Changing culture, one gamerscore at a time.

Ah, Dragon Age. Origins isn’t even out until the sixth, but thanks to Bioware being forward thinking game designers, I’m already settling into the lore and game mechanics very nicely. Dragon Age: Journeys is an eight-hour (roughly) flash RPG set in the DA universe, released in three chapters, though the first chapter is very much a beta test, judging by the glitches and endless surveys.

The idea behind the game is simple: a click-to-move RPG with turn-based combat, set in a world of dwarves, humans and elves, all set on freeing their lands from the evil that lurks below Orzammar (I’ll refrain from commenting on the fact the name sounds like Orgrimmar and the place looks a little like it, too). You’re set upon by various beasts, and your task is to complete three simple quests per chapter, all involving exploring the caverns beneath the ancient dwarven city.

The user interface itself is pretty advanced if you consider the fact that this is just a simple flash game. At the bottom you’ve got your classic WoW-esque approach to hotkeys, and the set of keys displayed will depend on who you’ve currently got selected, though everyone moves as one outside combat. In the first gallery picture (screencapped from my own save as GamesPress are lacking assets, odd as this game is better than all that FIFA tripe) I’e currently got Ardum, the party’s resident healer/spellcaster selected. What you use him for is up to you, but if you take a look at the hotkeys, I’ve got him geared more towards healing than anything else. In true Diablo style you can chuck pots and various other items onto hotkeys. However, this becomes tiresome quickly as the game insists you click a pot, then a portrait. Odd when you have a pooled set of resources and could simply select a toon to heal.

However, the rest of the UI is pretty swish, with the obvious circles of health and mana/stamina set around character portraits. You can also see that Ardum is pretty close to level six at the moment, due to the genius idea of actually putting the experience bar on the main UI, which is something that, due to it being missing, ruined the flow of Mass Effect by a significant amount. Next to it is a button set for switching between two weapon sets; in most cases, a melee and ranged weapon, though the caster wasn’t a swap I experimented with, though it’s for two different staves (healing and damage, for example).

Menu’s up top and you’ve got a compass in the form of two icons that flit around your screen in geosynchronous position relative to where your current objective is, and the nearest door back to Orzammar, your hub for this particular chapter (and I’m hoping only this chapter). Quick travel is, as you can see, most definitely an option, and the smartest element of it is it’s not based on place names, but instead what you’d be doing in that particular area once you arrive, for example “going back to Orzammar” or “destroying the Darkspawn machinery,” transporting you to Orzammar and a sub-level of the Deep Roads, respectively.

All this travelling, however, may wear thin the soles of your shoes, so it’s important to keep your armour and various other bits of meanie-bashing equipment to a high standard relative to your level (or level of arrogance; we all know the one person whose WoW character has a “poser set”). The inventory screen is very clean and straightforward, split into two main windows. Your toon, in this case, my own character Ordan Doomseeker (who’ll be transferring his name into the next-gen title next month), and on the right, a list of equipment. Equipping this angry little fellow is a simple drag-and-drop affair, with slots for one- and two-handed weapons, ranged weapons, weapon sets, armour, accessories, and so on. His stats are shown above and below, handy if you’re wondering how to best tweak your character’s numbers to suit a particular role.

There are two elements of this screen that make equipping characters a joy in Journeys. One is the item comparison system, originally a basic addon for World of Warcraft that then not only made it into the game’s core set of UI mechanics, but spread to almost every RPG released since. Hover over, and compare. Beautiful. The other is the set of category buttons just below your money count, which allows you to sort your items as all/weapons/armour/accessories/potions/quest items. Glorious.

Right, combat. I’m aware this sounds like a checklist, but this is a roleplaying game. To not organise everything into anal little semi-bullet points would be remiss of the characteristics of the genre itself: lots of little details all under helpful headings. Not that my journalistic style is in any way helpful. That being said, thank god the combat system is.

