Dragon Age: Origins E3 Preview

Another E3 preview of BioWare’s Dragon Age: Origins is now available, and this time it’s over at 1UP.

Managing your party uses the classic BioWare pausable combat, where you stop action to queue up attacks. The party AI also allows for you to have multiple battles at once. We saw two party members in one room fighting off a beast while two others carried out another fight elsewhere. Parties will have a maximum of four players — two fewer than the six possible in “Baldur’s Gate II” , which Zeschuk says is a compromise that enables them to achieve maximum “graphic fidelity” while also giving players enough “chess pieces” to move around the board. It’s not, however, a result of the game design being dumbed down — an understandable fear held by many PC enthusiasts, given BioWare’s recent focus on console games. “It’s a balance point,” says Zeschuk. “You don’t want to get overly detailed. In playtesting, we found that four was a nice number. You can mix it up with different characters but it’s still easy enough to control, [yet] still detailed enough that people felt what they were doing was meaningful.” Zeschuk also points out that by streamlining the number of characters players control, the team was able to focus on making other aspects of the game more epic: bigger enemies — a room-filling ogre was shown during the demo — as well as larger battles with dozens of combatants. “We’re going to be mixing it up a little more,” he says.

The dialogue system also hearkens back to games of yore. In stark contrast to Mass Effect’s highly interactive and well-acted dialogue, here your character is mute. Other characters speak, and you select your responses from a classic tree, but you never hear your character’s voice. “It’s an interesting issue,” says Zeschuk, when asked about the seeming backward step away from Mass Effect’s more immersive and cinematic dialogue experience. “We’re very dynamic with the dialogue choices and who you are, and there’s a lot of variety in who you can be in the game,” he says. With all these choices, managing the various dialogue possibilities for the main character turned out to be overwhelming, and likely impossible to fully voice. It wasn’t a decision taken lightly. “We went through a whole process involving a ton of people in the studio, and thought a lot about it, and at the end of the day [leaving out the voice acting for your character] fit the type of the game we were making. This is that classic, return-to-the-roots flavor.”