The notion of ‘choice’ in gaming has certainly become one of the themes of the current generation, but while many games pepper their quests with karmic rewards and punishments to simply offer the illusion that each moral choice you make actually matters in the game world, few games come close to offering the personal connection of, say, Fallout 3 or Fable 2 – and the level of choice in even these two masterworks seems far more peripheral ten minutes after finishing the game than it did during play. So when we see an RPG that is all about the player carving his or her own personal path through history, we have a tendency to raise an eyebrow. Nonetheless, this ‘choice’ shit is Bioware’s bread and butter, so we can attack Dragon Age: Origins without a hint of our spiteful trademark cynicism.
Actually, we should take that back and get the story out of the way first. A short tour through the game’s website will give you access to a great number of words about the game’s back story, setting and characters, but it’s written in biblically dense prose that we defy you to hold in your brain for more than ten seconds. It’s almost certainly information better learnt through playing the game than by reading a few press release word-belches, and our lingering memory is one of a generic Dungeons & Dragons-y universe that tramples uncaringly on Tolkien’s grave.
However, this kind of makes sense given that the developer is pushing Dragon Age: Origins as a spiritual successor to the Baldur’s Gate series (albeit one without a licensed D&D connection). Besides, Bioware is not known for being held back by generic conventions; Knights of the Old Republic is arguably the best thing to emerge in the last decade bearing the once-illustrious Star Wars label, while Mass Effect basically took the well-worn Gene Roddenberry multiethnic space adventure template and turned it into something rather splendid.
Origins looks set to push the boundaries of individualised gaming even further than previous stable efforts, not only by giving each of the six available races entirely different prologue chapters for their adventure – imagine if Fallout 3 started everyone in a different vault – but also by emphasising racial and class tensions between the game’s many different races. Bethesda’s game clearly laid down the boundaries between its cast of ghouls, raiders, mutants and humans, but here Bioware will force players to choose a race and live according to the social divisions imposed upon it, with your quests and interactions – as well as the additional heroes who join your party – determined by the ingrained attitudes of others as much as the value of your deeds.
Overall, it’s just another example of ways that games are expanding their horizons beyond mere a-to-b adventuring, and with Bioware at the helm, hopefully we can expect a game where choice and customisation will have a genuine effect on replay value.
