Dragon Age: Origins Previews
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You begin the game by creating a character and then following through their "Origin" story, the original subtitle of the game. This hour to hour and a half provides the intro and the background for the game specific to your character. From there it's onto the 50 to 90 hours of content the game provides. With around 11 or 12 NPCs at your disposal, you'll find the same inter-party banter that made the Baldur's Gate series so lively. Speaking of banter, every piece of dialog in the game is recorded with somewhere between Mass Effect's 500,000 spoken words and Baldur's Gate's 1.2 Million written words.
I asked Watamaniuk what is favorite feature of the game was. "Our dialog system isn't black and white, players are forced to make hard choices." For instance you might be presented with the option to kill one group or kill another group - but which one of those is the "good" option? It's a whole lot of shades of gray is Dragon Age.
While the other is at Eurogamer:
The party we took around the hands-on was four-strong, headed up by one of the six starting characters, a Dalish Elf called Winter. It's an early part of the main story - just an hour or two after the Dalish Elf origin story. There was no mission text, but it's a dungeon crawl: kill everything alive, open every chest, and the biggest guy in there will drop a portal. In this case, we were told that the big guy was an Ogre.
Winter's attacks included the Pommel Strike - an attack with the blunt edge of the weapon, designed to knock the enemy back. She could also gain aggro with her Threaten attack, or choose to land her blows on the enemy's weapon, reducing its damage.
Meanwhile, the nameless Tower Guard we'd recruited played the role of our team's ranged fighter, an archer with a number of accuracy and damage tweaks to his basic shot. His Shield Bash (a power shared with Alistair) had a similar knock-down effect, and could also be used to release party members from the grip of the Ogre before he attempts to mortar and pestle them against the stone floor.
