On the 2nd of July I attended closed doors presentation of "Dragon Age: Origins" in my hometown Warsaw, Poland. It was held at King's Castle - and yeah it's an actual castle, not a name of some club - as a part of BioWare's European tour. The party itself was pretty cool. Hostesses dressed in medieval clothes (well, sort of), drinks, some nice food, like giant roasted boar etc. Of corse the reason for all this was "Dragon Age".

It kicked off with Greg Zeschuk doing a little introduction of BioWare folks, and brief company history. They demoed two sequences in the game that were intended to show variety of player's choices within the game and impact they had on storyline. Bruce Venne and Mike (sorry, I missed his last name) were playing the exact same part of the game but with different characters and in different ways, with Mark Darrah doing commentary. Depending on your origin, party members and other factors it looks like you can have a totally different experience every time. Demo was divided into two sections. In the first one they needed to go some mage's tower with the only way leading to it is to cross and the pass is guarded by one annoying guy. There are multiple options you can attempt to convince him to let you pass. You can offer him cookies (for real) but that didn't quite work with him. You can intimidate him, blackmail him etc. etc. Pretty much standard but still it's always different depending on who you are, and who are guys in your team. After that there was the tower itself. Bruce played as well kind of warrior chracter who have never been to this tower, and by the first conversation you can tell he was not welcome. Again you can do it the easy way and try to talk yourself out of the sitation, or you can go the hard way and slash everything in your path. Mike on the other hand, as it appears, was raised in the tower and they welcomed him with opened arms. Later in the tower your teams encounters a healer Wynne. Well, it didn't turn out really good for Bruce as he had a woman called Morrigan in his team, and Morrigan hates mages. It all ended up in a brutal fight to the death. On the contrary Wynne was very pleased with Mike's team and after some chit chat she joined him in his adventure. There are also a personnal character quests, like for Wynne it's searching for some grimoire I think.

To conclude the demo thay showed a little bonus which was a fierce battle with a dragon. It was pretty awesome with the impressive finishing attack. Later to answer one of the questions they also loaded a level of some kind of dream world which looked really cool.

I had an opportunity to play PC version which seemed more like the full game that a demo. It was also localized into Polish. Full character creation and customization, stat points, races, everything. I started playing as a dwarf. For every character there's a different starting point. It's somehow similar to World of Warcraft and controls are also pretty much WoW-like. So you have hotkeys for attacks and spells, everything with a cooldown timer. There are lots and lots of dialogue. EA representative said it's about a million words of dialogue, every one of them is fully voiced with over eighty actors doing voice overs. There are also achievements in PC version just like 360. I talked a bit with Bruce Venne about whatever came to my mind, I regret I didn't write down my questions earlier cause you know, I have BioWare dev who I can ask about everything and I don't know what I want to know One of the things he said is that the main storyline will take about 40-60 hours and if you wan't to do 100% of the game it's more like 80-100 hours of gameplay.

I also played Xbox 360 version. Unfortunately it was only a brief demo but it gives the idea about controls and how the game is looking on consoles. Interface is very different than on PC but it's solid. After maybe a minute I figured out most of the things I can do with the controller. You can pause the game at any time and have access to all the spells, commends and everything in a circled menu. There are also quick commands you can issue with a press of a button, instant spellcasting, easy movement. Overall looking pretty sweet.

This event really got me hyped for "Dragon Age". The game is looking quite polished and it's still several months away. I can't wait for October 23rd to get my copy of the game, most likely collector's edition which they're also planning to realese. Hey, I also got a cool Dragon Age t-shirt