Dragon Age: Origins E3 Previews
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The first is at GameSpy:
Dragon Age: Origins is as much about building relationships with its cast of diverse characters and exploring the hand-crafted setting as it is about swinging swords and chucking fireballs. In a demonstration of the game's relationship system, I was shown how the choices you make while interacting with your companions can have significant long-term effects.
The situation presented in this demo was an interactive take on the classic love triangle, and took place in camp, where you'll take a breather between missions and get to better know your party members. Your character is a Grey Warden, and being the beefy knight in blood-soaked armor type, he can't help but attract all the women around him. In this case, it was a duel for his affections between Leilana, a fiery-haired archer, and Morrigan, the amorous sorceress just dying to coax the manly party leader into her tent.
The second is at GayGamer:
Unfortunately, there was nothing new there: the devs went on a rather lengthy ramble about how your character can flirt with one pretty lady party member and enter into a romantic dialog. But if your character flirts with another lady party member, the devious Morrigan (whose voice was, I believe, that of scifi queen Claudia Black), the first pretty lady will get angry and force you to choose between the two pretty ladies.
That wasn't a new concept back in the Baldur's Gate days, so I was utterly baffled as to why they'd show us some rehashed, par-for-the-RPG-course romance mechanic when Dragon Age is a blast to play and has lots more to offer.
And the third is at Giant Bomb:
Given Dragon Age's complexity, I've been really curious how well the game will play on a console controller ever since BioWare announced the game will hit the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 at the same time as the PC game. At E3 this week, I got at least a tentative answer, since BioWare let me check out a brief demo of the 360 game.
I'll answer the big question first: How do you manage all those abilities and attacks on a gamepad? You can map three abilities to the face buttons (one each to X, Y, and B) and then a second set of three abilities, toggling between the two sets of three by holding a trigger. Like on the PC, you can pause the combat indefinitely to issue commands to all your party members, and doing this on the console version is how you get to all the rest of your abilities. So you'll have access to the full run of powers here that you'd also have on the PC, you just won't be able to use as many of them in real time without stopping the combat.
