Dragon Age Central

View of the ogre in the creature editor.

The sixth and final direct feed (high quality) video of the toolset demonstration given at PAX. Narrated by Fernando Melo [fm] and Ferret Baudoin [fb]. Transcript follows.

[fm] Welcome back. In this segment of the Dragon Age toolset presentation, we’re going to go right into the game, and have a look at everything we’ve created so far. So here we are in the starting location, where we placed our flag, and we’re facing the direction that we had rotated the flag to, and we’re facing our NPC, our quest-giver. Let’s go ahead an click on him. We can see the hair, beard, outfit and tattoo that we put on him. So we didn’t get a chance to record any VO for the character because all these lines were written at the last minute. However Ferret’s been kind enough to lone us his voice talent and voice the NPC lines.

[fb as quest giver ted] Welcome PAX 2008 attendees. Err... That’s a bit formal, isn’t it? So, do you want to do my quest?

[player choice 1] Tell me about your epic quest of daring-do.
[player choice 2] I’d love to help. Tell me more.
[player choice 3] A quest? What’s my backstory? My Motivation? [chosen]

[fm] Ok, I gotta admit I’m a little bit curious about my backstory and motivation here. Let’s go ahead and pick number 3.

[fb as quest giver ted] This is a toolset demo, not a bloody story synopsis. Your motivation -- if you don’t do this quest then the toolset won’t ship EVER. Now are you motivated? The community’s eyes are on you now. One false step and no more toolset.

[player choice 1] Well--
[player choice 2] But that’s not--
[player choice 3] All right-- [chosen]

[fm] Wow, quest-giver ted is really busting our chops on this one, but we gotta keep going. Lota folks are anxious to get their hands on this toolset. All right, number 3.

[fb as quest giver ted] Just one false step. That’s all it’ll take. I got my eyes on you. Ahem. So about my grand quest. Go over there and kill monsters. If it helps, they’re very mean and very evil. Imagine they killed your family, and you’re on your way for revenge!

[player choice 1] My family’s alive and well, thank you.
[player choice 2] Kill monsters. Is that the best you can do?
[player choice 3] Dead monsters coming up. [chosen]

[fm] Oh, those dastardly creatures, how could they? There’s gotta be something about this. All right, dead monsters coming up.

[fb as quest giver ted] Blood thirsty, anxious, I like it. You’ve got a promising future in the career of professional adventuring. On with the demo.

[fm] All right, so we can see that our quest is now updated on the bottom left here. Let’s go ahead and click on that, and we’ll see that we now have the journal entries that we saw in our conversation editor.

[journal entry:]
You have received the bestest, most awesome, most gripping quest ever. OK, not really. This is just to show a simple quest. But if you tear up on occasion and imagine little Oscar moments as you go it would be appreciated. Oh, and go kill the mosters.

[fm] We’ve now accepted the [reads quest title] "biggest most mind blowing quest ever". And if ever there was an appropriate name for a quest, that certainly would be it. Let’s go ahead and exit that. So now we should be able to click on Quest Giver Ted again, and he should recognise that we’ve now accepted the quest and now start to read the lines that we created.

[quest giver ted] Adding a new line.

[fm] So there’s "adding a new line". And of course only because I asked him nicely...

[quest giver ted] Since you asked so nice, sure. :)

[player choice 1] The Good Choice.
[player choice 2] The Wicked, Evil Choice. [chosen]
[player choice 3] Fine, Morally Grey.

[fm] And I’m pretty sure which choice people are going to go for. Let’s try the wicked evil choice. And we didn’t have any other lines after those choices, but you can see how it works. So the next thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to run over to our ballista, the object that we placed on the map... there it is. We can see what it looks like, we can angle the camera around, and you can see that it fits the contour nicely of the land; it looks like it actually belongs there and is placed well.

Let’s go ahead and run over to where our enemies are at now. As we approach, we’re going to jump into combat. There they are. And they’re equipped with the mace and shield, just like we set them up. We’re just going to go ahead and let Ferret do his thing and take care of our enemies here... nicely done. All right, so now we can see that our quest is updated on the bottom left here. Our script has recognised that all the creatures that we set up in team 1 are now dead. And it’s updated the status of our quest to say that all the creatures have been killed.

