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Dragon Age: Origins - Random Infobits

by Gorath, 2009-10-29

EA held a big community event at the Gamescom back in August. Community focused sites from all over Europe were invited to play a selection of upcoming EA games and have a relaxed chat with the EA community managers they so far only knew online. I used the opportunity to try out Dragon Age: Origins for half an hour. The playing session was without any pressure and even without a time limit. Nobody was looking over my shoulder, I could do whatever I wanted. After ca. 30 minutes I had to leave for another appointment, but returned later for a one hour long presentation by Bioware. Most of the information given there has already made it to the interweb, so I don't think it's necessary to repeat yesterday's news. I feel a couple of things haven't always been presented in the right context though.

The toolset will be able to handle lip-synchronous voice-overs - in multiple languages for one module. Bioware plans to support Dragon Age with DLC for at least two years. They're also thinking about using their DLC infrastructure to distribute the best user modules made with the toolset. So DLC is not necessarily limited to official Bioware material.

PC and console versions have identical content. Apart from the controls it's the same game. With one notable exception: The tactics mode (zoomed out bird's eye view) will not be available in the console versions due to technical limitations. Its combat options are available in normal view though.

Waiting for the console versions allowed Bioware to create a lot of additional content. More than 60 quests made it into the game because more resources were available.

During the character generation only the first name can be chosen. This sounds like a serious limitation, but I think it's quite helpful to pull the player in. The dwarf I created was the king's younger son. As such he needed to carry the king's last name. The dialogs with his older brother, the heir to the throne, offered a lot of choices very early in the game. This wouldn't have been possible with completely free character generation.
Thanks to Dave from GamerZines for pointing out that we might not have heard the last word on character creation on consoles yet.

 

Box Art

Information about

Dragon Age: Origins

Developer: BioWare

SP/MP: Single-player
Setting: Fantasy
Genre: RPG
Combat: Pausable Real-time
Play-time: Unknown
Voice-acting: Full

Regions & platforms
North America
· Homepage
· Platform: PC
· Released: 2009-11-03
· Publisher: EA

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