Dragon Age: Origins Q&A
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GS: We recall from our previous jaunts in BioWare games that fighting dragons wasn't exactly a walk in the park--they were extremely powerful foes that ignored the attacks of simple magic spells and required a great deal of preparation, strategy, and even a bit of luck to overcome. How powerful will the dragons of Dragon Age: Origins be, and if they end up at odds with your character, what kind of prep and strategy will players need to take them on?
DT: I won't lie to you: bringing down a dragon is pretty tough, but if you can do it, the payoff is worth it. Combat is party-based, so you can choose to have some very powerful allies in your party, each with their own unique abilities that you can combine to give yourself some tactical advantages. Some strategies that work well are things like buffing your party at the start of combat (especially your warriors) to make them tougher in battle and also keeping your mages at a safe distance. You'll have to experiment to see what kind of strategy works best for you, but one thing I find useful is the "pause and play" system. The ability to freeze the game and examine the situation from different angles can give you some great ideas on how to shift the odds in your favor.
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GS: We understand that the idea behind the origin stories is to give different players (who choose different characters) completely different experiences. Given that the origin stories will provide a different starting experience, how does the structure of the rest of the game hold up to replays? How different will the full game be the second time around? How much of the story branches off in different ways to provide a newer experience each time?
DT: I couldn't tell you the exact number of times the story branches in the game, but I can tell you that your experience is going to change from replay to replay depending on so many different factors, including your choice of origin story, race, class, gender, dialogue choices, and even party dynamics, to name just a few. One single play-through alone [will be] a long game, and even then you won't have seen everything in the game, so there is a lot of replay [value] in Dragon Age: Origins. The fans are paying good money for this game, so we want to pack as much bang for their buck into this game as possible.
