Dragon Age: Origins Previews

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Written by BuckGB on July 9th, 2009

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As for the demos we were given, both stations had different party compositions. For the first, which we'll refer to as D1, the main character, who you get to create, was a human fighter. In the second group, D2, the main character was a mage. Both groups stood next to a ferryman and were attempting to secure passage to a mage tower with the eventual goal of enlisting the help of its residents in fighting the Darkspawn, the game's primary enemy. In D1, one of the party members was Morrigan, a seductive mage character who chimed in during the conversation with the ferryman to intimidate him into letting them pass. In D2 party member Sten was present, who for some reason thought it to be in the group's best interest to offer cookies to the guard to get everyone across. Since you can only have three members in your group not counting yourself, you'll need to consider who to bring along not only for their skills in the field, but also how they might be able to help out during conversations.

Along with checking out the console interface, we also got an updated taste of the battle system in Origins, and this might be where I was most surprised. When Bioware showed the game previously, what I saw of the battle system seemed clunky, and I especially wasn't impressed with the battle animations (I felt they lacked a certain aesthetic touch that I look for in Bioware titles). After playing the game this time around, I felt the system had definitely come a long way, and it should please fans of both action-oriented RPGs like Mass Effect, and fans of traditional PC RPGs. The ability to seamlessly switch between characters while managing attacks and magic is all handled very well, and after a few minutes of figuring out the nuts and bolts of the system I began handling battles admirably. Oh yes, and there is plenty of blood and gore to go around; some of the enemies are finished off in a fine, bloody mess. Awesome!

Everything else in the PC version of Dragon Age is broken down using hotkeys press '˜I' to pull up your inventory or '˜M' for your map if you don't want to use the on-screen icons. At any time you can pause the game and hand out some immediate orders for your party of four adventurers, meaning that you can slow down the action and get a breather whenever if all gets a bit out of hand. Being able to pause a time is a handy ability, one that we've made frequent use of in our past hands-ons with the game and which we've regularly wished we could use in real-life.

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