My hands-on time with Dragon Age: Origins was a short but extremely revealing glimpse at what drives the story, character development and game world forward. I was able to choose my character, interact with some NPCs and do a little dungeon delving.

The EA representative at my side told me that in Dragon Age's world humans had long ago tried to enslave elves. As such there is great animosity between the two races that also greatly affects gameplay. I chose to be an elvish rogue, and the game opened with a scene in which my character and his friend had found a few unarmed humans in elvish territory. Immediately the branching dialogue reminded me of Knights of the Old Republic. I was given the option to kill the humans or interrogate them.



As an aside I have always had an interest in morally gray areas and I was interested to see if I could find them in Dragon Age. To my surprise there were many choices beyond the standard black and white/good and evil standard that RPGs have been obsessed with the last five years.

I pushed through the situation with the humans by simultaneously grilling them for information on their intentions and threatening their lives. In the end I squeezed pertinent information out of them and spared their lives for their usefulness. From the start of the conversation, I could have immediately killed or freed them. This alludes to a great amount of depth, choice, reward, and consequence stemming from the conversation system.



The humans gave us the location of a cave that had elvish runes on its walls. This is of immense importance to the elves because they lost much of their history in their war with the humans.

I delved into the cave and battled a few giant spiders, found a few treasure chests and was generally pleased with what seemed to be standard dungeon fantasy RPG fare. My guide told me that the total demo took about 45 minutes to complete. I didn't have the time to finish the whole demo.



I procured some juicy details out of my guide. He said "Dragon Age is absolutely sexier than Mass Effect." He mentioned that in the current build of the game there was over one hundred hours of gameplay in the story.

I left Dragon Age: Origins impressed to say the least. It wasn't without its issues though. The Xbox build of the game is flat out unattractive and at this point in development I'm not sure how much more polish the graphics are going to get. Also the controls were not as responsive as you would expect but this is obviously something that would get ironed out prior to release.

My experience with Dragon Age: Origins put the game on my winter game rush calendar. Despite the noted problems the core themes and mechanics of the game show a lot of breadth and depth that has me intrigued to say the least.