Dragon Age Central

Ferelden Politics: "To our neighbors, Ferelden seems utterly chaotic. Unlike other monarchies, power does not "descend" from our throne. Rather, it rises from the support of the freeholders.

Each freehold chooses the bann or arl to whom it pays allegiance. Typically, this choice is made based on proximity of the freehold to the lord’s castle, as it’s rarely worthwhile to pay for the upkeep of soldiers who will arrive at your land too late to defend it. For the most part, each generation of freeholders casts their lot with the same bann as their fathers did, but things can and do change. No formal oaths are sworn, and it is not unheard of, especially in the prickly central Bannorn, for banns to court freeholders away from their neighbors, a practice that inevitably begins feuds that can last for ages.

Teyrns arose from among the banns, war leaders who, in antiquity, had grown powerful enough to move other banns to swear fealty to them. There were many of these in the days before King Calenhad, but he succeeded in whittling them down to only two: Gwaren in the south and Highever in the north. These teyrns still hold the oaths of banns and arls. They may call upon them in the event of war or disaster and they are responsible for defending those sworn to them.

The teyrns established the arls, giving them command of strategic fortresses that the teyrns could not oversee themselves. They are somewhat more prestigious than banns but they have no banns sworn to them.

The king is the most powerful of the teyrns. Although Denerim was originally the teyrnir of the king, it has since been reduced to an arling, as the king’s domain is now all of Ferelden. But even the king’s power must come from the banns.

This is especially evident during the Landsmeet, an annual council for which the nobles of Ferelden gather. It has been held for almost three thousand years with only a few interruptions for Blights and invasions. The sight of a king asking for, and working to win the support of "lesser" men is a source of constant wonder to foreign ambassadors."

- Sister Petrine, a Chantry scholar; An exerpt from, Ferelden: Folklore and History

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[dan tudge] As a Grey Warden, Duncan is charged with defeating the blight and must recruit the bravest warriors, mages, and rogues into the ranks of the Grey Wardens in order to defeat this blight. How you meet him and how he recruits you is actually different in each origin story.

Duncan introduces you to another young Grey Warden recruit named Alistair. Alistair is both charming and easygoing and never seems to be short of amusing commentary. I think players will enjoy having him in their parties.

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Loghain is a war hero and the leader of the armies of Fereldan. He’s a very complex character with deep convictions. How you choose to interact with him will be up to you, but I will say that you’ll have to make some pretty important decisions involving Loghain that could create a turning point in the story.

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Wynne is a spirit healer from the Circle of Magi, focusing her magic on the ability to briefly summon protective and restorative spirits from the Fade. She has served the Circle for most of her life and is highly regarded within the circle. Players willing to get to know Wynne may eventually discover that Wynne is no ordinary mage.

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Sten is a warrior of the Qunari race and has been trained as a soldier since birth (the Qunari are always at war). He’s a very stoic and disciplined man with a strong code of honor, so how he treats others depends on whether or not they have his respect, which he doesn’t give easily.

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Morrigan can indeed be a powerful ally, and I think players will find her shape-shifting abilities a powerful asset in combat. She’s power-hungry and selfish, so having her in your party with other members who have more-benevolent agendas and moral codes can result in some "tense" party dynamics. You don’t have to have Morrigan in your party, but she does add an awesome dynamic to the player and party relationships.

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Morrigan’s relationship with her mother, Flemeth, isn’t exactly sunshine and rainbows. In fact, Flemeth raised Morrigan to hold the rest of mankind in contempt, hating them for their weaknesses, and taught her to value power above all else. Both women are incredibly strong-willed and are practically more aptly described as rivals rather than family. They each have such a lust for power that you may be shocked at the lengths they’ll go to in order to acquire it.

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The Mabari hounds imprint themselves onto one master and are known to be fiercely loyal to that person. They are also absolutely vicious in combat. If you do manage to get such a dog to join your party, you will find them to be extremely intelligent creatures who you can command to overwhelm the enemy, knocking them to the ground, pinning them down, and horribly mauling them.

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there are party members unique to your origin. Each origin story has its own cast of unique characters who may or may not show up later on in the story. In any case, every character will react differently to you depending on any number of factors, including your race, gender, origin story, party approval rating, and other choices you’ve made along the way.

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I will tell you that you’ll have a great selection of them to choose from. Each one will have their own unique abilities, behaviors, and personal agendas, so it’s completely up to you how you want to compose your party. You can pick them strategically, depending on the scenario you’re preparing for, but sometimes it’s just fun to mix characters just to see how they interact with each other.

