Like any good 25 year old man, I take most of my life lessons from the cinematic masterpiece, Die Hard. One can live a well-rounded life guided by such an opus of the humanities. Sure, people have made movies about a cop in the wrong place at the wrong time before. Yeah, guys have jumped off exploding buildings and fought German terrorists since time was time. So what if there was nothing astoundingly new about Die Hard? It was an awesome movie because it did what it did very well, and didn’t try to be anything it wasn’t.
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After a frenzied battle, a short cutscene revealed that although the town was saved, Redcliffe’s mayor didn’t survive the melee. According to Mike Laidlaw, if the player performs well enough in the battle, they will not only save the mayor but earn a cool reward as well. Providing conditional bonuses is a great way to reward players for digging in to the tactics and winning battles with the least collateral damage. Hopefully the game will somehow give hints to the player to let them know reward conditions before they unwittingly fail them.
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After the talking is said and done, the time came to lay some sword to Blight. The combat system in Dragon Age looks to strike a balance between casual players that just want to throw fighters into the fray and players that love positioning characters, precisely controlling skills and pulling off combinations that would make any min/maxer blush. Dragon Age’s characters can be controlled by a tactics system, which is startlingly similar to Final Fantasy XII
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Dragon Age looks like a great game, but after playing Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights, I can’t escape a sense of been-there-done-that.​