A wad of Dragon Age: Origins trailers – that’s what you’re in the mood for. You weren’t sure, but now I’ve said it you realise that’s exactly it. How will they taste? Look below. There’s three of them, titled The Dwarf Commoner, The Human Noble and The Tower Of Ishal. I’d like to now say: oh thank goodness.
The Dwarf Commoner:
A good joke! In fact, a great joke, well delivered. With really decent acting. And then just a ton of chunky, well connecting violence.
The Human Noble:
Subtle infidelity, strong acting, entertaining blood splatters, and a sense of drama.
The Tower Of Ishal:
Gorgeous locations, really powerful looking magic, and a great looking boss fight!
Oh thank goodness’s goodness. Finally it’s the Dragon Age trailers I’ve been waiting for. They make the game not only look really entertaining, but also not something designed for horny adolescents. Notice something about all three trailers? Not a hint of screaming thrash metal in the background. In fact, no music at all, instead relying on the sound effects and dialogue. Hurrah, BioWare. HURRAH.
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Hurrah!
Screaming thrash metal?!?! I only remember Marilyn Manson in one of the previous trailers, admittedly I haven’t seen them all. I would love to hear more Warbringer or Skeletonwitch in my video game trailers.
First one: The lack of an accent I can forgive, but no beard? What is this shite? Lame joke, not enough dialogue to make a decision on the acting.
Second: Bad, crappy animations, but they don’t bother me that much. Blood looks terrible, and I hope it could be turned off. Voice acting seemed alright.
Third: Magic looks like fun. First time I might be tempted to roll a mage since forever. Cliched aoe attack doing boss.
Overall: Too brown. Too much attention on gore. Plot looks generic and may suck. And unless there is some greatly written and characterized love interests I would be staying the hell away from any of the romantic subplots. Will try it, but am not holding my breath or anything.
That’s next-gen?
I dunno, I guess I’m just so over RTwP combat. That looks like a hard-to-control snorefest, like NWN2 where I was fighting the game more often than the baddies.
All I really want is a party-based RPG with the independent spirit of The Witcher, the rich tactical goodness of The Temple of Elemental Evil, the maximum snazzy production values of Valve or Blizzard, and the quirkiness of Zeno Clash. Is that too much to ask?
I’m tired of fantasy, I’m tired of orcs, I’m tired of elves, I’m tired of dwarves, gnomes, and hobbits. I’m tired of magic swords with names, old men in dresses carrying canes, busty near-naked slave-girls with no depth for people adolescent in body or mind to cream their pants over. I’m tired of medieval kingdoms, I’m tired of knights, I’m tired of nobles and commoners living in massive walled cities containing exactly twelve people. I’m tired of the lazy approaches to good and evil, I’m tired of the hack authors and their laziness, I’m tired of races who are always evil, ones who are always good, and how it can all be conveniently measured by how pretty they look to us.
I’m tired of how fantasy as a collective genre hasn’t had an original thought since Tolkien pieced together random bits of mythology and old fashioned Victorian class-ism and race-ism into a story and Gary Gygax proceeded to eat it, crap it out and roll around in it with his friends rubbing it on their chests and privates.
How do you like THAT mental image?!
Did anyone else replace “I’m tired of,” with “I hate,” perchance?
PR woes aside (that ultimate collector’s edition with the sausage for example) this still looks good, the actual gameplay trailers from the PC version some time ago did enough for me, these flicks and the Manson-shit were pretty much console-crowd pleasers.
The most interesting part remains the toolset though, Gamespy wrote some nice stuff about it, with feedback from the NWN(2) modders.
Reading the comments here confuse me.
I played Baldurs Gate (1 and 2) as a 14 year old. Actually, I played BG2 first and then BG1. Why anyone is trying to argue that it has an incredible story is beyond my comprehension.
In BG2, you are an adolescent, and you and your emo-looking sister(purple hair? cmon…) wander around picking up friends and completing quests while searching for the evil wizard dude who pissed you off in the beginning of the game as well as killing your brother.
Looking back, I forgave its shortcomings because as a teenager( which means I am apparently dumb), that sliver of identification with the character, along with a sense of escapism, was enough.
So to you artsy pants people: I think they will deliver with this an experience that is similar for this generation of adolescents as they did with Baldurs Gate when I was an adolescent. Gore and blood and screen shaking critical hits included.
Think of it as an “entry-level RPG” sacrifice to the teenagers of the world, so that things like the Withcer 2 and other thinky RPGS will get a stronger fanbase.
And that should be all we should expect from them.
