might have their problems with the flurry of activities in battles
- limited class progression with fixed skilltrees
- poor level design with one-to-one copy-pasting of whole quest areas (do they mean, some areas are a carbon copy of each other???)*
- unsatisfying ending

Then she talks about the review from Gamestar.

Gamestar gave it 87, pros and cons:

+ thrilling storyline
+ great dialogs and quests
+ coherent / consistent game world

- some fiddly battles
- less epic as DAO

Their conclusion: great RPG, slightly weaker than DAO

Yesterday, on the 19th of February, there was a small DA2 presentation in London, open to the public. A Bioware, forumite, Maria13, made this thread about it. Here's a snip about what she had to say:

Well, a podcast was taken so no doubt it will be posted somewhere on BSN soon. There weren't many of us, I'd say about 50. Mike Laidlaw was questioned by The Guardian games critic. Most of the discussion was about the difficulty of writing such complex games. Mike was a very calm, informative and humorous interviewee.

Christ Priestly made a FAQ thread about the demo released this Tuesday, the 22nd of February 2011. Here's some selected snips from it:

What time will the demo be available?
For PC – February 22 at 9am PST
For Xbox 360 – February 22 between midnight and 2am PST
For Playstation 3 users in North America – February 22 between 4pm and 8pm PST
For Playstation 3 users outside North America -  February 23 between 4pm and 8pm GMT
 
I have a Silver Xbox Live account. Does that make a difference?
Slightly. The demo is available for free through both Silver and Gold Xbox Live accounts. The Xbox Live Gold account will have teh demo on February 22. The Xbox Live Silver account will have it one week late.

Where do I get the PC version of the demo?
We will have a link to the demo download on the Dragon Age 2 demo page.
 
How do I get my Hayder’s Razor” item for finishing the demo?
After you finish the demo if you have logged in with or created an EA account you will get an entitlement called Hayder’s Razor which is a Dwarfen Sword which they can use in the main game.
 
Is Hayder’s Razor available for all platforms?
Yes.

And so, this counts as one of the more than 600 items* you can get if you pre-order, buy the game at certain places,  play Dead Space 2 and much more*

* May not entirely be accurate...