14 DAY TRIAL // Dragon Age: Origins is now out all over the world and role playing fans are digging through its huge story and universe, trying different character combinations and various solutions to the conundrums the game presents.
Those who love the role playing genre and fans of previous BioWare releases went one step ahead and created a so-called “RPG Cliché Chart” aiming to show, a little tongue in cheek, the similarities that run through all of them.
The spreadsheet shows how Dragon Age: Origins is structured in relation to the Baldur's Gate games, Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire and the more recent Mass Effect.
The effort seems to have touched some weak sports in BioWare corporate armor as Patrick Weekes, who is a staff writer at the company, has taken to the official forums to deliver a harsh riposte. He says that if someone “is smart enough to do a big Excel spreadsheet with colour coding and stuff,” they should also be “smart enough to know about Campbellian archetypes,” referring to The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a book that mentions how myths and stories, which have pretty much the same structure all over the world.
Weekes has also explained why BioWare games are structured in quests, some mandatory and some optional, centered on a number of central hubs, most of the time four. He has said that the Quality Assurance process is much easier with this kind of setup and that this type of structure actually makes players more involved in the game experience, allowing them to clearly see objectives and easily track their progress in the game world. Overall, Weekes believes that “There's nothing wrong with it,” suggesting it could appear in upcoming games like Mass Effect 2, set to be released in early 2010.