E3: Dragon Age: Origins Hands On

As a fan of Bioware's Baldur's Gate games of old, I've been looking forward to finally getting my hands on Dragon Age: Origins. This happened today, first thing in the morning! Things kicked off with the latest trailer we had already seen - you know, the second trailer with that damn hard rock/metal/whatever music. Ugh, that thing just isn't to my taste.

Pretty soon, however, Dragon Age's lead designer was taking us through the game. What he showed us revolved around the romances that can pop up between your character and your followers. In typical Bioware fashion, two girls fancied the main guy - and you had to choose to sleep with one of them, or neither. On the one hand, there was the sweet, cute red-head with an accent; and on the other hand, there was the sassy, indepedent rebel. Some cold bastard in the room yelled out that he should sleep with the latter, so that's what happened. Cue raunchy sex scene - well, sort of. The guy playing quickly skipped it, saying "you'll get to see the whole thing in the actual game!" Curses.

Every action has its consequences, of course, and pretty soon all the other party members had their own opinion on things - including the woman you jilted. Poor girl, she was still trying to be nice and tell you off at the same time. Cold, cold bastards.

From there, it was onto combat - and a bloody great big dragon. The party had just approached a lady who was far, far older than is natural. A lot of people wanted her dead to try and gain all the knowledge she possessed, but all had so far failed. Up until now! Once you lay down the challenge, she turns herself into a dragon - obviously slightly harder to kill. It was a good example of the frenetic combat you can expect to see in Dragon Age. The melee people charged up and started hacking, while the spellcaster hung back, healing companions, casting fireballs, and - on one humorous occasion - turning himself into a giant spider so he could scuttle up and poison the dragon by biting its leg. Soon, however, the party members were being burned alive, and even getting picked up in the dragon's jaws and tossed around. Eventually, however, the main character managed to get on top of the dragon's head and stab his sword right through, with suitably dramatic camera angles.

That ended the demo. My impressions were generally favourable, but it was hard not to draw direct comparisons to Mass Effect 2, which we had just been wowed by. Compared to that, Dragon Age looks much less polished in terms of graphics and narrative delivery. It's not bad by a long shot, but it just seemed a bit rougher. I was a little disappointed with some of the voice work in particular - it sounded pretty stilted at times. However, I'm pretty sure that taken as a whole, the game's presentation will work out just fine.

I then got some hands on time with an early part of the game. Naturally, it was set in a dungeon with one other party member, and had us killing giant spiders and such like. Here's the thing, though: I was playing on the 360, getting my first change to see how it ran on a console! My verdict? Yeah, runs fine. Personally I think I'll like the PC controls a lot more (go go customisability and thousands of buttons), but it's still supremely playable. Your main attack abilities are mapped to B, X, and Y - and you can hold down the right trigger to make it flip over to an alternate set of three skills. It's fast and intuitive enough - not quite as good as being able to simply press 1 through 9, but it works.

Character customisation, from what I saw, looks very deep - there are a ton of facial and body sliders that you can tweak to make yourself look however you want. And then that was it - my time with Dragon Age was over! Overall, I expect it to be a deeply satisfying adventure, with a gripping story and solid combat. What I saw today didn't look like Bioware's most technically advanced or narratively exceptional game - but I'm pretty sure it'll be a fine return for them to the fantasy genre. We've been waiting long enough. Look for Dragon Age: Origins to hit the consoles and PC on October 20.

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