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Sunday, August 16, 2009

Dragon Age: Origins Updated Hands-On - The Origins of the Human Mage

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Dragon Age: Origins BoxshotDeveloper BioWare suggests that Dragon Age: Origins will be a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, and we just got our hands on the first few hours of the wizard's origin.

Dragon Age: Origins is an epic fantasy role-playing game that tells a tale of a swords-and-sorcery world at war to stave off an invasion of corrupted monsters. It's also sitting right here on the hard drive of our PC. We started a new game to watch an elaborate cinematic sequence that began with animated pictures on what looked like aged vellum paper--a throwback to the introductory cinematics of Baldur's Gate II. The paintings gave way to a vicious in-engine battle between Duncan--a swordsman who presumably acts as your advisor at least in the early going--and a pair of hideous darkspawn, the monstrous humanoids who are invading the land. By starting a new game, we went straight to the character generation screen to play through an "origin" story. This early-game content begins after you choose a combination of the game's races and classes, which include humans, dwarves, and elves, and basic classes of fighters, mages, and rogues--and from there, you can choose a specific background for that class. We chose the human mage, whose only background is as a student in the mage guild, and away we went. Please note that this article pertains to a hands-on play session with the PC version of the game, and be advised that this article may contain minor story spoilers about the early part of the game.

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Starting a new character as a mage will take you through an elaborate creation process that lets you allot statistic points to your character's ability scores. These include strength (which affects your melee attack ability), dexterity (which affects your speed and defense), willpower (which affects your maximum magic pool), magic (which determines how effective your magic spells are), cunning (which affects your stealth abilities), and constitution (which affects your character's overall health). Dragon Age's human mage characters begin their lives with statistics in the 10- to 20-point range, with points primarily clustered in the willpower and magic stats. At the beginning, you can allot five additional points (and with each experience level, three more points). Increasing your attributes to certain levels will not only make your character more powerful, but will also let you access higher-level skills along the game's elaborate personal skill tree. Like the pen-and-paper role-playing systems you might have seen, Dragon Age has a list of miscellaneous personal skills to which you can allot points. These include coercion (which lets you flatter or threaten your way through a conversation), stealing (which lets you pick other characters' pockets), trap-making (which lets you create deadly traps), survival (which helps your character better deal with animals and survive harsher elements), herbalism (the game's version of herb-collecting alchemy), poison-making (which lets you create various types of venom), and combat tactics (which lets you set specific scripts for your party members who aren't in action).

Should you decide to follow the path of wizardry in Dragon Age, you'll begin with a mage's origin and explore the mystical Fade.

Once you've chosen your skills, as a mage you can choose your character's spell specializations from five different options. These include arcane spells, which appear to be the most stock-standard of the mage's spells (including such selections as arcane bolts, with which you begin the game, and a continuous magical shield); the "primal" line, which includes elemental damaging spells of fire, ice, and lightning; creation, which includes various healing and defensive spells; spirit, which contains spells that pertain to manipulating your own or your enemies' spell power (or "mana"); and entropy, which contains various curses that "de-buff" your foes. We chose to start with the spirit line with the close-range "mind blast" spell that stuns nearby foes, but there are a great variety of different spells here that will let you create either a powerful specialist or a well-rounded generalist. And fans of the Baldur's Gate series will be happy to see analogs to classic tactical magic spells from Baldur's Gate II, such as fireball, grease, and Otiluke's Resilient Sphere. We then moved on to the customization of our character's appearance, which lets you choose different voices, as well as different hair and facial features (or choose from a series of premade looks). After selecting our appearance, we were off and ready to start our adventure, which began with an argument between Irving, the senior wizard at our mage tower, and Gregoir, the angry sergeant who leads the templars that guard the tower. According to the setup, the mages study in seclusion to better learn to use their powers, but they are guarded closely, if not imprisoned, by the templars, who are authorized to cut down any wizards who are corrupted by the Fade--a magical netherworld that people visit when they dream, and from which mages gain their power, but which also houses demons with connections to the darkspawn. There's clearly a great deal of tension between the two parties that's conveyed well in the dialogue and that sets the stage for more political conflicts in the game--as you poke around the mage's tower, you'll even encounter characters engaged in political discussions, such as one group of senior mages who suggest that there are multiple factions of wizards with different ideas on how close mages should live to the world of non-mages.

Politics aside, we dived right into our first task as an apprentice--completing a rite of passage known as "the Harrowing," which requires all stripling mages to enter the Fade. So, in we went, to find a hazy dreamworld where a handful of hostile spectral monsters attacked us so that we could get the hang of the combat system. Like in previous BioWare games, there's an auto-attack feature that lets you attack the nearest targeted enemy, though your other abilities, such as spells, work off a cooldown timer and can be tied to a hotkey bank, similar to the standard abilities you'd expect from a massively multiplayer game. The first enemies we faced weren't much of a challenge--the key characters we met were much more interesting. The first such character was a talking rodent who turned out to be an embittered apprentice mage that later took human form to speak with us. He explained that he, like us, had taken his test but had dallied too long in the Fade, which led the Templars to kill off his physical body, even though his spiritual form in the Fade had gained the ability to change shape. After a brief conversation, he joined us as a companion in the hopes of somehow escaping and suggested he could provide additional insight along the way.

But you'll need stout companions to handle what the game has to throw at you.

We then continued our test, meeting an ethereal spirit of valor, who was busy forging spectral weapons. When spoken to, the spirit openly questioned our character's courage--a dangerous mistake on his part, since we were equipped with Dragon Age's branching dialogue system, which let us use a willpower-based dialogue option to convince him of our conviction and persuade him to hand us a spectral staff. We also met a slumbering demon of sloth, a talking bear with bloodied jaws who spoke with us without bothering to lift his lazy head. Though the demon absently muttered something about devouring us both, our shape-shifting companion, Mouse, asked the creature to teach him how to change into a bear, and after some practice, Mouse was able to do so. The demon then explained that it was time for him to destroy us, though we were able to talk him down to playing a game of riddles in exchange for our lives.

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