Dragon Age: Origins Previews

A couple more hands-on previews of Dragon Age: Origins are now available for our consumption, thanks to BioWare’s ongoing press tour.

1UP:

It’s a very different feel from playing on PC; the radial menus make navigating the spells and items in the heat of battle easy to use, without feeling like a dumbed-down interface. You aren’t able to zoom in out of the battle in quite the same way, but I thought the view on the 360 made it easy to keep track of your entire party. The only sore spot for me is that it’s definitely only for one player. It feels like the game would be perfect for some on-the-couch co-op relaxation. Hopefully, the multi-track story will help me forget the bitter loneliness of trudging through the world on my own. But I guess I made it through Oblivion on my own without any lasting mental trauma.

NowGamer:

Current-generation technologies like the zoom to third-person from classic overhead with a massively detailed environment are a given, but BioWare has made what sounds like subtle differences to combat on paper, but mean a huge difference in practice. The mesh between real combat physics and dice-rolling has been refined. Stepping up the incline of the slope down to the dungeon, we had the tactical advantage of raining arrows down onto the spiders while they attacked our stricken fellow that, unlike Baldur’s Gate, would be impossible if something was obstructing our line of sight. Vice versa, ducking behind a boulder doesn’t grant you a Tabula Rasa-style defence bonus, but it will protect you from incoming projectiles. Your stats have a major part to play in combat, of course, but graphical and physics technology has advanced to the point that BioWare can now use them to augment the system for a more natural combat strategy. Using the boulderthrowing ogre in one of the DA:O website demo reels as an example, Dan explained this in more detail, (There’s certainly a point within the math where even if you physically move your character out of the way, you’ll receive a hit. It’s not real physics in the sense that there’s a point of contact and the boulder actually has to cross paths with your mesh, but there is way more ability to avoid things. And we don’t just call the talent backstab and roll a check for it, you actually have to move the character around for a backstab. So the real-time aspect of that has been brought forward from Baldur’s Gate.)