Coz The Witcher never claimed itself as the successor of Baldur's Gate.
Dragon Age however does. We were given that, DAO stayed true to BG's gameplay although not as epic. So we expect the same for DA2.

Spiritual successor which is a big difference. Bioshock is a spiritual successor to System Shock 2.

BTW anyone gone poking around with the DA:O toolset. Too early to say and i'm not a skilled modder but with a little tweaking to the existing toolset DA2 looks just as moddable as DA:O with almost the same tools. Textures for one thing are exactly the same format.

Witcher has one controllable party member, DAO has multiple. Action oriented works much better in singles than groups. DAO was also strategic/tactical on the PC, DA2 is less so. The angst comes from the company CHANGING what the game is rather. If it was originally an action RPG then this wouldn't even be under discussion.

Anyone else getting RIDICULOUS stutter from the demo? I started it up, even the cutscenes stuttered and were unwatchable (sound was fine though).

I have a Geforce 450 and a Phenom II X4 955 processor, so I think it should run just fine.

Yeah, I think someone said that they would most likely just release the DA2 toolset as an update to previous one.
Can't remember where exactly, though.

I do not know whether the Witcher 2 will be good, it may be absolute trite, however they seem to have focused on the things that I like, and so I am interested in it. DA2 on the other hand, I had hoped it would be the BG2 to DAO's BG1, not by being a clone of Baldur's Gate 2, but by building on and correcting the flaws of DAO the same way BG2 did for BG1, but instead they seem to have continued their slide towards the JRPG side of things, and I'm not refering to the graphics there.

I don't expect people to agree with me, I'm sure many people will actually prefer it over what I would have liked them to have done instead while others dislike what I am looking forward to in the Witcher 2. Downloaded the demo last night, so I'll see for myself tonight as to whether the direction of the game has made something I might like or not.

It's not in the demo build but will be in the full version. I linked to a post on BioWare's site with confirmation on it a page or so back. (I'm not sure you'll want to spend anytime there though past checking the link and dev message)

I heard that they might not even release an update to the toolset, and if they do it won't be for some time, but that was a while back when I heard it so don't quote me on that. If they intend to do lots of dlc though then unfortunately I can't see them being keen to release it this time, the dlc seems to have sold better for ME2 than it did for DAO, and alternate appearance packs don't sell too well when players can make their own free ones...

/end cynicism

What I find even more amusing is that people are saying Dragon Age 2 is a hack and slash. It's not a true RPG anymore, yet they're saying The Witcher 2 will kick its butt.

Now I've not been following The Witcher 2, but I would like to play it. However, the one preview I read yesterday said that outside of magic, you just press the left mouse button to do light attacks and the right mouse button to do heavy attacks?

That somehow makes The Witcher 2 more of an RPG? And no, I'm not saying it's not. I'm just saying that people's logic is failing me.

I didn't get any stutters but I just had a bad experience last night. Basically my 4 year old computer has decided it hates me. I was getting D3D9.dll crashes when playing Oblivion a while back so I was figuring it was one of my mods that was causing issues with my system. I downloaded the demo from the main DA2 site, it went along zippy and I was never able to run it from that download because explorer kept crashing on me. I finally said fuck it and downloaded it from Steam. It decided it couldn't log me into to the EA server on my account because I just recently decided to install the XP upgrade that turns off auto-run. That annoyed me because it's a digital demo and shouldn't *want* to touch my optical drives.

When I tried to select rogue LadyHawke the game decided for a bit that it wouldn't recognize that I was selecting my character. After some alt-tabbing and general repeated clicking it finally registered and I could start playing.

Everything went very smoothly til what I assume was the end of Isabella's encounter (is my memory right and she's the same rogue that you meet in DAO? I think she is but I haven't played DAO since 09 (not counting Awakening) and her change of looks threw me off at first but I dealt with it) when my game decided to crash thanks to D3d9.dll :( I have no idea how to fix it either since reinstalling Direct X9 never helps.

It was a very frustrating night leading in to playing the demo for me. Once I got past the flashy action sequences I definitely liked it (killed the ogre with the mageling Bethany which made me chuckle since I never play mages, but everyone else was dead :P). I'll fight with my computer more I think but all-in-all it was a bad experience with what should have been a nice evening.

Well last they said (I think it was Fernando Melo) they were undecided about the toolset. The existing mod tools for DA:O are pretty close to the ones they used to make DA2 already so they may release an update. However from what I have seen playing around with the existing toolset they might not have a say in the matter, the toolset already loads DA2 modules so I can only imagine it wont take much work to make an unofficial mod toolset.

But they didn't really change it, they just made it faster and removed the high camera. That doesn't make it an action game where as The Witcher 2 is certainly an action game.

Yes same Isabella that teaches you the Dualist spec in DA:O, she's been given a makeover and what appears to be some cosmetic surgery.

Well that would be good news if it can be done unofficially at least. I remember reading a post from one of them that said that while similar DA2 uses a modified toolset and wouldn't work with the old one, but there's a hell of a lot of clever modders out there and it would just take one of them to figure it out before a 'fix' is spread around.
I'd say neither is a action-RPG really, action-RPG to me is something like Diablo where it's just about the combat, picking up loot etc. Both DA2 and Witcher 2 seem to have too much other stuff going on to easily be shoehorned into that.

I've downloaded the demo but haven't had time to actually play it, I was just speaking from what I've heard, I'll give a more defined answer after I try it out.

For as easy as the demo is I just died on it twice in a row. Second ogre fight, first real one, and I was playing a mage who did not have any healing spells. The mage sister is out of the fight from the start so I had no real healing at all and that ogre and swarm made quick work of us.