Dragon Age: Origins Previews and Interview

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Written by BuckGB on September 5th, 2009

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As with any Western RPG, personalization is important. The character creation mode greets new players, and thankfully the options are deep without being overwhelming. Too many RPGs these days have such deep and complex character creation tools that it becomes impossible to create a character one's happy with. The slightly more restricted character creator in Dragon Age manages to keep things quicker and easier, and characters generally come out looking good.

As well as choosing a character, players can also choose a class. Some classes are restricted to certain characters, and as the game progresses, these classes can be further specialized. For instance, a Mage might eventually work his way toward becoming a feared and deadly Blood Mage. The three base classes are Rogue, Warrior and Mage, and each one works as you'd expect, with Rogues able to act as stealthy thieves, Warriors packing a selection of hard-hitting physical attacks and Mages ... well, you know what they do.

Thematically, DA is definitely dark. The Bioware team calls it a (Dark Fantasy,) which is technically correct, but this puppy is dark in terms of human nature. The people around you, as well as the people in your party, have real personalities and agendas. You can feel the malevolence you can feel the spiritualism you can feel the pain of these characters.

Much of this realism is due to the incredible animation and VO work. There are many cut scenes that propel the story, all of which add to the gameplay. Awesome, awesome work with these cut scenes. I would liken them to any major motion picture in terms of cinematography, score/sound, and animation. This is quite an achievement, considering the game engine renders these scenes in real time. In many ways, I consider this to be an animated feature (more below).

Dragon Age is a party based RPG. You create your own character, down to the size of his nose, and these choices can make a big difference. Over the course of the game, players meet and have the chance to bring up to three others along for the ride in any one scenario. The exact number of characters who can join the party has not been revealed, but Lead Designer Mike Laidlaw told me that it is just shy of a dozen full characters, with several others joining for very specific, finite arcs. During my hands-on time, I managed to find about six of them.

Each character has its own personality, and just like the old games, you quickly find yourself playing favorites.

"All we're about is making people care," Laidlaw told me. They did a fine job. For example, early on I met a warrior type named Allistair. Even though I too was a sword/shield warrior and he was basically redundant in my party, I refused to kick him out. He was just too cool.

I realized one thing while playing Dragon Age that is absolutely bad for me looting. I am a klepto when I play games that allow me to take every object and horde it. I did that in Fallout 3 with coffee mugs and clipboards, and in Dragon Age it was no different. When the menu says "Take All", I didn't hold back. It's like going to a buffet, and being told to take some and then you end up taking more than your share from the plate.

As things began to get very hectic, and with my health running low, Chris informed me of a few things that helped me get to the end of the demo, such as unleashing a pack of wild dogs as I searched for the exit, and making sure to collect some of the various weapons that were scattered throughout. When I reached the end of the demo, I was treated to a boss fight with a giant Ogre, who decided it would be delightful to sit on my party members and squish them. As time passed, he managed to take out my party one by one, to which Chris said "Hey, considering you don't play WRPGs, you didn't do too horribly", to which I responded "...I got squished by an ogre." The worst part was then watching my boyfriend play the demo, and beat the demo effortlessly. Stupid boyfriend being awesome at WRPGs.

In Dragon Age you're able to gather a party, play each member of the party during combat situations, and use their skills. Each character that will react in a different way to the environment around them, and will assist you in battle or give you their opinions when you're faced with a choice. Characters are unique in Dragon Age in the fact that they each have their own moral compass. Choosing to abandon a helpless child might earn you points with some of the members of your party, but severely diminish other members' feelings towards you as a leader. During the gameplay and demo it became apparent that if you made a decision that was so out of the norm for the moral compass of one of your party members they might even attempt to KILL YOU.

You can also use the very helpful system that is built into the game that will allow you to set general rules and guidelines for characters in your party to follow even when you're not controlling them. They can be INCREDIBLY in-depth for the master tacticians or very simple for players who want to allow the game to pick the best options. Everything is easily handled via a check box system that only takes a few minutes to learn and can provide you with an incredible advantage in some of the more vicious battles in the game. This gives players an excellent amount of control over the members in their party, even when they're not playing them.

The combat system is a bit trickier to assess, but it is definitely different from the Baldur's Gate games and therefore comes down to comparing apples and oranges. It is simpler in the sense that there are fewer spells, and there are fewer races to choose from. Some players may miss certain tactical finesses from Baldur's Gate 2, such as spell sequencers and contingencies. At the same time, the game also holds out many possibilities for character customization that resemble prestige classes from the D&D 3.5e ruleset. There are also other factors that were not seen in (A)D&D computer RPGs, like for example enduring injuries to specific parts of your characters' bodies that impose penalties on them until they are fully treated. Also, combat is definitely a challenge. Firing off spells too early, not using enough resources from your inventory, not positioning your characters right, these and other missteps can easily lead to you getting overwhelmed. Managing combat situations will definitely be an acquired skill, and I anticipate that some will still demand a good deal of attention even from experienced players. From what I've seen, dragons in this game will not be pushovers like they were in previous RPGs. So my conclusion is that some may find the combat system simplified, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. I found it quite fun, and it didn't take away from my brief gaming experience.

The graphics are also breathtaking and truly 3D with isometric and other possible views. I have seen a few complaints that they don't utilize the very latest standards, but as far as I'm concerned, this is mere nitpicking. Some of what I've seen inspired the same sort of cinematic reaction as when Gimli and Boromir see the Dwarf City in Moria for the first time. It can be quite astonishing to see.

As far as strategy is concerned, this comes in the way of advanced AI for your various characters. There is a screen in which you can customize various possible actions for your computer-controlled characters. For instance, you can set up a rule that says that when the character is at 50% of his health, he casts a healing spell. You can set up another rule that says that when a character is being attacked up close by an enemy, he uses a skill that knocks down the enemy allowing the character to back off and go back to attacking from a distance with a bow. All of these rules can be set up in a certain order of preference and the AI will take this into consideration when controlling your other characters. For example, you could have five or six different rules set up for each of your characters that takes into account any possible scenario that could happen which then allows you to always be sure that the AI will not do something stupid like having your healer cast an offensive spell when you're in dire need of healing. This adds an extra layer of depth and strategy to the battles.

RPGFan: What are some of the influences for Dragon Age whether it's from other games, movies, books?

Mike Laidlaw: Obviously, Tolkien, the godfather of fantasy, you have to go with him and then you could go back to like Faerie Queen and stuff like that too if you wanna go into some of the darker and older stuff. I mean, when you look at Tolkien, you kinda have the establishment of things like Elves and Dwarves and kinda like the high fantasy archetypes, so for us we thought: "how can we turn a lot of those on their heads, how can we do it with a modern sensibility?". And that's where I think George R.R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire is a great example and increasingly you see kind of these modern darker fantasies that come out where they're a little unrelenting and a little more willing to kill off characters... so we made those same decisions, we're prepared to have a world that's literally teetering on the brink of destruction and it is a dark place where betrayal is a commonplace thing, it's not just unicorn and ponies (laughs). So, that was certainly a big influence and of course innumerable fantasy books and elements of Dungeons & Dragons were influential too and certainly Baldur's Gate II in terms of the feel and the interface. There were a lot of other influences here and there but I think those are pretty much the big ones.

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