GEN7 Dragon Age: Origins

Combat Options: According to the BioWare guys showing me the game, Dragon Age can be played as a real-time twitch-based action-RPG a la Fable 2. And a player need plumb no deeper than that. Or the camera can be pushed more over the characters as your party's actions can be chosen more carefully from multiple menus of moves while the action is paused. And, my favorite part: Expanding on the smart combat system of Final Fantasy XII, players will be able to assign simple artificial intelligence rules to their party heroes, telling them, for example, to heal themselves when their health reaches a certain percentage of damage. Unlike FF XII, however, players won't have to seek the right to use each custom-command in the game world. They will be able to set the rules from the start.

The Controls: The point of the demo was to prove the 360 can handle Dragon Age, and in terms of controls, it was convincing. Character movement is on the left stick. Characters could be switched with another button (a bumper, I believe). The controlled character could launch a default attack with a press of the A button or any of three special moves mapped to the other three face buttons. Holding the left trigger switched the association of the face buttons to three other special moves. Holding down the right trigger paused the action and produced a radial menu that allowed access to even more powers. This may not be as elegant as using a mouse to point-and-click, but, in my hands, it was easy to swap characters and swap powers. The only drawback, as noted above, was the lack of visual clarity as to when the attacks were being carried out, something that may be the byproduct of the demo being set several hours into the game.

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They claim one playthrough might last 80-100 hours.

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The developers talk about there being as much as 800 hours of gameplay to this game, if someone was to play through it with each of the origin stories.

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