Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening Interview

Dragon Age: Origins online producer Fernando Melo took some time out of his day to answer three pages worth of IGN’s questions about the game’s recently announced Awakening expansion pack.

IGN: One of the things mentioned in the press release was the option to re-spec characters. Can you tell us a bit more about that feature? Is there a story context for this, or is it just available once you import your character?

Fernando Melo: One of the things that we recognized is that you could be coming in to Awakening having completed Origins, or very early at any point in Origins and artificially leveled up. There’s a lot of new spells, new specializations, new talents, and one of the things is that there will be new chains and extensions to some of them. We recognized that some people could get cornered because of the points they’ve already been spending and won’t have access to the new specializations, etc. So one of the things we wanted to do is give you the ability to basically force a re-spec of the character where you could re-spend all your points. Everything from attribute points all the way to your skills, talents, spells and specializations. So if you wanted to, you could basically redesign your character.

You don’t lose your plot data from Origins, in terms of your experience and you get that reactivity, if that’s what you want, out of Awakening. But you have a much easier time of trying out a lot of the new spells and abilities without having to go back to start a character with a blank slate, such as the Orlesian commander, or having to replay most of Origins — which is massive — to win some of that back. In terms of the mechanic itself, you do get it when you do your import, but there’s also something similar to the tomes that give you a skill or talent point where you’ll use an item and force a level up notification. When you click on that, your points are unspent and you can now re-spend them all. It’s fairly basic; the tome itself does have a little bit of lore to it, but there isn’t a story or quest attached to it. It’s basically there for you to use at any point in your Awakening adventure.