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Dragon Age: Origins Expansion Coming In March
ishanjain tipped news that BioWare has announced an expansion for Dragon Age: Origins, called Awakening, that is due out on March 16th. Awakening "is supposed to run about 15 hours and will allow for players to import and edit characters they've broken in from the core game," and it will take place "in the in the role of a Grey Warden Commander who's been tasked with rebuilding the order of Grey Wardens and finding out how the darkspawn survived following the death of the Archdemon dragon." A trailer is available at the official site, as well as some information on a new bit of DLC that will be out shortly, entitled Return to Ostagar. (It was originally due for release on January 5th, but was delayed.)
I am amazed at the resilience of the game industry in this time of massive unemployment and layoffs.
In hard times when most of the economy is tanking, there are some products which see a heyday. Bologna, for example, seems a dramatic rise in sales during economic slowdowns. Now too, I think it might be possible to say that the game industry is a contra indicator of economic success. Not only does it hold that game sales goes up during downturns, but that the people who play them are more likely to be affected negatively by the economic environment.
It'd be an interesting phenomenon to research, I think.
They should have just made the camera control like the same as what was used in Neverwinter Nights.
Give me top-down isometric view, 6 characters and real clerics, and get off my lawn!
Wow. There was a time people couldn't let go of a game and it was only top down, with 3 squares moving about. Now it's whine whine whine about stupid little things that don't really take anything away from a great story, great action and a chance to get into Claudia Blacks pants.
Because they're fun and engaging.
There's nothing wrong with actually playing through a linear story that somebody else has written. If I get a bit of freedom to shape things to my own tastes along the way, then great, but I'm not going to demand even that.
The simple fact is that some people are better storytellers than others. And the people that the likes of Bioware and Square-Enix get to write their stories are generally far better than the average Joe. Everybody likes to think that they could write or narrate a wonderfully engaging story if they ever had the time and/or inspiration, but in reality, it's a gift possessed by only a few.
Dragon Age's story isn't great; if they were going to ditch the whole AD&D/Forgotten Realms setting that was at the heart of the Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights games, then I would have hoped that they would actually do something a bit more... well... different with it. Compared to... say... Mass Effect, it felt very much like they were playing it safe and sticking to a well-trodden path with Dragon Age. If that's what they're doing, then a part of me would actually have preferred to have a more familiar Forgotten Realms setting (not least because of the potential for Miniature Giant Space Hamsters). If, on the other hand, they were trying to produce a genuinely different "dark" fantasy story, then I'm sorry, but The Witcher got there first and did it better.
That said, it's still a very good game with a very engaging story and fun play mechanics. The setting they've created is one I'd be happy to return to in the future.