Dragon Age: Origins Articles

GamesRadar has put together a thorough three-page preview of Dragon Age: Origins, while MTV Multiplayer shares a conversation they had with BioWare’s Dan Tudge about the game’s console versions. First, an excerpt from GR’s preview:

Following in the tradition of Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age: Origins will ship with a campaign creation toolset. This won’t be an app that BioWare dumbs down to make more user-friendly, but a robust suite with levers, buttons, and options aplenty. Players can use the plot editor to flag different quest conditions, create unique NPCs with customized clothing and facial models, and script up their own branching dialog trees for those characters. (We really want to grow that community and empower them to create lots of really cool content. We hope that it’ll be part of long legs for the title much like Neverwinter, which we still have some new modules coming in for even now. If we get even half of that kind of community success with Dragon Age, we’ll be very happy,) says Fernando Melo, producer at BioWare.

How deep is the toolset? It’s nearly identical to what BioWare used to make Dragon Age, only with most of their internal architecture extracted. (There are some limitations that will be there at the start. We’ll be expanding it over time, but straight away, players will able to take all the areas we have in the game and repurpose them, drop in any of the items and objects they have in the game. Scripting has been completely opened up. Scripting in particular is hugely powerful – I think more than any of our previous games, including NW, we’ve exposed a lot more of the game logic and combat and character creation – all of these things are scripted,) says Ross Gardner, lead programmer on DA.

Then a snip from the MTV piece:

I recently argued this gameplay style may not go over well with console users, but that’s only based on my experience with the PC version. BioWare is overhauling the interface for the console versions, something we haven’t seen yet.

(Dragon Age) exec. producer and project director Dan Tudge couldn’t tell me much about the console games while he demoed the PC one a few weeks ago.

(I think really catering the platform to support the console, or whatever platform it is, is key,) said Tudge. (Even though on the PC this is a great core PC experience, when we bring that over it’s also an intuitive console experience. We don’t just convert it over and say ‘˜here it is’ but a true, actual conversion that’s true to the platform.)