[journal entry:]
The epic battle is over. The monsters you created and placed are well and truly destroyed. In Ferelden they will selebrate this occasion every year and make a holiday out of it. Small children will say they want to grow up to be just like you. Or perhaps Michael Phelps.

[fm] Now that we’ve killed all the creatures, we should be able to go back, talk to our quest giver, and he should recognise that we’ve completed our quest. Let’s go ahead and click on him.

[fb as quest giver ted] The monsters are dead. The demo’s done. Goodbye now. This is an emotional moment for me. I told myself I wouldn’t cry.

[fm] All right, so our quest is done, we got some loot as well, great job by Ferret on VO -

[fb] It wasn’t ‘great’, it was marvellous.

[fm] [laughs] Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed our demo. This wraps up our presentation of the Dragon Age toolset. If you haven’t done so already, and are interested in creating content using the Dragon Age toolset, I’d encourage you to go and visit us online at dragonage.com. You can join the community there, sign up for the worldbuilder news letter to stay up-to-date, we’d love to see you on the forums. For myself and Ferret, thanks again.

[fb] Goodbye.

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The fifth of 6 direct feed (high quality) videos of the toolset demonstration given at PAX. Narrated by Fernando Melo [fm] and Ferret Baudoin. Transcript follows.

[fm] Welcome back. In this segment of the Dragon Age toolset presentation, we’re going to be talking about how we can add dialogue and a quest to our non-player character. The next thing we’re gonna to do is we wanna to add some dialogue to our character, to our NPC. He has to, after all, give us a quest. We’re going to go ahead and jump to the conversation tab, and in this case we’re going to load up an existing conversation; and we’ve gone ahead and pre-seeded this with some lines. Let’s go ahead and add some new lines, just so you can see how quickly and easily you can lines of dialogue to an NPC... maybe one more just for me... excellent. Maybe we can also show off how choices work. So once our NPC reads us that line these are the choices that would appear at the bottom of the screen for us. So we kinda have a good choice, a wicked evil choice - now in Dragon Age there really isn’t a concept of good and evil, so maybe we can add a third choice that’s a little bit more appropriate... very nice.

Alright, so the next thing we want to do is move that branch of dialogue that we just created and place it above the welcome line. The way that this is going to work when we attach this dialogue to our NPC, is he’s first going to read that "Welcome PAX attendees 2008" line. Within that branch of dialogue he will assign a quest to us, and we’re going to show that off in a second. The next thing that we do is we wanna make sure that the lines of dialogue that we’ve created will play after we’ve accepted our quest. The way that we do that is we jump to the plot flags, the plot tab here, at the bottom, and we’re gonna assign a plot script to this branch of dialogue. Now we’re going to cover scripting and plots and how all of that is going to work in much more detail over the next couple of weeks and months.

But for our purposes here we can just quickly jump to see what that looks like, just to give you an idea. We’ll open up our plot editor here. Now this plot, this quest, has three main states to it. The first one is when the quest has been accepted, and you can see that that’s set as flag 0. At the bottom of the screen you can see the journal entry - this is what would actually show up in our in-game journal text. The next plot flag, or the next state of our quest, is when we’ve actually killed all the creatures, and that’s set to flag 1, of course there’s an update to our journal at the bottom as well. Now this is when we’ve killed all the creatures in team 1, which we talked a little bit about when placing enemies. You’ll recognise that and update that we’ve killed all those creatures. And the last one is when the quest is done. So all the creatures are killed, we go and talk to our quest giver, he recognises it, and rewards it... hopefully.

Let’s jump back to our conversation. So again we’ve attached this plot and the next thing that we want to do is make sure that these lines of dialogue will only play when we’ve had our quest accepted. So let’s go ahead and pick ‘quest accepted’, and we’ll set this to ‘true’. So only when ‘quest accepted’ is ‘true’ will these lines of dialogue play. So what’s going to happen is, we’ll get this attached, we’ll talk to our NPC, quest-giver, he will assign the quest to us, he’ll then recognise the quest has been assigned, so the next time we click on him he’ll read our lines.

