Starting a Bioware game is deadly to your free time. To mine, anyway.
I played through Dragon Age: Origins for the first time last November, didn’t eat, drink, sleep, just kept playing until I was done. I got to the end out of breath and exhausted, but with the blood of the archdemon on my twin blades and the taint of the darkspawn simmering in my veins.
All those saved games were lost. But playing a rogue through the first time was only one story, and to get ready to play the expansion pack, Dragon Age: Awakenings (and to anticipate Dragon Age 2), I decided to replay the game and make some different choices.
Each different race/class combination has its own, semi-unique, origin story. Human and elf mages share an origin in the insular Circle of Magi, where all budding mages are sent to find their place as either the tools or the prey of the Templars. Your dwarf can either be from the underclass or of the nobility; your human can be from the slums or the castle; your elf can be from the ghetto or the forest. All stories do converge once your are pulled from your old life by Duncan, the Warden-Commander of the Gray Wardens. The Wardens are a mystically bound order tasked with defending the surface world from the depredations of the Darkspawn, twisted creatures formed, says legend, from the mortals who invaded and tainted the Golden City of the Maker. With the Maker departed, his prophet and bride Andraste long ago dead, murdered, and the land on the edge of civil war, an Arch Demon has arisen to lead the Darkspawn on a Blight — an invasion of the surface world.
Through the choices you make along the way, your adventure will bring you along roughly three different paths, once through the origin. Being helpful, kind, upholding the law and never making deals with the evil spirits of the Fade, you will follow the good path. Be self-serving and make deals to your benefit, and you follow the path of evil. Chart a middle course and nobody will really be that happy with you, but on the other hand, their expectations will be low. No matter what path you choose, your overall goal remains the same — defeat the archdemon and prevent the Blight — but your reasons may change.
Clone Wars Adventures: You’re in ar-cade world now.
I wasn’t sure what to think about SOE’s Clone Wars Adventures when I first read of it. A kid-oriented, “freemium” MMO set in the Star Wars universe? With SOE’s Star Wars Galaxies out for years and Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic set to tear things up next year, is there really any room for … Read more
