Dragon Age: Origins Video Interview and Preview
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Like many RPGs, Origins lets you set the behaviors of characters so that you don't have to babysit them in battle and make sure they don't blow all the healing items. The usual defaults are aggressive, passive, defend or whatever; a few games get super-specific at the level of setting the exact health percentage a character needs to be at before the mage to casts heal. Origins keeps both layers of management, letting the player get ultra-micromanagement-y with who casts what and under which circumstance or allowing them to stay out of it altogether and let the game decide who should be doing what based on class, equipment and skill level.
At this point in the demo, the village militia rallied to fight off the Blight at dusk, when an evil green mist swept down into the valley. Our party of heroes stood at the bridge leading to the village, waiting for the zombies the Blight produces to come through the choke point. Morrigan cast an area effect fire spell so the zombies would catch fire as they came over the bridge, then cast invulnerability and anti-knockdown spells on Sten so he could wade out into the fire and hack the flaming zombies. Liliana picked stragglers off with arrows and the Grey Warder because he was a rogue class just hung out and occasionally back-stabbed zombies that made it past everyone else.
This is an ingredient that could go either way for Origins: the player perspective. It was the combat that really made this clear to me because combat works like it does in Baldur's Gate: you can pause during combat and issue specific orders to your characters, or just let the combat play itself out like a real time strategy game. In that game, though, you were in a zoomed-out RTS view by default. In Origins, you can choose to play in a zoomed in third-person action view. You can, but I can't see why you'd want to since combat is still largely tactical. Yeah, it's nice to see how detailed everything is up close while the fighting is going on, and maybe I could trust the AI to handle the other three characters while I play as just one but I'm not sure I'd really enjoy it that way. I might get bored.