At the top you can now see the third set of lines which is set to only appear once we’ve actually killed the creatures. And we’ll be able to take a look at that as well. Let’s go ahead and assign this conversation to our NPC. We’ll go ahead and save. And the last thing we want to do of course is we’ll want to place our quest-giver in the map. Let’s go ahead and select him in the creatures tab, we’ll put him on our map the same way we did with our enemies and our objects. We’ll go ahead and place him near that flag, just so it’s easy for us to find him as soon as we jump into the map. Let’s go ahead and save that. So you can see how quickly it is that we can add some dialogue to an NPC.

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The fourth and final direct feed (high quality) video of the gameplay demo given at the Games Convention in Leipzig. Narrated by Dan Tudge [dt]. It has mostly been seen previously in low-quality cam-corder videos, but this is the first time we can very clearly see the inventory system, and what happens immediately after the Ogre in the tower of Ishal is killed. Transcript follows.

[dt] Welcome to episode 4 of the demo for ‘Dragon Age: Origins’: the Tower of Ishal. Now before we head into the tower, we’re going to actually swap out to a hero with a different origin. This one, an elven mage, is going to have a little more firepower. So we’re now in the tower of Ishal, and you can see here’s our elven mage. We still have the rest of our original party, you can see the blood and gore is still on them from the previous battles - this stays with you. By the looks of these barricades up ahead we may be in for a bit of a trap, but we’re going to head in anyway.

You can see our party’s been caught in grease. And that emissary up there, well he’s launched a fireball. That fireball’s lit the grease on fire. Now in ‘Dragon Age: Origins’, spells can interact with each other. So in that vein, we’re going to use our mage, cast ‘Blizzard’, and hopefully put this fire out. So while we were putting out this fire with Blizzard, our advanced party tactics sent our warriors up here and started taking out these darkspawn. At any time you can move from character to character in your party. You can zoom out to tactical where you can issue commands, spells, special abilities... you can stay in this view, just like Baludur’s Gate, or you can zoom right back into the action. Now that pause & play really allows you to get up close and get a great shot of the action.

[new spell descriptions seen:]
Tempest
Cost: 60
The caster creates an intense electrical storm that drains the life and mana/stamina of creatures within it.

Flaming Weapons
Cost: 20
Upkeep: 10
When activated, the primary weapon equipped by each party member is engulfed in flames, dealing additional damage with each hit.

Glyph Of Paralysis
Cost: 20
The caster places a glyph on the ground which, when entered, explodes and paralyses the target for a short time.

Flame Blast
Cost: 15
A cone of fire shoots out from the caster’s hands, setting all creatures within the cone on fire.

[with the help of tempest and the warriors, the emissary is defeated]

[dt] Before we push on forward, we’re actually going to loot this emissary. He’s probably got a few items we could use. [items are dragged from a list of items on the corpse to a list of items held by the whole party; there is a 1000 item limit] We’ll certainly grab this Sword of Ogre Strength and this Flamescale Armor; I think they’re going to help us out later.

Now before we head through this door, we’re going to use a buff on our entire party this time. It’s called ‘Flaming Weapons’, and it’s going to add fire damage to all our weapons. We’re going to use the warrior to go through the door first. Now this room’s full of Hurlocks. These guys are a little more difficult. So we’re going to use a different tactic. This time we’re going to use ‘Glyph of Paralysis’, and hopefully we’ll freeze up one of these Hurlocks. Now we’re going to hit ‘em with ‘Flame Blast’. This is a devastating spell, so you’re going to have to be very very careful where you point it. Now clearly in this encounter the flaming weapons really helped out.

You can see our artists have taken a lot of effort in making sure that these environments are absolutely stunning. They’re very very proud of their work. Now that tower guard mentioned that the darkspawn may be coming up from the lower chambers; clearly this hole, it’s one of their entry points. Now earlier we mentioned that spells in ‘Dragon Age: Origins’ can interact with each other. We saw the emissary light the grease on fire with a fireball. We’re going to try the same thing; we’re going to cast grease, and then light it on fire. And what we’re really talking about are spell combos. In ‘Dragon Age: Origins’, you can use spells together to create new devastating effects. Many of these will be documented, but a lot, you’re going to have to experiment with, and find out for yourself. Not sure if I like the sound of what’s behind that door, but we got a beacon to light, so let’s push on forward.

[mini ogre-meeting cutscene plays]

This is one of our more devastating creatures: the Ogre. Creatures like this are going to come with all their own unique abilities: Ogre hurl, pound... we’ve got Ogre grab (this is my particular favourite) - this is where he literally grabs a member of your party and pounds them. We’re going to have to throw everything we’ve got at this Ogre just to take him down. These encounters are going to be intense. They’re going to take every talent, every spell, every tactic you’ve learned.

[the ogre defeats all but one of the party members, then uses grab on him... then alistair is released and manages to defeat the ogre with a finishing move, with just a few percent health left]

Dark, heroic fantasy people, we don’t pull any punches here. Now we’ve got a beacon to light. Let’s see what happens.

[cut scene plays of loghain seeing the beacon, then another ogre grabbing king cailan before a fade to black]

[dt] So today you saw scalable combat, where you are always the hero. And through the story of the battle of Ostagar, you saw the decisions you made changed the way you perceived the world, and the way the world perceives you. And you saw Bioware’s return to it’s roots, with ‘Dragon Age: Origins’.

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The fourth of 6 direct feed (high quality) videos of the toolset demonstration given at PAX. Narrated by Fernando Melo [fm] and Ferret Baudoin. Transcript follows.

[fm] Welcome back. This is the Dragon Age toolset demonstration, and in this segment we’re going to be talking about how we create our non-player character, the quest-giver, and how we can customise how he looks. Now we’re going to need a quest-giver. Somebody’s going to give us our imputus to go forth and do good. Or not, as your choice might be. In Dragon Age there really isn’t a concept of ‘good’ or ‘evil’, there’s only choices and consequences.

We’re going to go ahead and add a new creature. This skin’ll load up our human male model. There he is, in all of his glory, as it were. And maybe the first thing we can do is give him some clothing. Any self-respecting quest-giver’s going to need some kind of clothing, or you wouldn’t take him seriously. So we’ve gone back to our inventory, and we have a couple of options for a demo here. Maybe we can pick one of those noble outfits... let’s go ahead and equip that. That’s not too bad, pretty spiffy. But I think for what we’re looking for I kind of like the servant’s outfit, actually. Let’s go ahead and add that and equip it. Pretty cool.

Alright, now he is still looking a little bit default, largely in part of the fact that he’s got a basic head. Now one of the things we can do is actually pull in any of the heads or faces from characters in the game. We’ll take a look at the appearances here; we have a limited selection for our demo. There’s Alistair. Alistair is one of the characters that joins you in the demo, if you’ve had a chance to look at that. We also have King Cailan. King Cailan, if you remember from the trailer, is kind of our young and idealistic King. He’d probably kill me if I put him in those servant’s robes, but touch cookies: we’re going to have in the servant’s robes. Alright, let’s go ahead and give him a name.

And, one of the other things we can do is, let’s say we’re not happy using one of the existing characters in the game, we can actually create a brand-new head-morph, a brand-new character from scratch. We’ll go ahead and create a new head-morph, and we’re going to choose our human male character, our base head from which all human male characters start from. And there it is. On the right hand side you can actually see that there’s several options available. And those are actually in several different categories; there’s actually hundreds of options in total. And when you combine that with the number of genders and races that we have, you actually have a nearly unlimited number of distinct heads that you can create using the system; pretty powerful.

For the benefit of the demo we’re actually going to stick to a couple of options that have some pretty dramatic
effects. Some of the sliders and options are fairly subtle, just to give you very finite control over what your character looks like. One of the cool things is that as part of the character creation process of the game itself, you’ll have something much more friendly that you can use to create what your player character is going to look like.

So maybe we can jump to the nose option. Have a little bit of a perspective view there. And why don’t we look at the up & down option, just to give a quick idea. We’ll just move that slider and you can see straight away the effect that it has. But again, given the hundreds of options that we have here, we think that you’ll actually have quite a lot of fun in creating very unique looking, very cool looking NPCs.

Let’s take a look now at what our hairstyles look like. We’ll go ahead and open up the hairs. And maybe we can just pick one of those default ones. That’s a little bit hard to see with the background; maybe we can change it to the blond colour. That’s a little bit better. Let’s take a look at a second hairstyle, so you get a feel for the different kinds of styles that exist. Here we are with a kind of ponytail with a braid. Looks pretty cool. Let’s take a look at another option... that looks pretty nice.

OK, so one of the other things we can show you is beards, or facial hair. Let’s take a look at some of those options now... that’s not bad. The last thing that we can show is actually tatoos. Now tatoo masks are something that you can apply - and all this also exists in the character creation process - each of the tattoo masks actually comes with different layers. So you can actually blend several of these together. And you can also see some options for some colours as well. For our purposes we’ll just kinda stick to the basic colour, but you get the idea. Let’s go ahead and save that. And the next thing that we’re going to want to do is attach that head to our quest giver. So you can see how easy it is to create an NPC and customise him. Let’s go ahead and save that.

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The third of four direct feed (high quality) videos of the gameplay demo given at the Games Convention in Leipzig. Narrated by Dan Tudge [dt]. This part contains the battle cutscene seen many times before, and the run up to the tower, also seen before in low-quality shaky cam version. Transcript follows.

[dt] Welcome to ‘Dragon Age: Origins’ episode 3. This is where the action really starts to ramp.

[battle cut-scene plays]

[duncan] The plan will work, your majesty.

[king cailan] Of course it will, the Blight ends here.

[cut scene continues: the blight rush the king’s camp]

[king cailan] Archers!... Hounds!... For Ferelden!

[cut scene ends, player runs across a bridge toward the tower of ishal]

[dt] The battle of Ostagar is underway.

[guard] Help me, they’re everywhere. They’ve taken the... you, you’re Grey Wardens, aren’t you? The tower, it’s been taken.

[alistair] What are you talking about man, taken how?

[guard] The dark spawn came up through the lower chambers and they’re everywhere. Most of my men are dead.

[alistair] Then we have to get to the beacon and light it ourselves.

[player choice 1] Come with us. We could use your help. [chosen]
[player choice 2] Get yourself to safety. Alisair and I will handle this.
[player choice 3] Just point us in the right direction.

[guard] Right, let’s hurry.

[dt] You’ll notice how easily we added this tower guard to our party. This choice is entirely ours. You’ll be faced with many choices like this in ‘Dragon Age: Origins’. My guess is, being a tower guard, he may not make it. We’re about to have our first combat. With the evolution of pause & play, you can pause the action at any time. Now before we head into battle we’re going to use a special ability called a ‘talent’ on our warrior. This one’s ‘Berserk’, it’s going to send him into a frenzy at a cost of stamina. It’s time to take out some darkspawn.

[party battles a group of genlocks]

‘Dragon Age: Origins’ is focused on mature themes, and you can see by this action, we don’t pull any punches here. Now before we engage these darkspawn up this platform, we’re going to actually make use of a couple of additional talents: this one called ‘Shield Bash’, which is just that, and another one called assault, which is a flurry of four blows.

[also seen:]
Shield Pummel
Cost: 30
The character unbalances his target with a well aimed main hand attack, then slams his target with two powerful blows from his shield.

You can see these are very effective talents. For a warrior, effectively using your talents is going to be key to victory in any combat situation. Next time you’ll get to see the tower of Ishal, and our endeavour to complete the mission and light the beacon send Loghain’s troops into battle to crush the darkspawn.

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A man and his dog stand by a fireplace. The dog looks happy.

A dog and two other characters battle a number of enemies, one of whom has recently lost his head.

A number of mage characters stand in a library-like room, the apprentice quarters.

A lake of grease burns from a mage’s fire spell.

Female elven mage faces off against a Genlock archer and sparks fly.

The third of 6 direct feed (high quality) videos of the toolset demonstration given at PAX. Narrated by Fernando Melo [fm] and Ferret Baudoin. Transcript follows.

[fm] Welcome back to the Dragon Age toolset presentation. In this segment we’re going to be covering how to add object, or placables, in the level. The same easy way that we place creatures on a level, we can also add different objects to the level as well. Let’s go ahead and find a nice open space that we can use... maybe by that path over there... and why don’t we jump to the placables tab in our palette window? Placeables are our name for objects. Some of these are interactive, some of these are just kind of window dressing to fill up and make the world seem more alive.

Let’s go ahead and add a new one. We’ll give it a name... and by default a door has come up, and as you’d expect you’ll be able to place down doors throughout the level and link those to other levels. So in this way you can string together lots of existing levels from the game or levels that you create and create your campaign that way. For our purposes though we are a military camp so we want to go with something that’s a bit more appropriate for the setting. We have a ballista placable that we can use, and that will probably fit very nicely with the context of that level. So we’ll go ahead and we’ll give it a name. And once we’ve done that we’ll go ahead and save it, jump to our area view, and let’s go ahead and put it down in the level.

So as we did with creatures, very easy to move it around and rotate it. But in particular with world objects you want to make sure that these are fitting really nicely with the contour of the land, and they look natural in the setting that they’re in. So one of the things we can do is we can actually jump into a 3d control mechanism. You can see that the ballista is a little bit off the ground on the right there. Once we’ve jumped into this 3d view we actually have control over any of the 3 axis for movement: so we can now move things in a vertical axis and of course forward, backward and horizontal. But we can also jump into a 3d rotation view, and what that means is we can now rotate in any of the 3 axis as well. So we now have much finer control over how we’re placing objects in the game world to make sure that they fit naturally into that setting.

So once we’re happy with it we’ll go ahead and save that out. And that’s basically how object placement works.

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The second of four direct feed (high quality) videos of the gameplay demo given at the Games Convention in Leipzig. Narrated by Dan Tudge [dt]. This part contains mostly a previously seen conversation cutscene. Transcript follows.

[dt] Welcome to the ‘Dragon Age: Origins’ demo, episode 2. If you remember last time we introduced you to King Cailan and Duncan. This episode will introduce you to a few more characters from our great cast. Let’s continue on with the demo, and get ready for battle.

Now we could use this time to explore the ruins and the King’s camp, but we’re here for the battle of Ostagar so we’re going to jump ahead to a point a little closer to the battle. [it is night time] The battle for Ostagar is close at hand. As Grey Wardens, we’re going to play a very important role in this battle. It’s also important to know that the reasons we became a Grey Warden were determined by the choices we made when playing our origin story. It’s time to find out what this role’s going to be.

[cut scene starts]

[king cailan] Loghain, my decision is final. I will stand by the Grey Wardens in this assault.

[loghain] You risk too much Cailan. The dark spawn horde is too dangerous for you to be playing hero on the front lines.

[king cailan] If that’s the case, perhaps we should wait for the Orlesian forces to join us after all.

[loghain] I must repeat my protest to your fool notion that we need the Orlesians to defend ourselves.

[king cailan] It is not a fool notion. Our arguments with the Orlesians are a thing of the past. And you will remember who is King.

[loghain] How fortunate Maric did not live to see his son ready to hand Ferelden over to those who enslaved us for a century.

[king cailan] Then our current forces will have to suffice, won’t they? Duncan, are your men ready for battle?

[duncan] They are, your majesty.

[king cailan] And this [the player] is the recruit I met earlier on the road? I understand congratulations are in order.

[player option 1] Thank you your Majesty. [chosen]
[player option 2] I didn’t have a choice, really.
[player option 3] I don’t feel that special.

[king cailan] Every Grey Warden is needed now. You should be honoured to join their ranks.

[loghain] Your fascination with glory and legends will be your undoing, Cailan. We must attend to reality.

[king cailan] Fine, speak your strategy. The Grey Wardens and I draw the dark spawn into charging our lines, and then?

[loghain] You will alert the tower to light the beacon signaling my men to charge from cover...

[king cailan] To fight the dark spawn. I remember. This [pointing to a map on a table] is the tower of Ishal in the ruins, yes? Well who shall light this beacon?

[loghain] I have a few men stationed there; it’s not a dangerous task, but it is vital.

[king cailan] Then we should send our best. Send Alistair and new Grey Warden, to make sure it’s done.

[player choice 1] I’ll do my best, your Majesty. [chosen]
[player choice 2] You mean I won’t be fighting in the battle?
[player choice 3] I refuse to be sent on an errand.
[player choice 4] If it’s not dangerous, I can do it myself.

[loghain] You rely on these Grey Wardens too much. Is that truly wise?

