Dragon Age - Hands-on & Interviews @ GameBanshee

A comprehensive Dragon Age preview and two interviews are up at GameBanshee after they had the opportunity to travel to Edmonton to play the game and spend some time with lead designer Mike Laidlaw, Ferret Baudoin and Mark Darrah.  Coming from an RPG site, this is a must-read for anyone curious about Dragon Age with some genuine first-hand experiences.  From the preview:

During the aforementioned boss fights (the Ogre battle at the top of the Tower of Ishal, for example), keeping on top of all your characters’ abilities and locations is of the utmost importance. In the previous example, you’ll quickly discover that the ogre can charge characters from a distance or pick them up for a crushing attack that will most likely result in the condition known as death. He also has an obscene amount of health, so I was constantly pausing to keep my party members away from the ogre’s death grip while also setting up backstabs and making use of my characters’ ranged attacks and spells whenever the ogre turned his attention toward someone else. I suppose you could rush into some battles haphazardly using only a couple of primary talents, but you’re going to have some casualties from time to time and you’ll end up unnecessarily using quite a few health poultices and other one-shot items.

Should a character fall in combat (including the protagonist), they become incapacitated for the remainder of the battle. If all characters fall, you’re forced to load your last saved game. If at least one character survives, then all fallen characters stand back up when the battle is over. As a penalty for being incapacitated during combat, a character receives a persistent debilitating injury. Some of the injuries my characters sustained were “broken bone” (penalty to dexterity), “torn jugular” (penalty to constitution), “cracked skull” (penalty to cunning), “deafened” (penalty to defense), and “coughing blood” (penalty to fatigue). All of these injuries can stack, so it’s important to keep your most susceptible characters at a distance or they’ll wind up in a devastatingly weakened state. To remove a persistent injury, you must return to your party camp or use an injury kit. As with poultices, each kit has a certain level of potency that determines how much damage it’s able to repair (lesser injury kits heal a single injury and a small amount of health, for example).

...From the interview with Mark Laidlaw:

GB: From what I've played so far, the game is very linear, at least during the first few hours. At what point does it open up to free exploration?

Mike: Yeah. Whereabouts are you?

GB: I just drank the darkspawn blood to become a Gray Warden.

Mike: Oh, yeah. You've got one dungeon, and then you get the world back. It's going to open up a lot. The reason we have a linear opening is largely for a couple of reasons: one, to establish the setting and story. Because it's a brand new IP, if you just drop people into a world they don't know, then there can be kind of like a degree of confusion.

And we're trying to build a story that's got its own dramatic, you know, impetus, and that kind of stuff. So I think a linear opening causes people to kind of understand, okay, here's the role. Here are the events that lead to me becoming a Grey Warden proper, which you just did.

Then you basically get to see how that plays out. And at that point, what you're about to come to the realization of is that I’m going to need to gather an army. And at that point, it's up to you. How are you going to do it? Because you basically take charge.

...and Mark Darrah:

GB: Are there entire areas that are inaccessible to you if you make specific choices?

Mark: Yeah. There are certain areas that are only accessible with certain characters, and depending on the choices you make, you may not actually even get some characters. That would block off entire parts of the game.