Dragon Age - Previews @ Shacknews, GameShark

Shacknews and GameShark join the Dragon Age preview prelude.  Shack is critical of the dialogue in the demo, although it's clear the author prefers Mass Effect's short and sharp system over full dialogue trees:

But by far the most troubling aspect of the demonstration was the serious lack of engaging dialogue. This was made apparent early on, as a conversation between your party and the drunken blacksmith played out in painfully slow fashion.

As much a fan of 1990s RPGs as I am, the genre has made some progress since then. Not much, but some. BioWare's own spacey RPG Mass Effect represented one small step forward for storytelling with its dialogue engine, which allowed players to quickly select responses ahead of time to better mimic the flow of an actual conversation.

Dragon Age is using pieces of the Mass Effect dialogue engine, but the seamless exchanges of that system have been discarded. In their place are traditional full-sentence response options, with a few cute camera angles as the NPC responds to your response. As strange as it sounds, it's not as responsive as it should be. And if you're not into monologues delivered by foppish elves and other stock fantasy characters, it's going to get tiresome.

...GameShark has a longer piece and here's a bit on the granular AI controls:

Eventually, the time for battle had come, and after talking to the town mayor (who sports an epic mustache), a rumbling and dust cloud down the mountain path played herald to the undead onslaught. During the battle, we were shown a bit more detail on it works. As promised, you can play the game in one of two ways: focus on one character and let AI handle the others, or switch between characters, pausing at times in order to utilize the best strategy.

AI can be set using the types of statements you would expect; things like, “If less than 25% health, use Weakest Healing Spell.” Thankfully, there will be plenty of preset AI with names such as “archer,” and these will repopulate all AI settings with ones based on that archetype. As your character levels up, they will also automatically change, keeping current.