Dragon Age: Origins Preview [PC]
It's my wedding day.
I imagine that surprises a few of you. It might surprise you more to learn that I'm also a female elf which, to save myself the mocking I'll get if I reveal that I give my player characters carefully-chosen fantasy names with far too many apostrophes and far too few vowels, I'll claim is called Jane. So yes, it's my wedding day.
For the record, this preview is going to go through one of the game's six character origins. If you don't want to know more, do not read on.
Elves are generally loathed by the humans of Fereldan – the country in which Dragon Age is set – and tend to live with their brethren in the slums of major cities, termed Alienages, the name of which should give you an idea of how these poor people are looked upon by humanity in general. Alienages. Alien. Foreign. Different. Inhuman.
Our cast for this story revolves around Jane, our poison-making, back-stabbing, dual-wielding, mass-murdering psychopathic city elf. Today, she's due to be married to Nelaros, the slightly camp “dreamboat.” Also getting married is Jane's cousing Soris, and acting as bridesmaid is another cousin, Shianni.
Things went a bit tits-up when Vaughan, son of the local lord, turned up drunk and in the mood to sexually harass female elves. That ended with Shianni bottling him in the head, which quietened things down until he came back with armed guards and dragged off Shianni, Soris' fiancee, a few other girls littered around, and me. The bastard. “We're having a party,” he said as he clubbed me over the head, “but we've got a shortage of female guests.”
Violence and rape. What a brilliant way to start a wedding.
Waking up in a cold, dank cellar with the other girls, it was time for action. The door was barred and there was nothing around to use as a weapon, so I told the others to wait for my signal before doing anything. A few were panicked, saying that we should just go along with it and try to forget it ever happened afterwards. Shianni, to her credit, didn't seem as worried as she could have been, and I'm a mass-murdering psychopath so I was pretty much unfazed. The problem was one in particular, who was kneeling on the ground, praying to the Maker for deliverance. When the guards walked in and she told them to get away from us, she got a vertical slash across her chest.
It was a novel way to make a point, certainly; with her death rattle echoing in our ears and blood pooling around her corpse for attempting to resist rape, most of the fighting spirit was choked off. The others were dragged out, leaving two to deal with me (as I, apparently, was “the scrapper”) who promised that they would be “perfect gentlemen.”
Until dear cousin Soris interrupted them. “Excuse me,” he mumbled at the door, gingerly holding a sword. “Oh look, it's a little elfling with a stolen sword!” chortled one of the guards, walking towards him. Soris knelt down and slid the sword along the ground towards me. The guards turned. One raised his hands and backed away slowly. “Oh, sod,” muttered the other.
Sadly, two armoured guards against an unarmed elf and a sword-wielding elf in a wedding dress isn't exactly a fair fight, no matter how pissed off the girl might be, so the first thing to do was use my Dirty Fighting skill to incapacitate one. This skill is pretty much the equivalent of throwing dirt in your opponent's eyes – it does no damage, but keeps them out of your way for a little while. With one stumbling around trying to work out what was going on and Soris trying to punch him in the back of the head, I turned to the other. The fight didn't last long. He swung wildly, and got a sword rammed through his chest for even attempting it. When the second finally recovered, he'd been reasonably wounded by Soris and it was little trouble to decapitate him, sending his head to the corner of the room and splattering my pretty wedding dress with blood.
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