Dragon Age: Origins Preview
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Politics aside, we dived right into our first task as an apprentice--completing a rite of passage known as "the Harrowing," which requires all stripling mages to enter the Fade. So, in we went, to find a hazy dreamworld where a handful of hostile spectral monsters attacked us so that we could get the hang of the combat system. Like in previous BioWare games, there's an auto-attack feature that lets you attack the nearest targeted enemy, though your other abilities, such as spells, work off a cooldown timer and can be tied to a hotkey bank, similar to the standard abilities you'd expect from a massively multiplayer game. The first enemies we faced weren't much of a challenge--the key characters we met were much more interesting. The first such character was a talking rodent who turned out to be an embittered apprentice mage that later took human form to speak with us. He explained that he, like us, had taken his test but had dallied too long in the Fade, which led the Templars to kill off his physical body, even though his spiritual form in the Fade had gained the ability to change shape. After a brief conversation, he joined us as a companion in the hopes of somehow escaping and suggested he could provide additional insight along the way.
