BioWare's Mass Effect franchise was one of the studio's more successful ventures, selling an ungodly number of copies for both the original game and its sequel across a number of systems. Stunningly, Dragon Age managed to outsell not just that franchise, but according to BioWare's Rob Bartel the game has apparently beaten sales records of all their other titles as well. That makes it all the more confusing as to why they've apparently decided to heavily emulate Mass Effect while creating Dragon Age 2, out next year.

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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.

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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.

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Dragon Age: Origins was rather unique in the fact that at its launch not only one but two pieces of downloadable content were available; The Stone Prisoner and Warden's Keep were two addons that added extra quests and content to the base game. While The Stone Prisoner was available to everyone who bought the game, Warden's Keep was only included with the digital deluxe version of the title. Anyone else wanting to play it has to purchase it for an additional seven dollars.

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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.

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