Sure, dragons are cool and Dragon Age Origin’s developers know how to make a great trailer, but that’s not enough to make a great game.
After sitting down with the developers of Dragon Age: Origins I was able to get some hands on time with it for a few minutes. As I began the demo I assumed control of three characters wandering around a cave. By hitting the left shoulder button of the Xbox 360 controller I could swap between which character I controlled and the remaining two would follow me.
After encountering a few baddies I quickly found out that switching between your characters is essential to survival. At that point I thought I would be alright with juggling the three characters in order to progress through the game, but I hadn’t put my finger on the gameplay’s flaw yet. After hitting the attack button several times for the character I had selected, I realized that I wasn’t attacking. That’s when I realized that each of the character’s attacks had to refresh before they could be used again. These refresh rates take so long that they force you to switch between characters if you want to deal any real damage. Each character has three attacks, but as they do little damage and quickly run out, players are forced to swap out their characters until they find one whose attacks attacks have refreshed. Although I only played for a few minutes, this quickly began to annoy me. Swapping between characters and trying to find the one whose attacks are available in order to deal minimal amounts of damage is not my idea of fun.
Not only were refresh rates a pain, but when player’s characters can attack, they don’t seem to do any damage. Sure, they do inflict damage on the baddies you’re up against, but you can’t really tell it’s happening. This lack of visual confirmation you have attacked combined with the painfully slow refresh rates made combat extremely unsatisfying.
Not wanting to believe that Dragon Age: Origins suffered from such bad gameplay, I decided to look for a trailer that contained some actually gameplay to see if this experience was universal.
That looks awesome, no? Sadly, that footage is nothing like the level I was playing on the Xbox 360 demo unit. Was I not zoomed in enough to see the combat? Is it better on the PC? We’ll find out soon as it’s being released on October 2o for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.
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