Dragon Age: Origins – A Tragedy in the Making
By AJ Glasser, 10:00 AM on Mon Mar 30 2009, 21,046 views
As "spiritual successor" to the Baldur's Gate series, BioWare's upcoming fantasy RPG has lot to live up to. Not to mention a console port expectation that no PC RPG has ever fulfilled.
It doesn't help that the game is being touted as a "new" take on the fantasy genre, or that the PC ship date was shoved back to coincide with the console release. But BioWare may yet deliver on all their promises. They have all the ingredients of a good game, plus some genuinely interesting ideas that haven't made it into any other game quite yet.
The newest of these ingredients – the approvals system – was showcased at the latest Dragon Age: Origins demo. Actually, it looks a lot like the character interactions in Baldur's Gate II – but in that game, characters wouldn't do better in battle if they liked you. Origins shakes things up by giving you an invisible approval score among your party members. Certain actions you take or choices you make affect the score, netting you approval or disapproval. The more a party member approves of you, the more effective they are in combat – and you also get the Baldur's Gate II perks like hidden side quest or romantic relationships. The less the party member approves of you, the more likely they are to up and leave like they do in Baldur's Gate – but in Origins, they could possibly turn against you, if you do something they really, really disapprove of.
For my look at this interaction system, I watched a BioWare employee play through a quest called The Defense of Red Cliff. The village – called Red Cliff – is being repeatedly attacked by the game's primary evil, The Blight. The game is largely an open world after the first few hours of tutorial play, so this quest doesn't occur at any particular point in the game's timeline – but I was told it was "after the first third" of the game.
The demo master's party consisted of slutty sorceress Morrigan, archer Liliana (a.k.a. Girl Legolas), and the sullen Sten, plus the generic human Grey Warder main character. The demo master chose to play his Warder mostly as a Nice Guy – offering to help the village fight off the Blight and even agreeing to rescue some drunk blacksmith's daughter. He did choose to kick in a door and gave one snippy response in a dialogue tree; but for the most part, I felt like I was watching "Boy Scout Goes to Middle Earth."
Morrigan and Sten shared my cynicism – as soon as the demo master started spouting heroic platitudes, the sorceress made some quip about rescuing kittens from trees and Sten nagged about needing to go do other, more important stuff. An icon list appeared on screen when the dialogue tree to accept the quest ended, informing me that Morrigan and Sten disapproved of the Grey Warder's actions while Liliana approved, possibly laying the groundwork for a romance with the Warder later.
BioWare didn't confirm or deny the depth of the relationship system in the game (e.g. we do know that you can have more than one relationship at a time, but we don't know if homosexual relationships are possible for both genders). They did insist that it was "classy" and highlighted a new gift system where you have to find out what characters like and give them those things to raise their approval rating. For example, Morrigan likes jewelry, but she doesn't like rocks; she will take a rock if you give it to her, but you have to load her up with trinkets to get a spike in her approval rating. Sounds like a dating sim, really – but if jewelry is what it takes to bump Morrigan's approval up enough to unlock her best spells (or at the very least keep her from turning on me), then so be it.
The next ingredient that could make Dragon Age: Origins a good game is the combat system. It's not especially new, but it is detailed and effective. BioWare has already shown off a bit of the spell-chaining in the combat system; cast an ice spell to freeze an enemy, cast a stone spell on yourself so your fist is rock-hard, and then punch the frozen enemy to shatter him to bits – a la Terminator 2. But this time, they showed their tactics system in action.
Like many RPGs, Origins lets you set the behaviors of characters so that you don't have to babysit them in battle and make sure they don't blow all the healing items. The usual defaults are aggressive, passive, defend or whatever; a few games get super-specific at the level of setting the exact health percentage a character needs to be at before the mage to casts heal. Origins keeps both layers of management, letting the player get ultra-micromanagement-y with who casts what and under which circumstance or allowing them to stay out of it altogether and let the game decide who should be doing what based on class, equipment and skill level.
At this point in the demo, the village militia rallied to fight off the Blight at dusk, when an evil green mist swept down into the valley. Our party of heroes stood at the bridge leading to the village, waiting for the zombies the Blight produces to come through the choke point. Morrigan cast an area effect fire spell so the zombies would catch fire as they came over the bridge, then cast invulnerability and anti-knockdown spells on Sten so he could wade out into the fire and hack the flaming zombies. Liliana picked stragglers off with arrows and the Grey Warder – because he was a rogue class – just hung out and occasionally back-stabbed zombies that made it past everyone else.
This is an ingredient that could go either way for Origins: the player perspective. It was the combat that really made this clear to me because combat works like it does in Baldur's Gate: you can pause during combat and issue specific orders to your characters, or just let the combat play itself out like a real time strategy game. In that game, though, you were in a zoomed-out RTS view by default. In Origins, you can choose to play in a zoomed in third-person action view. You can, but I can't see why you'd want to since combat is still largely tactical. Yeah, it's nice to see how detailed everything is up close while the fighting is going on, and maybe I could trust the AI to handle the other three characters while I play as just one – but I'm not sure I'd really enjoy it that way. I might get bored.
