Introducing Dragon Age

Curse was recently invited to Edmonton to visit the Bioware offices and play their upcoming title Dragon Age: Origins.  

Dragon Age is the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, and the intensity from that game is carried over and amplified in the new title. You play a Grey Warden, one of the last members of an ancient order that has guarded the world from the Blight for centuries. The world is, as most worlds are, plagued not only by the horrific terror that is the blight but also by political strife, poverty, and injustice. Few remember the greatness or the purpose of the Grey Wardens, and many are too busy with their own lust for greed and power to care.

This is a game that really delivers on it's promise. You will be immersed, you will feel remorse, you will feel regret, you will revel in your marvel as you make decisions that shape the world around you. If you've missed the emotional attachment that you've felt in only the best of games then don't go another day without looking into Dragon Age. 

At the beginning of the game you're able to choose how your character begins life in the new world. The choices you make early on are going to reflect how your character is treated and accepted later in the game. A few examples include a poverty stricken Elf, or a Dwarf from a noble house. The story starts in a completely unique way depending upon how you make your character, and the decisions begin compounding from that point on.

The Blight is the enemy that the main storyline focuses on. Early on in the game you have your first encounter with the Blight. You're helping the King, and the leader of the Grey Wardens, when a trusted general of the King pulls back his reinforcements and leaves everyone to die. During the course of the game hunting down and killing this traitor is part of the storyline, but you also need to unite the nations and gather a massive army to help defend against the Blight, as it's apparent anything less than a solid unified front will mean death for every living person.

In Dragon Age you're able to gather a party, play each member of the party during combat situations, and use their skills. Each character that will react in a different way to the environment around them, and will assist you in battle or give you their opinions when you're faced with a choice. Characters are unique in Dragon Age in the fact that they each have their own moral compass. Choosing to abandon a helpless child might earn you points with some of the members of your party, but severely diminish other members' feelings towards you as a leader. During the gameplay and demo it became apparent that if you made a decision that was so out of the norm for the moral compass of one of your party members they might even attempt to KILL YOU.

You can also use the very helpful system that is built into the game that will allow you to set general rules and guidelines for characters in your party to follow even when you're not controlling them. They can be INCREDIBLY in-depth for the master tacticians or very simple for players who want to allow the game to pick the best options. Everything is easily handled via a check box system that only takes a few minutes to learn and can provide you with an incredible advantage in some of the more vicious battles in the game. This gives players an excellent amount of control over the members in their party, even when they're not playing them.

The content for Dragon Age is incredibly vast, the game is said to have over 80 hours of gameplay, but with the number of choices and different paths that those choices lead you it can grow exponentially. During the brief demo we were able to observe several players playing the same game, and the most unique thing about Dragon Age is you couldn't tell they were playing the same game, the various decisions and choices a player makes actually impacts how events unfold and will give each player a unique experience. A specific example would be a mother begging you to help her son who's possessed by a demon. The apparent options for the game we were playing were:

A. Kill the boy
B. Sacrifice the mother in a ritual that would allow us to fight the demon and save the boy
C. Leave

After sacrificing the mother and saving the boy one of the game developers told us that there was, indeed, another option that would have saved both the mother and the son! Our actions specifically lead to the death of a character in the game, and depending upon how we go there certain choices are made available to us. This level of choice is unlike anything in any game to date.

Bioware is going to continue to support Dragon Age with over 2 years of post launch content that will be seamlessly and easily integrated into the storyline you've chosen and the world that the player lives in. They also plan to support the community with development tools and sharing capabilities that will allow players to quickly and easily create and share content.

Here's a look at the origin stories: