Even though I’ve seen various previews for Bioware’s Dragon Age: Origins, I had pretty much zero interest in the game.  It’s not that I don’t respect Bioware…I do.  But it just seemed like such a generic fantasy game in a generic fantasy world that there was nothing about it which excited me at all.

So fast forward to Comic Con, where I come upon a huge EA booth and a bunch of Dragon Age banners.  I was surprised to see that Dragon Age was playable at Comic Con.  I mean, anyone who wanted to could just walk up to one of the PC stations and play around with the game if they wanted.  Of course, I couldn’t resist the opportunity so I began playing through a dungeon with the helpful advice of one of the Bioware reps.

I’m still not a hundred percent sold on this game, but I am way more interested than I previously was after getting a chance to have a hands-on with it.  First of all, the graphics, which didn’t look like anything special to me in screenshots, are really nice when you are up close and personal.  Everything looked well done - the characters, the mobs and the setting (well, the setting was a bit generic).  What’s more, you have a lot of control over the camera and the game looks surprisingly different from various angles (top down, over the shoulder, etc.).  But zoomed up close, the animations were pretty awesome.

I saw one of my fighters kind of “shield bash” an orc (or whatever it was) and it just looked really good.  All of the attacks looked nice…it was tempting to just sit back and watch the battle unfold.  But I soon found that casting magic spells was really fun.  My mage had a wide variety of fire-type spells to cast and the magic effects were very sweet.  I was having such a blast with it that I ended up injuring a bunch of my party members with an AOE spell.  Hey, it happens.  To make up for it I cast a cool buff that made their weapons kind of catch fire.  Awesome.  I also noted that there are some line-of-sight and cover features in combat.

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