Dragon Age: Origins Preview
Dragon Age: Origins is meant to be a return to Bioware’s roots, which are based in the fantastic computer RPG, Bauldur’s Gate. Bauldur’s Gate is considered by many to be one of the best Dungeons and Dragons based games ever created and formed the base of many signature story elements that can be found in almost every Bioware release to this day. Mike Laidlaw, lead designer on Dragon Age: Origins was nice enough to give Aeropause a look at Dragon Age: Origins, including some of the team interactions, as well as one of the big set piece battles.
Dragon Age: Origins introduces players to The Great Wardens, protectors of the land that fight off corrupted creatures that come from a disastrous plague known as The Blight. The Blight has infected the land, destroying anything that comes in its way. The Great Wardens play a powerful role in trying to defeat the creatures of The Blight, but of course, since it is a Bioware title, you will not be battling on your own, as you will recruit and interact with several party members to help you reach your goal.
The first section of gameplay that Mark has us look at is the personal interaction between characters after we have set up camp. During Dragon Age: Origins, you can set up a campsite at any time, allowing you to rest your characters, learn new spells and fighting techniques, as well as interact with party members, including appeasing or insulting them.
Character interaction is a big part of Dragon Age: Origins, as you must balance the desires of all the distinctly different characters. If you appease one person too much, you might do critical harm to another character relationship. Do enough damage to an NPC party member and they may just up and leave you, denying you the use of their skill set, or worse, having them fight against you.
Our first interaction is with Morrigan, a sorceress of the black arts. Morrigan is an outcast of the party, but has decided to come along to help your character fight the evil of the land. Of course, she is driven by a more than passing fancy in your character. As we interact with Morrigan, the options in the dialogue support multiple branching paths that could take the discussion in multiple avenues. To have some fun, Mark decides to have our character totally play along with Morrigan’s desires, which concludes with us “warming her tent”.
With our evening complete with Morrigan, we then are confronted by another female party member, Leliana. She is a famed archer that has had a long standing friendship with our character, and she is not too happy about our sexual congress with Morrigan. In our dialogue options, we start down a path of being rather contrite with Leliana, telling her it is no big deal and that she should not worry. At this point, Mark tell us that we can continue to press down this path, and we can get to a point where Leliana will decide she does not want to roll with your character anymore and she will leave. So we decide to bring it back and convince her that our digressions with Morrigan will not continue, thus ending another episode of 90210, I mean pacifying the situation.
Another aspect of character interaction has to do with gifts. During your travels, you will find rare items in battle. Some of those items can be used by you to boost your character, but some can be given to party members to boost their interactions with you, aligning them to your cause. The gifts tend to give inspiration, and of course, boost their skill set. Giving gifts to a party member that might be upset with you is a good way to ease tensions and nip problems in the bud.
Moving away from the campsite, Mark loads up a new section of Dragon Age: Origins, where we have been charged with finding a person by the name of Flemeth. She is the Witch of the Wilds and in common day terminology, would be the equivalent of “the boogeyman”. Well except for the fact that she is a female. In our interaction with Flemeth, we find out that our party is not the first to try and put her down, and that the others before us had failed. Not being deterred, we enter battle with Flemeth, which revealed a great surprise, as she ended up either turning into a dragon, or summoning one. I was unclear on which sequence happened.
This battle is one of the larger set piece battles in Dragon Age: Origins and it employs some new devices for an RPG battle. First we are shown how the dragon attacks in 360 degrees. The tail section will attack, while the head might bite in another direction. Also, claws and wings will factor into the battle, requiring your party to choose angles of attack from different directions. The AI for each of the characters plays out very smart, and the battle system seemed to be reminiscent of Mass Effect in that you can command characters to load up spells and so forth, if you want them to attack with specific powers or weapons.
During the battle, it should be noted that the action on screen looked amazingly fluid, with little to no hiccups considering all of the battle items that were happening at one time. As the battle raged on, and we watched our player character get chomped on a couple of times, the screen faded to black, causing the room to moan a bit, as we all wanted to see the dragon get taken out.
With the presentation at an end, we did find out that Dragon Age was set for an October 20th release, and will be shipping to three platforms simultaneously. Those platforms are the PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. I did love all the dialogue choices, and the battle sequences were amazing. As long as the character appeasement stuff does not get too juvenile, as it started to get in the Morrigan vs. Leliana segment, I think Dragon Age: Origins will be another big hit for Bioware.
Recent Comments