14 DAY TRIAL // I am the type of gamer that mainly enjoys strategy, turn-based when possible, and role playing games, from a Western developer mostly, and in a way Dragon Age: Origins managed to hit both those spots for me, with the role playing some of the best I've seen and combat that could be easily broken into turns, with positioning and special ability playing an important role.
I was one of the fans who followed most of the information on Dragon Age 2 and I was ready for the faster combat speed and for the game to focus mostly on the city of Kirkwall and on its immediate surroundings.
What I was not ready for was the set of false choices that BioWare introduced in the game, the kind of moments when the player is, apparently, forced to choose between two very different outcomes that have far reaching consequences for the future of Thedas, only to find out in a few hours that the outcome is in fact not too different.
The next Dragon Age can keep the concepts pioneered in the sequel but needs to make sure that the clearly marked “big choices” have real and branching consequences that spiral out and send the gamer down separate paths that fully affect the world.
Otherwise players will be tempted to only go through the Dragon Age games once, completing only the main quests in order to see the final, mainly predetermined outcome, without investing the passion and the time that they currently do.
And BioWare also needs to make sure that it no longer rushed the endings, as it did in Dragon Age 2, where two crucial characters were pushed into behaving in ways that their previous characterization did not suggest were possible.
It makes no sense to build a world and give it rules and actors only to ignore them in the grand finale and just deliver an outcome that was decided in a designer meeting when the game was in its concept phase.