Dragon Age: Origins Trailer - Red Dragon Battle

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Remember old Firkraag? Dragon Age, as the name suggests, has some dragons too, which you're going to throw your party at. Precisely that's the content of a trailer 1UP is hosting. The scene was recorded directly at E3 and it shows a bit about game mechanics if you know what to look at. While it didn't manage to keep me looking at the screen for the whole duration, it admittedly looked very good, comparatively better than the dragon fight in the last Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion, Storm of Zehir. I suppose it's much more involving if you actually get to play. Enjoy. You're only allowed to access the video if you meet the age requirement.

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Here is the original link. Thanks to our friends over at Codex for the lead.

 

Yikes, this has been up for a day and a half without a single comment? Let's change that! This looks absolutely fantastic! Bioware is really outdoing themselves on this title. Let's just hope it's actually halfway playable upon release.

Thanks Chev for posting the link!! (wow, Chev is posting news again, cool).

 

Holy crap that was cool.

 

(Sorry to be a Negative Nancy)
So it has two useless attacks? When the dragon's eating one of the fighters, it just gives the rest of the team lots of time to attack, it doesn't even seem to do much damage, he ate that one guy like three times.
Same with the scream, it just freezes the dragon and the guys near it, the dragon doesn't even get time attack. Unlike in BG2 where the dragon would do a wing buffet and blast everyone away and eat your mage, while your fighters were only getting back up in the other side of the cave.
And that firebreath doesn't even seem to be doing any damage to enemies that are less than 5 meters away.
Additionally, it has way too many hit points, this is like some MMO boss.

No, this is not cool, the first dragon fight in NWN2 was.

 

Yeah, not very impressive. That fight looked way too easy. I also just don't like the way this game looks.

 

Thanks!

 

I fail to see how 4 adventures can slay a red. If that was the case dozens of parties would be standing in line. Once a red is wounded it flees.

You can step on spiders. And a man in a dragons mouth is canned meat.

 

In what world? Remember, Dragon Age is a brand new fantasy setting, so unless you have an inside scoop into the lore of that world, you don't know what red dragons in it do.

Also, I'm guessing (read: hoping) that the adventuring party was extremely high level during this battle. For as much of a beating as those fighters were able to take, I'm thinking they must have hit that super human stage of the game. But who really knows.

Hopefully some of the apparent weaknesses mentioned are items still being worked through in the balance and fine tuning process....

 

No, they said that the game settings were on "easy" (and that there were still some technical problems), but... If you're munched by a dragon after being blasted by a couple fireballs, there's usually some melting involved.

 

I'm going to guess that like every CRPG *that I'm aware of* before it, things like "melting" will be represented by hitpoint loss. Fireballs do a certain amount of damage. Getting chomped on by a dragon does a certain amount of damage. If you have enough hitpoints to withstand these things, you'll survive. Some attacks will likely require some sort of save vs. death to avoid being killed outright.

Anyhow, if that wasn't a super high level party, even on easy settings, dragons are clearly going to need to be buffed quite a bit.

It was still a joy to watch!

 

My comment:

I've been thinking that these trailers must be pretty low res. When I see the stills, the game looks nice and crisp, with nice detail. But the trailers always lack vibrant colors and seem muddy, with a lack of detail. Just a thought.

 

A couple more observations-- I wonder why the one fighter appeared to die almost immediately, while the other 2 and mage/healer were able to take so much punishment.

I also noticed that as soon as the battle ended, that fallen fighter popped right back to life. I hope that's something that only occurs on the easy setting. I greatly prefer for death to actually have some consequences. Being forced to sit out of a single fight because you're DEAD doesn't seem to give the whole death thing a whole lot of weight. Hopefully higher difficulty settings incur greater penalties when a character dies (e.g. rare magics are required to raise the dead).