Dragon Age: Origins Preview

After spending some time with Dragon Age: Origins while attending the recent New York Comic Con, Rock, Paper, Shotgun tells us about the experience.

Meanwhile, I played Dragon Age for much longer, and come away with less to say. That’s the perennial problem with playing an RPG like this on a show-floor – it’s not the format. I can play with the party control mechanism and prod around a few menus, but in terms of key elements like storytelling, I haven’t a clue. The whole demo took place in a dungeon containing (er) things. Which I killed. With swords. And magic.

I managed to get into one interactive conversation with NPCs, which managed to show off the Mass-effect-esque character acting and a pretty-typical Bioware troika of conversation options. As in, the be nice, be mercenary, be a right bastard choice. So, no, I don’t have a sense of whether it’s going to blossom into a delightful RPG epic of dark fantasy or similar.

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But I did get to give the general battle-systems a good run-around. And they’re impressively solid – four party members, which can be switched between at any moment. Each character having two (sets) of weapons which you can switch between, automatically highlighting or darkening the skills you can now use in your taskbar. With admirable speed I was getting the hang of my Rogue character – in one moment when my whole party was wiped out, he did a little hit and run, retreating to bombard with some specialist arrows with poison effects before coming back in to finish it off with the blades. I was even comfortable with the camera angle it was set at – which basically locks itself to a given character in a third-person manner, and zooming to the next character when you select them. It’s clearly evolved from their experience with the console RPGs, but doesn’t distract me as much as I suspected it would. Put it like this: I didn’t feel the need to see if I could find any alternative camera options. And on the more surface level, it’s highly welcome to have a post-Witcher RPG which actually looks attractive on a contemporary basis.