@ Lobotomist
“if you look for great strategic (semi turn based) combat. Old D&D feel. Dungeon crawling. Plethora of good written quests. And awesome editor for tons of player made content. Than you know why DAO will be cult classic.”
From reading NWN forums it seems that people are going to stick with using NWN2 for a whole range of reasons (co-op, multiplayer, persistent worlds, Forgotten Realms lore, vast amount of assets and scripting available, sheer critical mass of other modders, etc).
If I were Atari and had the crpg AD&D/wotc license, I’d commission CD Projekt to do a NWN3, make it as backwards compatible with NWN1/2 mods as possible and host it all on a portal. After all CD Projekt are hardcore BG and PS:T fans, they run gog.com, they have rapidly built up a lot of respect for their approach to The Witcher, they are hungry and ambitious and based in a region with lower development costs and a ever growing PC-using base.
Atari seem to be really missing a trick with their IP and with a lack of a busy online portal a la Steam – they could easily have one by using NWN, AD&D and that whole community. At the moment Bioware seem to be holding the baby for them but without actually having any rights to the IP iself.
@Wulf are you contending that straightfoward good vs evil tales are signs of ‘right-wing extremism’? Sounds like you’re completely lost in leftist moral relativism. Should we lament the ‘right wing extremism’ of the black and white way we talk about Hitler, Pol Pot or Stalin? I think not; sometimes good and evil are easily identifiable and if you think that’s right wing extremism, then I pity you.
Morally grey narratives tend to be more intriguing and engaging than black and white ones and that was one of the big strengths of The Witcher over many other RPGs, I agree with that, but right wing extremist, WTF? Sounds more like projection on your part.
“They make the game not only look really entertaining, but also not something designed for horny adolescents”
Sure, instead it’s for bloodthirsty adolescents?
They haven’t shown me anything that makes me think this is going to be a successor to Baldur’s Gate as it was apparently meant to be.
After reading the comment, I’m inclined to agree with merc.
“Extremist.”
We should always keep this quote in mind when slinging about political insults, especially when they’re done for no reason at all. “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
I’m amazed that so many are upset by silly things like the blood effects and facial animations (talky bits don’t look worse than the stiff uncanny valley stuff in ME anyway). People are so picky these days. It’s not a cartoony game like Fallout, Baldur’s Gate or KotOR where your imagination does half the job in bringing it to life and feel visceral.
It is an RPG after all, as long as the RPG and story bits work and the combat is at least functional it should work fine as a game. These last trailers have gone a long way towards restoring my interest in the Dragon Age.
Quoting Owen from above:
Regardless though, I’ll be waiting for John of Walker to play and review it before considering buying.
Second that, if there’s one area where I trust John Walker’s taste it’s in telling me if a story is good nor not :)
Erm, those trailers made me want to get the game less, not more, more mass effect pls BiowarEA
This article cracked me up. Oh, John Walker, you sly dog, with your *incredibly* subtle sarcasm.
Bizarrely, I actually prefer the heavy metal flim flammery of the previous trailers. I thought they were all kinda boring and generic.
Mass Effect’s narrative was fantastic. Better than half the big budget films I’ve seen in the past couple of years.
These clips aren’t impressing me.
However, the gameplay looks pretty fun. It’s a shame I won’t be buying it… because? NO MULTIPLAYER EL OH EL.
Dragon Age: Origins Ultimate Collectors Edition
Are they mocking the COD4 MW 2 NVG edition or is there truth in this vid?
I liked the boobies :(
I still can’t see how anyone can consider the first 2 trailers anything above ‘awful’, but each to his own I guess.
Third one wasn’t so bad though.
It’s going to be hard to go back to the ‘click’n'wait’ style of rpg combat after the immediacy of Mass Effect, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and even Jade Empire.
For the record, however, this game is solidly on my ‘buy on day of release’ list. And Bioware, overall, is better at this whole genre than Bethesda.
Remember when BioWare made good games? Baudur’s Gate was good. This isn’t good.
Wulf: there are plenty of MUSHes that sound right up your alley.
The game might end up being good, but that blood spatter is absurd to the point of being distracting.
I see what they’re trying to do, but I think the Bioware would be better served by leaving the GUI “On” in these demo videos.
With it off, it just looks like they’re showcasing looks and general “awesomeness” instead of nitty-gritty gameplay, and in the looks department there’s not a lot to showcase. This game’s strengths, if it has any, will be in the nuts and bolts of the combat system and the narrative.
