Posts Tagged ‘dragon age origins’
Steam announced yesterday that they had partnered up with Prima, long the purveyor of official "strategy guides" for games like Mass Effect 2 and Prince of Persia, to offer downloadable versions of their guides through Valve's platform. At first glance I liked this idea a lot, but after buying one of them it seemed like a waste of money.
While excited gamers this week have been treated to the first full expansion to BioWare's epic RPG Dragon Age: Origins, customers who purchased the Mac port of the game are left wondering when they'll get in on the latest content themselves. Since being launched the Mac port hasn't been supported in the least, and nobody at any of the involved companies have confirmed or denied whether or not the expansion will be coming to OSX.
While the escapades of Zevran and Leliana in BioWare's Dragon Age: Origins have been featured positively in a lot of gay media, it was presumably only a matter of time before their inclusion would show up in negative depictions as well. WorldNetDaily, a popular conservative news site ran an article last week with the ridiculous headline of "Players have dirty 'gay' sex in hit game".
BioWare is a developer with an extensive history in roleplaying games. One of their earliest titles, Baldur's Gate, is often lauded as revitalizing the computer RPG genre entirely as well as introducing the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons ruleset to an audience that had never been exposed to it. When their 2007 sci-fi RPG Mass Effect was released on the Xbox 360, it had amassed a million in worldwide sales in its first three weeks. Dragon Age: Origins is BioWare's latest release, returning to their roots as fantasy aficionados after their forays into science fiction.
In a previous entry I talked about the way many games implement "moral choices" these days and how lackluster I generally find that implementation to be. One of the things Bioware has advertised about regarding Dragon Age is that their story will be much more nuanced and realistic, not pigeonholing players into these sock-puppets of emotions. While I'm no where near far along enough in the campaign to make a qualified statement on things, I wanted to break for a moment and explore my previous point a bit further using this game as an example.
It seems that any game coming out these days touts "moral ambiguity" as a selling point. But is this mechanic worth the hype or just a failed caricature of human ethics that gives the illusion of choice but instead forces players into unrealistic and stereotyped paradigms?
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