What you’ve got here is actually a fight very far into the game, against a couple of normal mobs and an ogre, who you can think of as That One Ridiculous Mob, or TORM for short. At the moment, the caster is selected, and he’s just finished moving forward, about to cast a spell called Staff Bolt – no mana cost, decent damage. I know. No mana cost. Makes you cry, doesn’t it? His range is shown by the blue hexagons, and the red indicated where he can fire. The hand hovering over TORM’s right foot is my mouse cursor, to give you an idea of what the mouse changes into once you’re hovering over a viable target, helpfully indicated to you by the red hexagons. Also interesting to note is that the larger mobs take up more than one space, though it seems to be either one or three spaces in a line, indicating they’re all very long, but very thin. Silly Bioware. Abilities remain on the bottom, and you can handily see mob health/mana/stamina on the right, with an order of combat up in the top left, which proves incredibly helpful for timing alternating waves of offense and defense in the later, harder battles.

Combat is fun, and – for a turn-based combat system – very swift. Characters move around very smoothly and respond immediately to commands. There’s no victory dancing or ridiculous taunts by your team or the enemy, just pure, visceral combat. It’s incredibly fun and really accelerates the combat to a pace that even non-flash-RPG fans can appreciate whilst racking up items for the game on PC/Xbox/PS3. Healing is a simple job, as is casting and melee, but it’s important to remember that there will sometimes be boulders and small trees on the battlefield (though this is clear, frustratingly, in the screenie), so you’ll have to plan around lines of sight, which can be used to your advantage in a melee heavy party fighting a team of casters.

Your characters can and – on Normal and above difficulty levels – will die during combat. This is remedied in one two ways; either level your caster’s healing talents so he can ressurect in and out of combat, or simply use Injury Kits, which come into use automatically once you’re out of combat. Interestingly, the second I bought an Injury Kit at a shop, the game instantly used it on one of the KOed members of my little fantasy-platoon, saving a fair amount of time digging through my inventory screen.

However, if you’re thinking about boosting your caster into a Super Healer who can bring people back to life by simply blinking, you’ll need to plan his abilities carefully, and this is where the talent tree screen comes into play. In the last picture you can see Ardum’s Mage talent trees, though we’ll focus on Spirit Healer talents as the example, selecting his most recent spell-based acquisition; Revival. Select a spell and spend your points. Simple, right? The different trees are sometimes named a little cryptically, but it’s easy enough to figure them out. “Class name here” is usually basic stat boosting across a wide range of categories, whilst you’ll get the ability to tank, heal, and deal fire-wrath damage should you want to specialise with anyone. Personally I ended up with two offense Warrior class members and Ardun, who was a Healer with a mean Staff Bolt spell that kept mobs from stomping his face into the cave floor.

At first you’ll get a few talent points to mess around with, but sadly it soon drops to one per level. That said, there are only four levels to every tree, so this makes a fair amount of sense, as otherwise by level 20 you’d be proficient in everything and the game would begin to resemble Animal Crossing more than a fantasy brawler RPG. It’s a nice, clean talent tree screen and it makes no bones about what it does, which speeds up your character advancement as there’s no auto-talenting in this. But that’s for idiots anyway, so it’s all good.

Right, that’s basically everything there is to Dragon Age: Journeys so far, and I won’t talk about the quests. Though simplistic (it’s a flash game, let’s not expect Ikaruga), it’s a great storyline and sets up the narrative of the next-gen title very well, introducing you to the various antagonists in the simplest way possible: getting you to spend hours on the web bashing the living daylights out of the little bastards. There are five achievements overall, and another five per chapter, so after twenty little metagames you’ll be sitting on a pile of four or five items at least, transferable into DA:O once it releases on November the sixth, or the third if you’re over the pond. Remember to fill out the surveys, because unlike most people, Bioware do actually take criticism into serious consideration, though if Ubisoft mention more quest-types in Assassin’s Creed II one more time I may go postal.

And, of course, a link to the game itself. Enjoy, all.