Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Danger! Danger! This contains a few minor, character-specific spoilers – but nothing to do with DA’s main plot.

My first few hours with Bioware’s latest had more worried I wasn’t going to be entertained. Sure, I was having fun, but my party, the people I was travelling with, were pretty dry. Facetious holy warrior Alistair had a nice line in comic deflections, but arch sorceress Morrigan seemed a textbook line in sneery, sultry know-it-alls (though I’m sure there are many stings to be found in her self-confident tale) and, while the dog was sort of cute, it wasn’t exactly chatty. As for wide-eyed, pseudo-French bard Leilana – well, my cat could read those lines better than her. Sigh. Could I really make it through a couple of dozen hours with these ciphers, these stereotypes, these appalling cod-Euro accents? (Though, seriously, I like Alistair a lot). Then I met Shale, the golem – almost immediately the game’s bright, dazzling star.
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Sorry about the delay on this. The plan was to judge it last night, but there were – er – unavoidable delays. In a pub. Sorry. However, I’ve judged the competition and selected the winners, turning this into a very Dragon-agey day indeed. Hopefully they’ll have their copy of the Dragon’s Age Direct2Drive shortly. The standard of entries were high. Many people did copies of famous people. Many people did copies of us. Many people did seemingly completely normal fantasy characters, with bios, which is very sweet. Some people did things which make me genuinely disturbed. Some of them are winners. But which ones? Click, to discover.
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We’re playing Dragon Age. Except for John, because he’s already finished it and reviewed it for PC Gamer. The rest of RPS were a bit later to the party, so to speak. Consequently we’re a little… distracted. We offer a few early thoughts below. It’s probably fair to say that there will be minor spoilers in this article.
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Dragon Age playing masses, the 1.01 patch is out, and it’s likely essential. Those who’ve seen my PC Gamer review, and indeed very many others saying the same, will have noticed complaints that the Easy difficulty level at certain points isn’t altogether that easy. And I’ll wager many playing on Normal aren’t exactly finding it a breeze. The patch notes explain that they’ve, “made Easy difficulty easier”, and crucially, “slightly increased attack, defense, and damage scores for all party members at Normal difficulty.” I’ve yet to check what difference it actually makes, but hopefully this will address my one major complaint with the game. Steam has already auto-patched, so restart if you’re playing it over there. (And while I’m here, here’s Eurogamer’s review of the 360 version – it seems the PC won this one rather well.)

Over the weekend the Dragon Age pre-loading has started, meaning if you pre-order it – er – it’ll start downloading. Early. And similar. Anyway, to celebrate this momentous event, Direct2Drive have given us five copies of the Digital Deluxe Edition to give away to you. Our fine readers. So it’s compo time! To secure your copy of this much anticipated game, you have to use the recently released character creator to make the most interesting looking character you can. What does “interesting” mean? Well, you read the site. That’s your job to work out. Reverse analyse our evil noggins. Anyway – when you’ve done that, send a link to a grab of your creation, perhaps with a little in-mail elaboration of why you think it’s so splendid. Don’t actually mail us the screengrab. Mail us a link to the photo. I repeat, mail us a link to the grab of your character. We can’t have our compo inbox bunged up with enormous jpg files, you understand. Anyway – get the creator from here and get cracking. The compo will close at 6pm EST GMT on Thursday 5th, so those who don’t win still have time to actually pre-order the thing. The usual compo rules apply.

EDIT: If you have trouble grabbing, try FRAPS.

First of all, I’m very sorry for the headline. Moving on. The Dragon Age trailers, they will not stop. The latest is the reveal of the Dwarven potential party member Oghren, a fighter who can join your gang. As you’ll see in the trailer below, he’s brash, rude, and partial to the odd drink or seven, and at odds with the political state of his home city of Orzammar.

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You can now download the Dragon Age character creator, letting you find out the range of races and looks available for your potential avatar. You can get it in English directly from clicking here, or if you’re after another language head to the official Dragon Age site, in the column on the right. There’s also a new and rather excellent CGI trailer, which you can see below.

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Dragon Age designers talk architecture, history, archaeology in the latest Dragon Age trailer. There’s a lot of discussion of level design, world design, and the way that the game was prototyped in the Neverwinter Nights engine. That makes for an interesting “compare and contrast” for tech and design between the two games. This is the kind of trailer we were expecting, I think? That said, it’s an odd choice of trailer title with “Making A Living World,” because it’s definitely not making a living world in the sense we understand it as gamers. I’ve also posted a bunch of the new (and old) images EA released earlier today, and you can click for big versions.
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As Dragon Age edges ever closer more details about the game world are beginning to appear. Now we are given snippets of the city of Denerim, a capital city rife with corruption. Ooh, and you get to hear Tim Curry for a bit.

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BioWare has been peculiarly tight-lipped about the voice cast for the soon-to-arrive Dragon Age, until now. A decision which became more than a little silly at E3 when they played a scene with the voice of a famous actor, and then refused to agree that she was in it. As we reported at the time, Kate Mulgrew (famous for being the guinea pig-voiced captain Kathryn Janeway of the USS Voyager) was providing the voice of a witch known as Flemeth. Yesterday BioWare announced that Kate Mulgrew (famous for being the guinea pig-voiced captain Kathryn Janeway of the USS Voyager) is providing the voice of a witch known as Flemeth. However, there’s many more famous names announced, and people: one of them’s Tim Curry. Footage below.

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