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Genlocks and Hurlocks are some common types of darkspawn. Genlocks are the most numerous of the darkspawn and have short, stocky bodies. These guys are pretty tough and difficult to kill, especially since they have some resistance to elemental magic. Genlocks are good defenders, using fortification strategies, siege weapons, and traps whenever possible. Hurlocks are taller and more muscular, forming the strongest part of the darkspawn armies. They excel at two-handed weapons, especially the "alpha" Hurlocks that lead the charge.

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Party interaction is one of the best parts of Dragon Age: Origins, much like it was in Baldur’s Gate. The party approval system is something new we’re introducing in Dragon Age: Origins, and it influences how your party members react to your decisions and behave towards you. Each character has their own personal motivations and moral code, so if you do things they don’t like, they could leave your party, or even turn on you. On the other hand, if you gain favor with them, you could get special bonuses or certain other perks, which you’ll discover.

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Mike Laidlaw, lead designer on the game, writes a blog entry about the blight. Highlights follow.

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A Blight begins with massive numbers of darkspawn surging to the surface, creatures that carry a disease known as the taint. The taint is a poisonous corruption that not only damages living creatures, but spreads over the earth, twisting the land into a barren and disease-filled landscape.

Normally, the darkspawn are disorganized and fight with each other, rarely appearing on the surface except in raids and small invasions. However, a true Blight begins when the darkspawn find a leader who unites them into a great horde and unleashes them onto the surface in a wave of darkness and destruction. This leader comes in the form of a powerful and terrifying creature known as an Archdemon.

To end the Blight, you must find and destroy the Archdemon. Not an easy task, given the hordes of darkspawn under its command. You don’t have much time either, because with each passing day, the Blight grows. The earth itself will wither and die; the land is leeched of moisture, turning everything dry and brown. The sky fills with rolling, black clouds that block out the sun, making it easier for the darkspawn to surface. As this wasteland spreads, the corruption of the Blight spreads with it, diseasing all in its path.

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Duncan, leader of Ferelden’s Grey Wardens, will be your mentor and provide you with the tools you’ll need to fight this spreading corruption. Further, you’ll meet a number of interesting characters along the way that may join your party. Each have unique abilities and personal agendas which may or may not align with yours, or each other’s.

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PCGZine, a free online pdf magazine, has an exclusive hands-on preview article that features a few new screenshots. Excerpts follow - the last paragraph contains Origin story plot spoilers.

For the last 15 minutes, the two Elves we’re watching on the screen have been engaging in some proper old-school dungeoneering. Since entering the underground ruins they’ve been ambushed by the walking dead, various vicious traps, spiders the size of bears (not to mention an actual bear covered in spikes known as a ‘Bereskarn’), and these Elves dispatched them all through careful use of skills, tactics and items.

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Those ruins they’re exploring are actually old Elven ruins. [...] when one of them starts reading the Elvish writing off the statue, a conversation option lets you express confusion as to how your friend can even read. [...] in Dragon Age the Elvish civilisation suffered a little setback. [...] the humans of the world [...] managed to enslave the entire Elven race and only recently upgraded their place in society to scrawny servants. The few Elves who’ve fought back [...] have taken refuge in an enormous forest and it’s playing as one of those rebels that makes up one of the game’s six Origins.

Character creation in Dragon Age is as much about you choosing your Origin as your race, class and gender. [...] For example, one of the Origins starts you off as a noble who’s obsessively training against their cosy upbringing to become a great warrior. Or if you choose to be a Mage you have to pick a special Origin that has you battling through the tyrannical schooling that all magic users in the world are forced to undergo. Before Mages can wander the world like free citizens they have to display control over their abilities, with those who can’t (and, horribly, those who are just too gifted) undergoing a kind of magical sterilisation that leaves them slow, emotionless and unable to anything but enchant things.

The general idea is that as well as providing a unique opening to everyone’s game, your chosen Origin keeps popping up, even after the six plots have converged. Your race, upbringing, class, history... all of it changes how people react to you in this prejudiced world.

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nothing in Dragon Age is good or evil, nothing is right or wrong [...], the only consequences of your choices are the physical and emotional consequences in the world and in your chosen party. [...] Every party member gets a percentile bar in their stats that shows their current opinion of you - a bar you can give a boost by giving away special ‘gift’ items to them.

