Dragon Age: Origins The Darkspawn Chronicles DLC Preview

GameSpot is the first website to get some hands-on time with Darkspawn Chronicles, and shares with us their impressions of BioWare’s upcoming Dragon Age: Origins DLC.

These are, explains Bartel, not the talking, fully sentient darkspawn introduced in Awakening, but the orc-like creatures of the game proper. Generally, role-playing elements are stripped down in favour of a brisk, combat-based experience. Dialogue menus, for instance, just “didn’t make sense” given your grunting, brutish cohorts, says Bartel.

Starting out at the gates of Denerim, you work your way through the city, battering down Denerim’s defenders and picking up promising recruits (and dispatching unwanted ones) as you go. We acquired a hulking ogre early on–a useful unit, capable of all the same abilities it had in Dragon Age: Origins, including a powerful charge and that familiar rock-hurling, mass-knockback attack. So we lumbered around as the ogre, demolishing barricades and clearing a path for Team Darkspawn. Familiar characters crop up in the city districts, with qunari warrior Sten defending the market district with a band of mercenaries and Oghren the dwarf leading an army of drunks out of the tavern. (The golem Shale is the one party character that doesn’t appear in this DLC, says Bartel.)