nice characters but the environment looks empty and plane.

but they got allot of time left to work things out.

Why the long faces?

Wow. Is that a female Hawke? Bioware almost never show off anything other than one default male character.

The character models are definitely improved, but the environments and lighting still don't look as good as Origins to me.

I hope the console version is more actiony and real time were you dont have to wait for a cooldown rather than "wait and strike".

I hope they show off the console gameplay soon.

If that's female Hawke, then I'll definitely play with female. She looks amazing.

Ehm characters faces are customizable like before, thats the just the default if you feel lazy to do one of your own.

They allow us to finally make a good looking character this time I'd be highly pleased. I just wonder how it will be with textures on 360.

Ah no more purple tone on everything!

At the presentation I went to at PAX, they made it sound like they wanted the environments to be a lot less busy than the original game. The focus here is on characters. That said, this is literally the first place you'll see in the game.Well the "lighting" in DA:O was all baked on, not at all dynamic. Thats why it looked pretty good in the environments.Right now the textures are a little lacking but the engine is clearly being polished. One thing that really stood out to me when I was playing was that the game now has more than one material shader. The armor is VERY shiny, and there is a lot more variety as far as that goes. The textures seem better though, if not great just yet. And at the presentation they said that the PC version will look MUCH better than Origins, rather than just being an anti-aliased version of the console game, so hopefully we will see nice clean textures on PC.It is very much that. I played the Rogue at PAX, and it plays very fast. The skills are a lot more physical, and you end up jumping around the battle field like a ninja. One of the moves the Rogue starts with is actually evade, which allows you to jump back quickly, and it seems like if you attack right after you get an automatic crit as you leap back. The rogue seems to be very much about not getting hit and loosing momentum with a couple of skills that got stronger the more successive hits you got on the target without being interrupted. It will be interesting to see how the game fairs in late game scenarios as the number of abilities might get a little much to manage. Already from the start I had a little trouble knowing exactly what I was doing. Cooldowns are still a factor, so you have to move between your skills fluidly, but once you do that, it doesn't seem like you will have to wait much at all to use your next ability.Yes but the default faces always look best. The textures always fit better, the models are usually better, and they look less like a generated character. It stands to be said that it looks like the character customization is actually a bit more detailed this time, it seemed like there were a good deal more options (though they were greyed out on the demo machines), which made me very happy as I love a good bit of customization.

I have seen some games with the same gameplay style, but some abilities have much lower and much faster cooldowns, like Guild Wars 2.
The default attack you can do is super fast because its like half a second cooldown which makes it very fast and it feels like a action game were you press same button fast and they will do the attack right at that moment.

I dont mind if some abilities have cooldowns, but in the original DA it just takes too much time to see the next attack happening, even the default attack.
I just hope its faster in attack motions and the input when you press a button so it feels more.That is what makes me excited :)

About the customization, I will always do my own face, hair, facial hair...etc. if I have the option. Have a different feeling when you create something yourself than take something that is others.

I see what you did there ^w^

I know, but it's hard to get a pretty face (Mass Effect 2 comes to mind)... and that one just looks perfect for me. Don't ask why.

EDIT: And also what pythxvii said. :)

No not really, it depends your standard on "pretty face".
I personally try to make them look as natural and cool as possible, and in ME1 and ME2 it takes like 10 minutes more or less to make my character look cool, same goes with DA1.

Again, it depends how you view your character and how good you are at making them.

I really like the way they've improved the graphics, the faces look more realistic this time as opposed to those shitty models they had in doa.
However, the main problem remained in the animation, the characters were too stiff and that really ruined most of the dramatic scenes in the game.
That's the main issue they should try to improve... And hopefully they did.

The cutscenes in DA2 that I saw looked a bit more natural, much less of the sort of still shots of chest up, and the animation within those scenes seemed a good deal better. They felt more like traditional cut scenes.

The unfortunate thing is that these things are not what made the original DA:O great. It wasn't that kind of game, it wasn't meant to be a hack and slash, character action game. It was a traditional ass RPG, and in that sense it was excellent. If you like those kinds of games, it was a really good example of how to do those right. WHile the action in DA 2 seems good enough, I do hope that at least on PC, there is a sort of old school mode where things are a little slower, a little more tactical.

I dont want the typical say Ninja Gaiden, God of War stuff, no no.
As long as the default attack doesnt have a cooldown were you can keep attacking is fine by me. Think about Torchlight or Diablo3 were you default attack has no limit and you can keep attacking, but when you do use abilities like special attacks, magic...etc. then cooldowns should be there for the sake of RPG factor and stradegy.

But I am excited to see how it turns out, as long as it appeals to me more than DA O did in a way then I might give it a go.

loved Dragon Age 1! Never bought any DLC for it but still loved it. This looks great as well. Day 1