Dragon Age: Origins Previews

Now that the embargo has been lifted from the most recent Dragon Age: Origins press event in Edmonton, several new previews have popped up on the web. Here we go…

GameZone starts us off:

As the story evolves, there is betrayal and death and only a couple of Grey Wardens survive your character being one of those. It is up to you to rekindle the unity that bound the various armies of the world and pull them together to combat the Dark Spawn before the world is lost.

Aiding in those elements are a strong tactical element and strategic gameplay. Each of the characters you can invite to join your party has his or her unique personality and motives. As you make decisions along the way you will either gain favor with them or lose it; if you lose it, they can turn and attack you. Picking your party members for their strengths and the situations is key. You might pull in the war dog, which can charge quickly through to take out rear archers, or you might go with the typical tank, mage, healer, and rogue configuration. You can open the tactical interface and give precise situational orders for combat. If you play a mage, you might have your tank go into full taunt mode for any enemy attacking you if your health hits 75%.

Then we hear from Gaming Nexus:

Your interactions with certain characters will also vastly differ depending on what origins story you choose. For instance, I was very familiar with Jowan, a mage accused of practicing Blood magic, which is expressly forbidden. His role becomes a somewhat significant one in the plot (from where I could tell), but my relationship with him was solely due to the fact that I decided to take my origins story from a mage’s perspective. A rogue, for example, would not have had the same encounters with him, but would instead have an entirely different setting in which to interact with him when the time comes.

The plot, dialogue, and characters were clearly very thought out while the game was in development. At the same time, however and this is where Dragon Age really shines your actions and your own personality have a significant impact on the storyline and even the characters themselves. Whether or not you can accept members to your party, creating friends and foes along the way, will depend on your interactions with them. Similar to Mass Effect, you may choose between a charming demeanor or an intimidating one, with some variations in between.

A much more elaborate article is at GameShark:

Spend some real time playing Dragon Age and you start to see how the idea of something like blood thematically permeates all facets of the game: The role Darkspawn blood plays for the Grey Wardens; the role dragon blood plays in a specific quest for which we watched a demo; the George R. R. Martin-esque nobility, in which the blood in a character’s veins can mean everything. Regardless of whatever impression you get from marketing videos, blood is not just used in this game as a visual to gore it up. It’s a core part of the Dragon Age world, and when viewed through that lens, it’s very hard to view its implementation in this game as gratuitous.

I was not able to progress far enough to see if this same notion holds true for the (romances) your character can engage in, but certainly I get the sense that, like the romances in Baldur’s Gate II, a lot of it depends on how you play your character. If you play your character maturely, there’s every reason to believe that the sexual content in the game will also present that way. Certainly that is the goal.

And then we have Cheat Code Central:

On PC, Dragon Age’s gameplay is designed to be flexible and allow the player to play it the way he or she wants. The default camera is a standard third-person perspective, but if you prefer the traditional isometric RPG camera view, you can simply move the camera out with the mouse wheel and view the world from above. In either view, you can steer your character directly with the WASD keys or simply click the point where you want him to go with the mouse. In traditional BioWare fashion, your hero acquires a party of followers over the adventure, and you can switch between them all on the fly. Every character has distinct special abilities such as spells, attacks, ability buffs, and more. All abilities and items can be mapped to a hotkey bar for quick activation, and you can issue orders to your group while paused if you need a moment to think. If you prefer to focus on just your hero character, you can even create customized AI routines for your squadron, telling them exactly how to behave in incredibly specific combat scenarios.

The console versions of the game play and feel a bit different, with good reason. BioWare redesigned several aspects of the game for consoles, such as the user interface and the camera. The PS3 and Xbox 360 versions look more like a standard third-person action game, with an over-the-shoulder camera and a speedier feel to combat. Players can map six abilities or items to the face-button, using the right trigger to toggle between two hotkey sets. Pulling the left trigger opens a radial menu that pauses the action and allows players to choose from the complete set of available attacks and items at their leisure. The difficulty has been altered as well, with the Normal setting on consoles roughly equivalent to Easy on PC. Despite these changes, BioWare is insistent that absolutely nothing from the PC game was removed from the console versions, merely tweaked so that players on every platform experience it in the best way possible.