Dragon Age: Origins Exclusive Impressions - Combat, Dialogue, and a New Character Revealed
We take an exclusive look at this intriguing role-playing successor, and we also take the wraps off of a new character.
Canadian developer BioWare made waves last year with its futuristic role-playing game Mass Effect, but the studio made a name for itself with its more-traditional fantasy-themed RPGs for the PC, including 1998's Baldur's Gate, 2000's Baldur's Gate II, and 2002's Neverwinter Nights. The studio is apparently going back to its roots with Dragon Age, an all-new fantasy-themed game intended to revive the spirit of its classic fantasy games in a brand-new world with new characters and a brand-new story. Most of the details of this story remain under wraps, but we had a chance to take an updated look at the PC version of the game as well as to share the details of a brand-new, as-yet-unannounced character.
BioWare's approach to Dragon Age seems to be taking the game's story and wrapping it around your character. Like in Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights, you'll start your game by creating a single character from what appears to be a predefined list, including such career paths as "human noble warrior" and "elf mage." After you've chosen which sort of character you'll play, you'll then go through an "origins" prelude section that should take two to three hours to complete. This prelude will naturally familiarize you with the game and its controls, and also with your character's abilities and his or her place in the world. The world of Dragon Age is currently being torn apart by war against an invading horde of monsters, and though your character has, by virtue of completing his or her origin storyline, become a "Gray Warden" enlisted by the nation's king himself to help fight the good fight, you won't always be given preferred treatment. For instance, elves are essentially treated as second-class citizens, so if you opt to play an elf character, you can expect to receive shabby treatment from humans.
Our updated demonstration time with the game included watching several dialogue scenes and two different battles. As we've discussed in our earlier coverage, Dragon Age's dialogue takes place by way of Neverwinter Nights-style numbered responses that may be insulting, polite, or humorous--or give you the opportunity to use your characters' speech-related abilities, such as persuasion or intimidation. You may also find yourself connecting more closely with certain characters depending on both your character's conversation skills and your character's origin. For instance, the human noble warrior might get a better reaction and receive some additional reconnaissance info from the Ash Warriors, an elite canine corps that fights alongside the Gray Wardens, whereas the elf wizard may be dismissed out-of-hand by the brusque warriors. By the same token, the elf wizard may connect more closely to characters such as Wynn, a mysterious sorceress in service of the king, who confides more closely in the elf because of the common bond of sorcery.
We also had a chance to watch a few different battles in action. Battles will be action-packed and seem reminiscent of the melees of BioWare's Knights of the Old Republic: small-scale, heated skirmishes between your party members and small squadrons of enemies. Like in Knights of the Old Republic (and BioWare's previous fantasy RPGs), you'll be able to pause the game at any time to give orders to your characters. Each character will have various skills and abilities that can, in the PC version of the game, be assigned to various hotkeys that also appear along the bottom of the screen, as with many massively multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft. These abilities can include combat skills, such as melee stun attacks and shield-bash attacks that knock opponents down, as well as magic spells. Like with those games, different attacks will have different properties, and some will have cooldown times that must expire before you can use them again.
Both battles took place in the Korcari Wilds region, which is an enormous open area that includes forests and grasslands peppered with settlements and encampments. Both took place against small squadrons of darkspawn, the monstrous humanoids that have invaded the land. The darkspawn that we saw seemed to come in two varieties: a shorter, squatter version that occasionally carries bows and arrows, and a taller, beefier version that comes running at your party with broadswords. However, neither version of these critters is immune to the hacking of a good, sturdy sword, and if you finish one of these foes with a critical hit, you'll often be treated to a zoomed-in, slow-motion killing blow, such as a beheading. Other enemies may go down in similarly spectacular fashion in death scenes that recall the Sony PlayStation 2 God of War series.
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