Dragon Age: Origins Preview

IGN has just published a brand new preview of Dragon Age: Origins after checking out a demo of BioWare’s upcoming RPG during last week’s Game Developers Conference.

If you’re a die hard PC gamer, you’ll be glad to know you can draw the camera up to a near overhead perspective, pause the game, input all the actions you want your followers to take, unpause to let them play out, then repeat until you’re victorious. If you’re someone unfamiliar with this style of play and feel you might be overwhelmed by the wide range of options for melee, ranged, and magical attacks and defensive abilities, there’s a custom tactical menu in the game that lets you set behavioral parameters for your party.

If you’d like, you can set the scantily clad mage Leliana to automatically use a health poultice if she falls below 25 percent health. A number of these types of parameters can be set at once, and they’ll apparently change as your character levels up. Those that unlock will be tailored to your class, so if you want to set up an archer-specific set of behavioral modifiers for your ranged character, you can do that. Or if you think all that type of custom-automation is unnecessary and would rather control everything directly, you can do that too.

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From what we saw, the game is definitely looking promising at this point, as it seems to be wrapping up the old-school CRPG style in a slick new interface and pretty graphics. We should point out that we only saw the PC version of the game for this demo, so no word yet on how the console versions might work. According to BioWare there are a number of interface styles being considered for implementation on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and the ultimate decision regarding which to include will have to be made in the coming months. We’re also not clear on how downloadable content will be incorporated into the game, though based on our interview with BioWare last week, it seems it’ll play a fairly significant role.