Duration: 14:21

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We go into the tower, and immediately have a difficult situation. Our darkspawn opponents have taken up a superb defensive position and have a kill zone set up for us. Once we go beyond the room near the front door, we’ll be in a room filled with wreckage that creates a winding pathway. At the beginning of this pathway is a trip wire; once one of our party members triggers it the trap is going to generate lots of grease that’ll make the floor slippery. That’s extremely bad, because we’re facing a genlock emissary with fire spells and if the grease ignites it’ll explode, causing severe damage to the whole party. From there, we’ll have to travel through the narrow corridor facing the emissary’s spells and arrows from several darkspawn archers. This area is challenging on any difficulty, but on Nightmare it’s simply brutal. A frontal assault here is almost guaranteed to get the party killed, so we’ll have to think outside the box.

To do this, I turn to the Tactics screen. The Tactics screen allows the player to tweak the AI controlling party members (including the player character, when a different party member is being manually controlled). Normally, each companion sticks together in a group and engages enemies on sight. Here, though, I alter the AI commands for Alistair and our temporary partners to “Wait” so they just stand in place and won’t do anything without a direct command from the player. I’m planning to set up an ambush for the darkspawn, and to do that I want our three companions to wait at the start point while I have our player character move out, take some potshots at the darkspawn defenders, then retreat back. The goal is for some overzealous darkspawn to pursue us back, at which point I’ll switch the AI back to normal and can engage with the benefit of superior numbers and a defensive posture.

On my first trip out, I don’t even have to take potshots at the enemy—darkspawn archers shoot arrows at our main character, so I have him beat a hasty retreat back to home base and sure enough, two enemy archers pursue. One of them hits the Glyph I laid down earlier, and I promptly switch the AI back to default so our fighters can engage; we easily crush these darkspawn. That’s definitely helpful, but there’s still a very dangerous emissary we need to take care of, so I switch the AI back to Wait and have my character move out to try and lure that particular enemy into our trap. It takes a couple of tries—the first time he doesn’t take the bait—but eventually he arrives and I drop a Glyph to freeze him in place. From there, he’s easily taken down by the rest of the team when their AI is switched back. After that, I use the ambush tactic one more time against a hurlock archer, then decide we’ve weakened the enemy enough to attack normally. The group heads out and doesn’t have the tripwire to worry about—I deliberately triggered it earlier and the grease has dissipated by now—and all that’s left are two enemy archers, who are easily neutralized. In the end, despite facing a disadvantage in both numbers and battle position, we won a key engagement using sound tactical thinking, and I’m heartened by this success.