Dragon Age: Origins Preview

If you're looking for Mass Effect wrapped in fantasy clothing, look elsewhere.

We switch to a point closer to the start of the Battle of Ostagar. In a cut scene the King, Duncan, yourself and others are plotting strategy. Duncan and the King are to draw the darkspawn in while another force lies in wait to flank. Someone, however, needs to climb the Tower of Ishal and light a beacon to let the flanking force know it's party time. That someone turns out to be you.

Remember that scene in the second Lord of the Rings film, when it's pouring down with rain and the good guys are waiting anxiously on the ramparts for the evil invasion force to charge? Something very similar then happens in a Dragon Age cut scene, which then leads to the combat proper (which is scalable, by the way).

Here Tudge once again switches character, back to the Mage. Our four-strong group is at the base of the tower, with blood and gore from previous fights clearly visible on their armour. As a Mage, it's our job to stand back, heal and do damage. In the first room the party gets caught up in speed reducing grease and a darkspawn emissary launches a fireball that lights the grease on fire. Here we see that Dragon Age's spells can interact with each other - we cast Blizzard and put the fire out, all the while the AI is controlling our party and sending them off to deal with darkspawn warriors. We cast Tempest, an intense electrical storm that drains life and mana. We loot the poor emissary, heal up and buff everyone with Flaming Weapons, which adds fire damage to all our weapons.

We jump into the Warrior party member and head through the door into the next room, full of darkspawn. We jump back into the Mage and cast Glyph of Paralysis, freezing one bad guy in place as we hit him with the devastating Flame Blast. We launch Grease ourselves and cast a Fireball to light it up. In Dragon Age you'll be able to combo other spells in this way and, while a lot will be documented, a lot you'll have to figure out for yourself.

We're looking forward to discovering more on Bioware's latest RPG

We continue heading up the tower, and hear a roar behind a door. Inside a giant Ogre is waiting to sort us out. His special abilities include the Ogre Pound, the Ogre Hurl, where he grabs and throws rocks and the Ogre Grab, where he picks up one of your party members and pounds them in the face. We heal and occasionally deal damage. Our Warrior uses Shield Bash to break its grip when it's got one of us in its grab. Slowly but surely we reduce its hit points to nothing, and a gruesome slow motion finisher slices the beast in two.

There are finishing moves, called death blows in the game, for every type of attack, including ranged and sword. A critical hit will result in a death blow, so you'll want to concentrate on increasing the chance to crit with certain characters in your group. Expect them all to be gory - we saw decapitations not only with swords but with shields too.

We light the beacon and trigger a cut scene. The battle is still raging. The King is in the thick of it. He's grabbed by a monster and held aloft, presumably seconds away from an untimely death. It's here that the demo ends.

The combat is classic Baldur's Gate. The spell combos have us intrigued, and we look forward to experimenting with different combinations. But, for us, Dragon Age's appeal lies is in how you'll be able to manipulate the story and how your origin will affect the way the game world reacts to you, which should, we imagine, make it hugely replayable - an essential component of any single-player game.

Like we said, for some of you this 'return to Bioware's roots' will be a godsend. For us though, we can't help but feel like we've been here before, in countless fantasy role playing games not just from Bioware, but from other developers as well. Some of the features Bioware implemented in Mass Effect, features we thought would become RPG standard, are nowhere to be seen. Mass Effect's critically acclaimed conversation wheel, for example, which allowed you to choose the flavour of what your character would say mid sentence, is completely ignored in favour of the standard multiple text lines system we've seen in role-playing games for years.

Hopefully Bioware has some fresh and unique features ready to unveil in the build up to the game's release that will help dampen our overwhelming sense of familiarity. Otherwise, this might be a case of been there, done that. If you're a huge Baldur's Gate fan, however, this may be music to your ears.

Dragon Age: Origins is due out for PC early 2009.