First Dragon Age: Origins Details
BioWare has released some deeper details on its brand new role-playing game franchise, Dragon Age, in preparation for a more in-depth reveal later today at Electronics Arts’ E3 press conference in Los Angeles. This dark fantasy role-playing game is being billed as the spiritual successor to BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate, which admittedly is a hard act for any company to follow - even a company like BioWare..
BioWare says that Dragon Age: Origins represents a return to the company’s roots, promising a fusion of fantasy with stunning visuals, emotionally-driven narrative, fast-paced combat, powerful magic abilities and credible digital actors.
BioWare will be demonstrating Dragon Age: Origins behind closed doors at E3 all this week. Some of the features revealed this morning include a party-based combat system where party-based attack skills help take down groups of monsters and massive creatures. How parties gain or use these skills remains to be seen, but the concept sounds interesting.
A powerful magic system will be available to characters that can use it, though magic has been previously described by BioWare as being uncommon in the world. Still, those that can harness it will have the ability to create spells combos that can combine different spells that offer unique and powerful results.
Players will be able to customize characters in a number of ways, as one would expect from a role-playing game. Characters can be developed as you see fit using special abilities (spells, talents and skills) and discover weapons that are very rare. Magical weapons, much like the use of magic, are also a rarity according to previous statements from BioWare.
The story in Dragon Age is yours to shape, according to BioWare; players will decide who to trust and who to fight against. Create alliances are turn on them; be evil or good. The path to your ending is yours to create. How open-ended and how much affect you have on the game is debatable at this point, but hopefully BioWare has created real consequences to the player’s actions and interactions in the world.
Finally, players will partake in what BioWare calls an “Origin story,” a prelude that lets the player decide how they see the world and how the world sees them. This prelude event is a driven character creation mechanism that determines who you are (perhaps race? profession?) and where you begin the game.
BioWare will no doubt reveal more about the game later this week - if not later today. Watch our continuing coverage of all things E3 related E3 Hub Page.
Dragon Age: Origins is scheduled to ship for the PC in early 2009.
