Why Dragon Age Multi-Player Is Good for BioWare (And Us)

If you haven’t yet seen the multi-player trailer for Dragon Age: Inquisition, give it a watch.

I admit that, after the great fun that the Mass Effect multi-player format turned out to be, I’m excited to see how BioWare does the sword and sorcery version. Devs have assured people repeatedly that the single player campaign will not be affected in any way by what’s known by the unfortunate acronym DAMP and that’s good enough for me, at least for the moment.

Then I got to thinking about why they would add a multi-player element to a story so dedicated to role playing. For me, the answer lies not in BioWare’s history (though they’ve shown enough interest in social play over the years) but in the wild success of Bungie’s Halo series on-line.

Other game series have had on-line multi-player, certainly, but it was Halo that actually brought me into that world. After a decade my family and I still hop on to Bungie’s servers from time to time and go nuts fighting total strangers. Even I, a terrible shot and someone who never remembers to look at her radar, can have fun blasting away in various game modes. Who doesn’t love blowing half a dozen skulls out of someone in Headhunter?