I do agree that the videos were much more promising, in a “this could be cool if what I think could be happening is actually happening but I can’t tell without some GUI and tooltips” sort of way.
@Super
It’s a joke, the real special edition just comes with a cloth map, a DVD, and some other crap.
Heh yeah that’s what I figured.
It’s getting harder to tell what’s serious and what’s a joke surrounding this game what with the transsexual and bestial brothel sex and such.
Well if 80% of the content is not dull and samey filler, then it will surely be better than Mass Effect at least.
The RPGs of today really need to look to the Ninja Gaidens and Devil May Crys of this world if they want melee combat to look right. You can’t just have two characters facing each other, playing their animations in turn. You need hitboxes and recoils and stuns and physics in play.
No, I’m not saying that RPGs should turn into action games. I’m saying that the better action games make hitting people look RIGHT, and an RPG developer could pilfer this knowledge and use it effectively, we’d get something much better out of it.
Something that springs to mind is development of character animation. The (sadly Japanese-only) PS2 game based on the famous Berserk manga does this excellently. Near the start of the game, your character swings his (HUGE) sword like it’s a sledgehammer, putting all his weight into it and skidding, tumbling and generally looking not the slightest bit graceful about it. As you level up and put more points into sword skills, he begins to hold onto the sword more confidently. His stance is higher, and his swings and faster and cleaner.
Near the end of the game, he’s a true master of this gigantic sword, and is bringing it round in one-handed arcs – he animates like it’s an extension of his body now, rather than the gigantic lump of steel he was throwing around at the start. If an RPG could do that, and make characters visibly improve their fighting style over the course of the game, that’d be awesome.
Seems exactly the sort of thing that Dragon Age could use.
“I am looking for damn Baldurs Gate succesor”
I’m looking for one too – what a shame this looks nothing like one.
It’s utterly juvenile, looks abysmal, and is yet another in a long line of nu-Bioware “we want to make things cinematic!” drivelware. Deep games are not like movies – because they can’t be unless they loose their depth. Deep games are like books.
Baldurs Gate was a book, Dragon Age looks like Uwe Boll doing a fantasy movie.
Was the whole post being sarcastic, or did i miss something?
The voice acting was terrible, the joke wasn’t one, the combat looked incredibly dull (hit each other until someone falls over), the locations didn’t look that special, and without music there was NO drama at all.
the magic looked pretty powerful though… so maybe the whole post wasn’t sarcastic…
My interest chart shows positive growth.
Dominic,
Gothic does that to some extent. But the combat itself is still pretty weak. The moves don’t become particularly flashy, but as you improve your skill the PC can wield his sword better with slightly different moves.
I’d like to see it adopted more too.
Round-based needs to be disguised much more. And I don’t see why it isn’t considering the computer could “roll” several rounds ahead, or even resolve the whole conflict before a single animation is played (but allow the player to interrupt), it would be completely transparent to the player and they could be playing any sort of fight-scene they want, with all sorts of fancy animations.
@Dom: Hopefully you’re not suggesting that Medieval Fantasy combat should look like Devil May Cry, but rather that it has the same attention to detail? :P
All I’m saying that fighting games actually have mastered the art of making it look like you’ve actually hit someone, even if it doesn’t kill them. There’s power and weight behind every attack, and a lot of RPGs seem to want to do that, but end up falling into the trap of two avatars playing attack animations, maybe synched up now and then, and having one falling over when they run out of HP.
In a Ninja Gaiden game, you know when you’ve been hit. There’s a visceral sense of impact there – you get that familiar noise, you get knocked back, you see a spray of blood that splashes against the floor. You may have only lost a tenth of your health, but it feels like you just got HIT.
Man, these dwarves mean freaking business.
For a game with such great graphics and acting, those are some awful attack animations (or, rather, animation). Wouldn’t look too bad in Neverwinter Nights or Baldur’s Gate, but here we have highly detailed characters with facial animation, who engage in complex interactions, only to start whaling on each other with the same motion like wind-up toys a minute later. It started getting old by the end of the first trailer! Can’t wait to have to stare at it for an hour straight during a trek through some mine or a sewer level.
I do see all these things in the final combat video linked in the article, actually. There’s recoil on getting hit, there’s knockback on strong hits and there’s blood splashes (to the point where some people are complaining about it) There is no silly chained spinning kick attacks and such while the character efortlessly hovers 10 m in the air like in DMC, but hopefully these aren’t part of what supposedly makes the melee combat in these games ‘look right’…
Apparently they let the public play the game at the Comic Con. Anyone seen any reports?