If there’s one thing the multi-hour, sprawling epic Dragon Age: Origins can’t be accused of, it’s being too linear with its storytelling (or, for that matter, too short on content). The team behind the RPG wasn’t happy with the game just being open-ended, however: they want to completely do away with the way they tell their tales, and are redesigning the next Dragon Age from the ground up.

Our hands-on demo of Dragon Age II opens with our hero Hawke tearing through hordes of darkspawn like nobody’s business. Each enemy goes down with two swings of the sword — three if they’re lucky. After taking out the requisite ogre (with a suspicious amount of ease), we discover a massive dragon breathing directly down our necks. And then Oghren, the narrator, cuts in to tell us what really happened.

Once we’re able to gain control of Hawke again on the battleground, the combat now feels way more like the Dragon Age we’re used to. The fighting becomes more tactical, the enemies more difficult to take down, and the fights a bit smaller and more focused. Everything in the preamble up to this point had been Oghren embellishing Hawke’s legend…and now we’re playing what really happened. Rather than just blowing through hordes of hurlocks and demolishing the ogre, we instead struggle our way through the terrain, losing Hawke’s brother Carver along the way. The sense of danger and imminent destruction is now very real.

This framed narration is what drives the story in Dragon Age II. Rather than limiting the scope to what a single character can experience, the game’s narrator is able to tell more than a decade of history over the course of the game, allowing the player to see the full repercussions of their actions. Obviously, we’re super stoked to see where this new-fangled storytelling structure will take us in this expansive new world.

On the gameplay side of things, everything we loved about Origins’ combat is here, but now it’s sped up. Rather than issuing commands and having it feel like your character is waiting to execute them, everything happens with immediacy. This leads to a much more console-friendly experience, whereas the first game definitely felt like it was adapted from a PC.

Though some of the original game's more hardcore fans may bemoan the easing up of the learning curve, we appreciate the changes. Dragon Age II is still early in development, but we have a hunch that these tweaks will keep its pace snappy for fans and newcomers alike. Now if we can just figure out where we left our longswords…