Dragon Age: Origins E3 Preview

Based on what we've seen elsewhere and the new preview on VGTribune, I don't think anyone can call BioWare's E3 demonstration of Dragon Age: Origins a success. Unless, of course, it was purposely designed to push away the action crowd and get RPG enthusiasts genuinely interested:
After encountering a few baddies I quickly found out that switching between your characters is essential to survival. At that point I thought I would be alright with juggling the three characters in order to progress through the game, but I hadn't put my finger on the gameplay's flaw yet. After hitting the attack button several times for the character I had selected, I realized that I wasn't attacking. That's when I realized that each of the character's attacks had to refresh before they could be used again. These refresh rates take so long that they force you to switch between characters if you want to deal any real damage. Each character has three attacks, but as they do little damage and quickly run out, players are forced to swap out their characters until they find one whose attacks attacks have refreshed. Although I only played for a few minutes, this quickly began to annoy me. Swapping between characters and trying to find the one whose attacks are available in order to deal minimal amounts of damage is not my idea of fun.

Not only were refresh rates a pain, but when player's characters can attack, they don't seem to do any damage. Sure, they do inflict damage on the baddies you're up against, but you can't really tell it's happening. This lack of visual confirmation you have attacked combined with the painfully slow refresh rates made combat extremely unsatisfying.
So we have to strategically cycle through our party members to ensure their attacks are queued properly and won't have damage statistics that are designed for a 62" television screen? That's great news.