Returning to the Elf origin one more time, it’s one of these choices that kicks everything off once you first pick the origin. On an otherwise calm and safe day, you and your old friend pounce on three humans trespassing through ‘your’ patch of forest. The humans claim they’ve lost their way, but now they’ve found where you live, if they return home the secret could spread. So your options are to let them go, kill one to scare them or slaughter them all. I ended up killing one of them right there in cold blood, and I always play lovely men in RPGs. But letting them go just felt too foolish. Like I’d be betraying my race over squeamishness. So up came the arrow and down went the main, his friends screaming in terror.

David Gaider, lead writer on the game, has written a three part blog in which he discusses the writing process of his upcoming novel ‘Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne‘. Dragon Age-relevant quotes follow.

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One of my tech designers commented to me the other day that a character I wrote was really sarcastic.

“She’s supposed to be sexy,” he said, “but really she’s just sarcastic. Everything she says is pure sarcasm. Was that on purpose?”

“Maybe,” I said dubiously

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But Dragon Age was my baby. I was the one who first formed the world. With direction, sure, but beyond that it was my vision. My footprints are everywhere. I’ve watched it grow, cringed as other hands touched it and tweaked it and sometimes I was even amazed as something I’d barely considered had life breathed into it and became something better than I’d ever hoped it could be.

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this story needed to introduce the Dragon Age setting. It needed to touch on all the important points, as most readers would be completely unfamiliar with any of them.

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I had to list the elements I needed to touch on. Religion. Elves. Dwarves. Darkspawn. Magic. Ferelden.

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I decided on a prequel. We had identified years ago that there was an excellent untold story to be found in the Ferelden rebellion against Orlais. It’s referred to many times in the course of the game, but there was a lot more that could be said about it. It was a great tale.

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With the highlighting it became obvious that every character in my book was constantly spitting, glaring and clenching their teeth. They exchanged looks, glared, growled and even snarled – sometimes multiple times on the same page.

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Hi. I’m Dan Tudge, the Executive Producer and Project Director on Dragon Age: Origins. Welcome to my first blog entry for IGN.

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Over the next few months, I’m going to give you a crash course about the game and I’ll begin today by introducing you to the Grey Wardens, a secretive brotherhood that spans the ages.

Throughout the history of Thedas, there have been multiple Blights: events of incredible evil when hordes of darkspawn rose up from beneath the surface and spread across the world, slaughtering and enslaving anything in their path. With each Blight, the civilized world was brought to the brink of complete destruction, and it is only thanks to the Grey Wardens that the darkspawn were defeated and driven back underground.

The Grey Wardens are an ancient order of fearsome elite warriors, made up of only the most physically and mentally superior of all civilized races. Their sole purpose: to destroy all darkspawn and drive back the Blight. They are the last line of defense against a Blight, and are said to possess the unique ability to sense the presence of darkspawn, and have a greater knowledge than anyone else in Thedas of tactics used to combat these twisted creatures. The Grey Wardens were once a large and magnificent organization, the sight of them arriving in glorious numbers wherever darkspawn threatened was truly a sight to behold. They were revered by the people, and the nations of humanity once gladly supported them with food, equipment and a steady stream of recruits.

But it has been four hundred years since the last Blight, and many now think the Grey Wardens to be irrelevant and obsolete. Their numbers have dwindled to near extinction, and although they are now seen to be only a relic of a once great and proud league of heroes, the few remaining Grey Wardens still keep up their training and maintain a watchful eye for signs of another Blight.

They now believe another Blight is at hand. Fearing that their numbers are too few to defend Thedas once more, they will turn to you for help. When you create your character in Dragon Age: Origins, your choice of Origin Story will determine how you are recruited into the Grey Wardens, and your personal motivations for joining them. To become a Grey Warden is to be endowed with great power and responsibility, to battle the deadliest threats imaginable, and to free a nation from the Blight.

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I’ll leave you this week with the mantra of the Grey Wardens.

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Grey Warden’s Motto
"In war, victory
In peace, vigilance
In death, sacrifice"

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[dan tudge] Fans who loved the rich story, interesting characters, and tactical combat in the deep fantasy setting of Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights will love what we’re doing in Dragon Age: Origins. We’re capturing the same great spirit of story, exploration, tactical combat, and character progression that we delivered in those previous titles and bringing it to a dark, heroic fantasy setting. We’ve taken a lot of what we learned from creating Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights to make Dragon Age: Origins even better, so fans can expect a lot of what they enjoyed about those games, but with next-gen improvements.