[king cailan] Enough of your conspiracy theories Loghain. Grey Wardens battle the Blight no matter where they’re from.

[duncan] Your Majesty, you should consider the possibility of the Arch Demon appearing.

[loghain] There have been no signs of any dragons in the Wilds.

[king cailan] Isn’t that what your men are here for Duncan?

[duncan] I... Yes, your majesty.

[mage] Your majesty, the tower and its beacon are unnecessary. The circle of magi...

[priestess] We will not trust any lives to your spells, mage. Save them for the darkspawn.

[loghain] Enough, this plan will suffice. The Grey Wardens will light the beacon.

[king cailan] Thank you Loghain. I cannot wait for that glorious moment. The Grey Wardens battle beside the King of Ferelden to stem the tide of evil.

[loghain] Yes, Cailan. A glorious moment for us all.

[cutscene ends, the player runs around ostagar]

[dt] Alright, you’ve heard the plan. Duncan and the King will draw the darkspawn in. We will light the beacon, signalling to Loghain and his troops to flank and close the trap. Alliances are going to play a very key component to ‘Dragon Age: Origins’, and regardless of the disagreement over the plan, this is our best chance
for victory.

OK, you’ve seen all the preparation. When we come back, you’ll see how the battle will start to unfold.

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• sequence_02_620x350.flv
  24.5MB 620x348 3m49s vp6f (smaller version)

The second of 6 direct feed (high quality) videos of the toolset demonstration given at PAX. Narrated by Fernando Melo [fm] and Ferret Baudoin. Transcript follows.

[fm] Welcome back to the Dragon Age toolset presentation. In this segment we’re going to be covering the placement of enemies in the level. Now we’re going to need some bad guys as well. So the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to go back to our pallet window - this is where, again, we have all the different assets we can place into the level, categories of assets - and we’ll go ahead and pick the creature tab.

Let’s go ahead and add a new creature. So, we’ll give it a name, and by default this is actually going to show us our base human male character. But in this case what we want to do is replace him with some darkspawn creatures, which you might recognise from the trailer or from the demos if you’ve seen those. Let’s go ahead and take a look at the appearances that we have available for our demo. So we’ve got two basic darkspawn creatures - a Genlock and a Hurlock - and we can just load up the Genlock here... now this is the smaller variant of darkspawn, but just as deadly, particularly when he’s in packs... really nice detail on those. Let’s take a look at the Hurlock... Hurlock is the larger of the two, and even more impressive when you’re up close and fighting with these guys.

So the next thing we’re going to do - let’s stick with the Hurlocks for our demo - we’re going to give him a name. The next thing that we’ll do is make sure that they’re set as hostile. We do want to kill them after all. The next part is we’re actually going to assign them to team 1. And I talked a little bit about this in our last segment, but our script that we have assigned to the level is looking for any creatures assigned to team 1, and once they’re all dead it will update the status of our quest so our quest-giver knows we’ve accomplished what he set us out to do. So that’s basically what we’re doing there.

Last let’s go ahead and jump into the inventory, we do want to give him a bit of a fighting chance after all. So we have a couple of items here, we can zoom in those as well and see what they look like and rotate them. We have a long sword and a mace as a weapon choice for him. We also have a basic shield. So let’s go ahead and equip him with a mace, and a shield as well... we’ll select those... and then on the right hand side we’ll go ahead and equip them on him. We’ll talk a lot more about these kinds of options over the next coming weeks and months as well. For our purposes though it’s fair enough that he’s kinda really well equipped to kinda battle us, and there he is with the mace and shield on his back.

So the last thing we’re going to do is save that and jump into our area view. We’re actually going to place them now. So let’s find a nice spot far enough away from our starting location so we don’t immediately jump into combat as soon as we get into the level... maybe near that tent at the base of that ramp there. We’ll go ahead and select the creature from our palette and place him down. Let’s just zoom in a little bit on that... and you can see how easy it is to just kind of move him around, and to rotate him as well, to get the placement just right for what you want. Let’s go ahead and add a second creature as well. And we’ll just do some basic adjustment for him. And that’s creature placement. [video ends]

Variants

• dragonage_pax_toolset_2_flash.flv
  19.4MB 620x350 3m51s vp6f (smaller, flv version)