Lucien’s Toys

After years of making great and epic RPG’s that expand on the licensed franchises of Dungeons & Dragons and Star Wars, BioWare has finally decided to build a game whose world is all their own. Say hello to Dragon Age: Origins, a game BioWare cofounder Greg Zeschuk describes as a spiritual successor to the Baldur’s Gate series.

For those who know just what Baldur’s Gate is, you have probably already gleaned that Dragon Age is going to be an action RPG based on a dark fantasy setting. However, as has been advertised, players will be able to form their own origin story of their character, reminiscent in many ways to Mass Effect. The game will also feature both a singleplayer and multiplayer campaign, each of which presents the story in a different manner from each other.

The trick now has been to combine the multiplayer mechanics long reminiscent of the Baldur’s Gate franchise with the dramatic perspective that games like Knights Of The Old Republic and Mass Effect allow. BioWare has addressed this by utilizing two different different 3D perspectives. The first is the third-person view of Knights Of The Old Republic, which is the perspective the player has during exploration and interaction with other characters. The second is for during combat, when the camera moves up into an isometric view of the player below, allowing for a more strategic yet fast-paced approach to combat. It’s also possible to zoom back into a third-person perspective during combat, taking command of any of your party members.

As in most of BioWare’s games, conversational options and moral decisions are a huge part of the storytelling. Each time around the events that will take place later on are greatly affected by your actions early on. BioWare is very hard to make the story a very reactive one to the player, so that it is the player himself who finds his own solutions to the conflicts that take place. That, or the player can work the conflicts to his own advantage. It’s up to the player to decide.

BioWare has deemed Dragon Age “the next fantasy RPG revolution.” Their writers have pieced together over five thousand years of history for the world of Dragon Age, concerning it’s feudal factions and political conspiracies, as well as the varying states of it’s races over the years. At the current point in the timeline where Dragon Age will take place, most Elves are considered nothing but low-level vermin that serve humans night and day, and are kept in walled off prison-like areas. Perhaps the player will be able to do something great for the Elven race and turn that around? No word on that yet, but we’ll find out come winter 2009.