Dragon Age Updated Preview - Rage of Mages
You say you want to cast magic missile? You're attacking the darkness? Fine, fine, there's an elf in front of you, and he's going to explain how magic works in Dragon Age.
Dragon Age: Origins is the upcoming fantasy-themed game from our friends at BioWare, a wholly owned subsidiary of Electronic Arts and the Canadian studio responsible for such role-playing games as Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Mass Effect. It's also a game we haven't had a chance to cover very often here on GameSpot, so we're happy to finally have a chance to post a new preview story covering the use of wizardry in the game. In Dragon Age, you can choose to play as a mage class, which starts off with the mage tower origin story that we've covered previously and then leads to a tale of sorcery-powered high adventure and zapping bad guys with nasty zappy spells.
While Dragon Age's list of skills is universal for characters of all professions (including such abilities as conversational coercion, potion-brewing herbalism, thievery, and combat training), the game has a unique set of "talents" for mages. Mage characters have a single line of mage-specific skills that include a basic attack spell, an arcane bolt, an improved ability to zap people using a magic staff, personal shielding magic, and an overall boost to wizardly power. This basic line of skills never seems like a bad choice to spend talent points in as you gain experience levels, except that there are four other talent lines (or "schools of magic," if you prefer) with plenty of other interesting and useful spell abilities that are worth exploring.
The four additional talent trees for mages are primal (elemental damage spells); creation (healing and protective magics); spirit (which focuses on countermagics and controlling enchantments); and entropy (which focuses on hindering magics). Primal, for instance, includes four different talent lines for fire, ice, lightning, and earth, each of which has four levels of abilities, including the classic fireball, lightning bolt, and cone-of-cold spells you may remember from BioWare's previous Dungeons & Dragons-based games. However, the primal talent group also includes certain spell abilities with combinatorial effects. For instance, the most powerful talent in the earth line, petrify, briefly turns an enemy to stone and makes that enemy vulnerable to instant death by shattering if attacked with a concussive spell, such as the earth line's stonefist spell. As it turns out, certain spells from the ice talent line can also freeze enemies solid, rendering them similarly vulnerable to being shattered. The primal line also contains two different weapon enhancements for all characters in your party; the fire line causes weapons to deal fire-based damage; and the ice line causes weapons to deal cold-based damage. The remaining spells in the primal talent lines are generally powerful damage-dealers with large radii that can also damage your teammates if they get in the line of fire. Careful micromanagement (or combinatorial strategies, discussed later) is crucial in using these talents, lest you blast your own party to smithereens.
The creation line of talents is a straightforward set of healing and protection (or "buffing") spell abilities, including on-the-spot healing and over-time regeneration, and full-party regeneration, as well as offensive and defensive team boosts and the Dragon Age version of "haste"--which makes you and your team attack more quickly but drains away your character's energy. The creation line also includes a set of "glyph" spells that affect a small chunk of territory with various magical properties, including defensive skills like canceling magic or increasing your teammates' defenses, and offensive glyphs that can repel or paralyze enemies that stumble into the radius. Finally, the creation talents also include a miscellaneous line of spell abilities that enhance endurance regeneration and include a precious few attack spells, including an "insect swarm" spell that continuously damages its target, and a "grease" spell, which, just like in Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights, causes an area of ground to be covered with a slippery grease that hinders movement. However, in Dragon Age, an area affected by the grease spell can also be set alight by fire spells, burning up any enemies or friendlies in the area.
The spirit line of spells also contains four sets of talents, each with four abilities. The spirit line is focused more on canceling magic and draining "mana" (magic energy) from your foes, though it also has some powerful attack spells. Among others, spirit includes a line of talents to protect against or dispel hostile magic; a line of talents that interferes with your enemies' mana and limits their ability to cast spells of their own; and a line of talents that deals with death by magic and replenishes spent energy from corpses, animates fallen enemy corpses as allies, and includes a "walking bomb" effect that causes an enemy under effects of the spell to explode if killed, damaging everyone in the radius. The spirit line also has a psionics-based set of talents that lets casters enhance their parties' weapons, psychically blast a single foe, encase a single target in a protective bubble (similar to Baldur's Gate II's Otiluke's Resilient Sphere), and contain an enemy in a cage of crushing force that will also shatter any frozen or petrified foes. The spirit line seems to be the most subtle of all the mage's talent trees, and from what we've played of the early game, it won't necessarily be needed to dispatch the enemies you encounter at first.
Finally, the entropy line of talents includes a series of debilitating spell abilities, including a set of talents that weaken or paralyze foes; a set of "hexes" that curse any enemies in range with a specific affliction; and a set of nightmare-based abilities that can freeze enemies in their tracks and that includes powerful analogues to Baldur's Gate II's sleep, horror, and chaos spells, which immobilize enemies in slumber, cripple them with fear, and completely confuse them into performing random acts, respectively. As it happens, sleeping enemies who are then targeted by a horror spell suffer maddening nightmares that deal severe damage to them, instantly killing most weaker foes. The entropy talent line also has a set of death-magic-based spell abilities that drain an enemy's health or summon a damaging noxious cloud to hang over an area, not unlike the classic cloudkill and acid fog spells of Baldur's Gate II.
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