As the spiritual successor to BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate, one of the most successful role-playing games in the industry, Dragon Age: Origins represents BioWare’s return to its roots, delivering a fusion of the best elements of existing fantasy works with stunning visuals, emotionally-driven narrative, heart-pounding combat, powerful magic abilities and credible digital actors. The spirit of classic RPGs comes of age, as Dragon Age: Origins features a dark and mature story and gameplay.

BioWare will be presenting their upcoming dark heroic fantasy Dragon Age: Origins publicly for the first time ever to fans at Gen Con in Indianapolis, Indiana, the GC Developers Conference in Leipzig, Germany and the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle, Washington.

The Dragon Age Toolset provides builders with powerful, developer-grade tools.

Key features include:

• Create Original Adventures: Using Dragon Age's rich set of assets and locations as starting blocks, you can modify these stunning areas by adding new quests, characters and scripting to create your own adventures, conversations and cut-scenes.
• Powerful Script Editor: You can fully customize combat and creature AI to create detailed action sequences full of heart-pounding party-based tactical combat.
• On-Going Toolset Content Updates: We have plans to release additional assets and features for the toolset in the future, allowing for expanded creation of new areas.
• Live Toolset Demonstration at the Penny Arcade Expo
  The Dragon Age Toolset will be part of a stage demonstration during the Penny Arcade Expo, August 29-31, 2008, at the Washington State Convention & Trade Center in Seattle, Washington.

At the time of this writing, you can attend the live demonstration scheduled to be on the PAX main stage Sunday, August 31, at 1:30 PM Pacific Time. For more PAX information and coverage please check out our Conferences 2008 web page.

Toolset Demonstration Highlights

• At PAX, Dragon Age: Origins Producer Fernando Melo and Senior Designer Ferret Baudoin will be presenting a 45 minute overview of the toolset for Dragon Age fans.
• The demonstration takes place in the Ruins of Ostagar area
• A quick look at the extremely flexible Face Morphing feature
• Clothing, armor and weapons will be selected giving a quick look at the variety
• Enemy monsters will be selected and placed in the area
• The new dialogue editor will be featured
• The module created on stage will be played through live in the Dragon Age: Origins game

Key Features :

• Epic Party-Based Combat – Dragon Age: Origins will introduce an innovative, scalable combat system, as players face large-scale battles and use their party’s special abilities to destroy hoardes of enemies and massive creatures.
• Powerful Magic – Raining down awesome destruction on enemies is even more compelling as players apply “spell combos,” a way of combining together different spells to create emergent unique effects.
• Deep Customization – Players will develop their characters and gain powerful special abilities (spells, talents and skills) and discover ever-increasing weapons of destruction.
• Your Story, Your Way – With its emotionally compelling story, players choose with whom they wish to forge alliances or crush under their mighty fist, redefining the world with the choices they make and how they wield their power.
• Origin Stories – Players will select and play a unique prelude that provides the lens through which the player sees the world and how the world sees the player. The player’s choice of Origin will determine who they are and where they begin the adventure, as they play through a customized story opening that profoundly impacts the course of every adventure.

Dragon Age: Origins is scheduled to ship for the PC in early 2009.