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BioWare has always focused on delivering deep, story-driven experiences, where your actions and choices have meaningful consequences. We’re taking that even deeper with Dragon Age: Origins by introducing a new feature called "origin stories." You start the game by choosing and then playing through the origin story of your choice. You start off in a unique place in the gameworld, which sets up the way you become a Grey Warden and flavors the rest of the game in terms of your motivations, how you perceive the world, and how the world perceives you. Your choices will open up different story branches, dialogue options, affect how other characters treat you, and change the state of the Dragon Age world by the end of the game. Compared to our previous titles, the story and scope of Dragon Age: Origins is the most ambitious of any BioWare game yet.

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You can choose which type of hero or antihero you want to be, meaning that it won’t always be clear which decisions are "good" and which are "evil." You’ll face a lot of tough moral decisions along the way, and sometimes you may have to make seemingly evil decisions for the greater good. The choices in Dragon Age: Origins are not always black and white, but rather, shades of gray. The important thing to remember is that every choice you make will have a consequence. For example, there is a "party approval" system where members of your party may disagree with certain choices you make. If you keep making decisions that they don’t like, they may get angry with you, or even leave your party.

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Dragon Age: Origins uses a party-based tactical combat system that is really a next-gen evolution of "pause and play." The action is fast and happens in real time, so if you like to just get in there and hack-and-slash your way through your enemies, you can do that, but you will quickly learn that you will need to think much more tactically if you want to survive. With the pause-and-play system, you can pause the action, issue a string of robust commands to your party members, and then jump right back into the action. You’ll have full control of each party member, so you’ll have a lot of different abilities and attacks at your disposal, including magic and spell combos. You have a lot of control over the camera, too. You can zoom out to a tactical view so you can see all your enemies and direct your party, and you can zoom in so you’re right in the thick of the action. That’s where you’ll want to be when you land a punishing death blow!

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Character progression has always been a core pillar of every BioWare game. In Dragon Age: Origins you will choose your player’s race, gender, class, customized appearance, special abilities, and of course your origin. Players will develop their skills, talents, and spells to support their style of play. Do you want to create a healing mage, a dual-weapon-wielding rogue, or a sword-and-shield tank? As their characters advance, players can also choose a class specialization that will unlock advanced talents and spells.

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The party-approval system plays a big role in the dynamic between you and your party members. Make decisions they agree with, and they’ll follow and support you. Make decisions they despise, they may turn on you. Each character has a very unique personality making them enjoyable to interact with. However, it is their interaction with each other that I find most entertaining. There are romances you can choose to pursue or not, and you can also forge strong alliances, friendships, or even betray those around you, with different consequences for your actions. Don’t forget that your choice of origin story also heavily influences the relationships you’ll have throughout the game.

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You can have up to four members in your active party (including yourself), but you’ll be able to swap out members of your party for others throughout the game. Each character not only has their own unique set of skills and abilities, but they also have their own unique personalities and behaviors, which may or may not complement your style of play. You’ll meet a lot of different characters along the way, so there will be plenty of opportunities to try out different compositions of party members, each with their own unique advantages or disadvantages. It makes for a lot of great replayability, too. And for those who want, you can play the entire game in tactical view just like Baldur’s Gate.

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We’ll be announcing more details of the Dragon Age Toolset very soon, but for now I’ll tell you that we can’t wait for the community to get their hands on the new toolset. We really wanted to empower our fans with the ability to create their own next-gen adventures within the Dragon Age universe, so they can expect a lot of great things they can do with scripting, cinematics, objects, and so on. And of course, we at BioWare will provide lots of support on our community site. We do have some very cool plans for downloadable content, but we’ll be talking more about that later.

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A big difference between Dragon Age: Origins and our previous fantasy games is that Dragon Age is our own original dark-fantasy universe. It’s a completely new world that BioWare designed from the ground up, with its own deep history and lore, so fans will see things that they haven’t seen before in other fantasy games. It’s also the darkest and grittiest game we’ve ever made. It’s intended for a mature audience, so if you’re looking for a fun, sophisticated game with a page-turning story set in a huge dark-fantasy universe, this is the one for you. It’s BioWare fantasy role-playing at its finest, and you may even be shocked by some of the things you’ll see...!

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