Dragon Age: Origins: A Touch Of BioWare Magic?

The Lord Of The Rings has a lot to answer for…

We’ve got a lot of time for BioWare here at X360. Not only did it produce one of the most impressive Star Wars games to ever reach consoles, but its use of characters, branching narrative and action-heavy RPG traits has consistently impressed us. From Knights Of The Old Republic through to Mass Effect it rarely put a foot wrong, and when we heard that it was returning to the fantasy genre that made it famous, we gave a little yelp of delight. After all, we’re all hopeless D&D fans underneath. Just look at Warcraft.

Dragon Age: Origins has the sort of calibre that you’d expect from BioWare: the huge sprawling story, the three-dimensional characters, the sense of history and the open choices that affect the people around you. It would be too easy to call it Mass Effect with swords and perhaps wrong too, as it really doesn’t take into account the PC heritage the game clearly wears on its sleeve. EA and BioWare have been careful when showing off Dragon Age in the run-up to its release, and this has fuelled our worries over its control scheme. Playable builds of the PC version show a game with hundreds of hot keys and commands, the ability to jump between your units à la KOTOR, pause time, give directions… there’s a lot to do. Considering it hasn’t been seen on the 360, we’re right in being slightly worried about how all these complicated controls will translate onto to the limited, by comparison, pad.

Having said that, BioWare has consistently answered our worried calls saying that it was working on a successful control scheme, and who are we to judge? We’ve loved pretty much every single one of its games, even the overlooked Jade Empire, and we’re willing to go on faith.