A Look at the Dragon Age Character Creator
As we get closer to November, my anticipation for Dragon Age: Origins steadily mounts. When I saw the character creator had been released I rushed to give it a whirl. Following is a look at its features as well as what the creator tells us about the game itself.
Gone are many of the feats and stat min-maxing of the Baldur’s Gate II and Throne of Bhaal character creators. Bioware has significantly streamlined the choices made when picking a character and it seems likely that far more customization will occur during leveling.
With any luck, Bioware will have successfully combined choices you make in game with the organic growth of your character, and won’t force the player to depend on D&D experts and extensive research to choose their play-style before the game even begins.
Creating a character
Most RPGs start you out in the same place regardless of your character type. Dragon Age does not follow this convention. Which race and class combination you choose determines which of the six origin stories you’re going to play. These constitute the first couple of hours for your character, and they give each player type a unique personality before you delve into the ‘main quest.’
For example, you can choose human, elf or dwarf for race, and warrior, mage or thief for class, but each combination has a relatively limited choice of origin story. Mages of any race (dwarves cannot be mages) are all ‘magi,’ powerful students of magic who have to pass a test and prove they can control their dangerous magic or be destroyed.
Non-mage elves can be Dalish Elves where a found relic sunders you from your people, or City Elves where the city’s human magistrate tries to claim his right of primae noctis with your wife and you are forced to rebel.
Finally, dwarves can either be Dwarf Commoners in which you work your way up for the local crime lord, or Dwarf Nobles where you are the favored son of the king and have to survive elaborate court intrigue before you begin your journey.
While the story differences are probably the most significant choices here, the races and classes also affect your starting stats in a very traditional D&D manner i.e. dwarves get constitution bonuses.
Thank you! I too think this stylish tunic accentuates my hips.
Additional Customization
Following that, you have a fairly detailed face appearance editor although there is no way to change the body size or shape. In addition, you can change the portrait of your character which is now an in-game render of your model instead of pre-drawn art.
After appearance, you allocate 5 skill points. Gone are the days of taking down your warrior’s intelligence to 3 points to maximize strength and constitution; you cannot subtract points from unimportant categories. Following that is a glimpse of skills and abilities you can look forward to as for the moment they’re almost entirely locked.
Skills are uniform across classes and include herbalism, survival, trap making and combat tactics. You aren’t actually choosing points to allocate into your skills; you merely see what you can have access to as you level.
I really think my left side shows off my cheekbones better. Rotate the portrait! Should I act bemused, or angry?
Abilities
While there isn’t any customization available, the number of abilities that will eventually be accessible is stunning. Warriors have fifty-six abilities, rogues forty and mages sixty-eight. They are divided up into sections such as Shield and two-handed etc. and it’s unclear whether the skills are direct trees or if you’ll have to limit yourself to certain sections.
Abilities for warriors include ‘Cripple,’ which strikes low at a target and gives penalties to movement speed and attack/defense, ‘Scattershot,’ where you hit multiple targets as well as abilities to sunder armor. Rogue abilities consist of ‘Feign Death,’ ‘Whirlwind’ and ‘Arrow of Slaying,’ which is an automatic critical, among others. Mages have ‘Petrify,’ ‘Haste,’ and ‘Waking Nightmare’ which randomly stuns enemies and occasionally briefly turns them into an ally.
What more do we know about Dragon Age?
We already knew that the combat mechanics in Dragon Age took many influences from World of Warcraft. While there is still the Baldur’s Gate ‘mid-battle pause’ mechanic, gone are the days of clicking and watching, replaced by hotkey abilities on cooldown a-la-WoW. Now we know that it goes far beyond that. Not only are the abilities in a style like WoW, many of them are taken directly from Blizzard’s game (feign death, sunder armor, taunt).
I’m not saying this as a negative, quite the contrary: go with what works. The mechanics in WoW are well developed and balanced, and weren’t even that original when Blizzard first used them. Many are well-established D&D tropes and it’s a good thing that Bioware isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel when they’re already doing so many original things in Dragon Age.
Do I really need to learn 'Shield Block?' I'm pretty sure somebody without this talent could figure it out. It's not rocket surgery, folks
In addition, we know that the ability system has been aggressively streamlined. I say this in the hope that it is in fact streamlining and not dumbing down. I still have faith that this game hasn’t received the Invisible War treatment. Fallen comrades automatically resurrect at the end of a battle in which some of your party survives, removing the annoying tradeoff in Baldur’s Gate games between memorizing resurrection instead of a battle ability, and wasting time finding a temple. Hopefully the reductions made in the skill and ability trees are of this type: removing elements that weren’t fun, rather than simply removing depth.
Finally, it’s clear that the origin stories aren’t merely tacked on prologues that will become irrelevant once you’re into the game proper. The extreme limitations put on class/race combinations for each story suggests that your character’s background tightly intertwines with much of the plot. Knowing Bioware, it is likely that the origins introduce themes and influence NPC reactions that will resonate throughout the remainder of the game.
While simple, the character creator reinforced what I already knew: I am ready for the new shit.
I’m interested in your thoughts on the matter. Hit up the comments!
