Just a BioWare Fan

I know many people hate the “fetch quests” that proliferate across Inquisition. I, however, look at them as the best way my Inquisitor can make a name for herself in Thedas.

The Dragon Age has heroes already—the Hero of Fereldan and the Champion of Kirkwall in the past decade alone. My Inquisitor has to set herself apart somehow. Hawke and the Warden focused on tattered pantaloons and lost knuckle bones delivered without comment. It can be done better!

Thus the Inquisitor sets about delivering flowers to graves, scattering ashes, lighting candles, and feeding the hungry. She doesn’t just bring back a [often quite strange] lost heirloom, she delivers medicine to save lives. She helps the grieving. She gives blankets to the cold.

While Dragon Age: Inquisition showcases the robust senses of humor that informs so much of what BioWare writes, it has a bit of a reputation for being much less dark than the previous Dragon Age titles.  In part, that may be because it actually has a color palette, rather than shades of brown, grey, and gore.

For those of you who think Inquisition is all Disney princesses (though none of them would sit like Josie does at her desk, I’m telling you) and fluffy fennecs, I’ve compiled a list of forty things I would qualify as dark and/or creepy.  The list is in no particular order, just how they came to mind.

1. Tevinters making the ocularum out of the skills of the Tranquil, with the explanation in that locked hut in sleepy Redcliffe
2. The Hunter’s note about mages and Templars behaving badly, with its desperation, murder, and implied rape
3. Dead bodies in poses of torment freakin’ everywhere, most particularly at the Temple of Sacred Ashes half-melted into the ground

I thought it ideal to stop 50-some hours into Dragon Age: Inquisition, a quarter of the way through the touted 200 hours of content, to write a review of the game thus far. While I do have a few complaints, in the main my reaction boils down to one word: wow.

This review will avoid spoilers but the main story quest has consistently impressed and surprised me. Think Skyrim meets Dragon’s Dogma meets the beauty of BioWare’s wonderful storytelling. Here’s the tl;dr version: Dragon Age: Inquisition takes a little getting used to but it has amazed and delighted me and I’ve only just found out what the main story’s about.

Note, please, that I’m playing on the X-Box One. Hubby has had continuous problems on his PC, including taking three days to download the game and a number of freezes and crashes. I’m not going to address those because they aren’t the game, they’re likely a combination of hardware and Origin problems. Let’s talk about the glorious masses of content, instead.

I’ve rewritten this review of Destiny several times because I keep forgetting to post it and keep thinking of new things to say. The upshot? Despite its woefully thin veneer of RPG it’s a console-loving, MMO-flavored, first-person shooter, a whole lot more Halo than Mass Effect.  In and of itself that doesn’t make it a bad game, it just isn’t a Bioware game.  For me, it has almost no longevity. I wanted it to fill the gap until DA:I hits my mailbox but I'm back to Far Cry 3 already.

That’s the short of it, but of course a game this well-hyped deserves a more-thorough review.  Destiny offers plenty of fun and takes a step away from Halo without abandoning what made Bungie such a hit in the first place.  Here’s a run-down of the good and the bad I’ve found in several days of FPS goodness.

As yet another “BioWare should market to women” thread has been locked at ye olde BSN, I thought I’d condense my thoughts here. The topic has been bashed to death and will continue to be beaten like a dead horse, but there was much of interest in that thread.

The contention that irritated me most claimed that marketing should focus on the biggest of a game’s existing demographic, to the exclusion of all else. This, proponents declared, is the most efficient use of each marketing dollar. This, I say, is short-sighted.

If women comprise a growing share of the gaming market why wouldn’t you target that demographic as well? According to BioWare devs, the Dragon Age consumer base is already 30% female. While a large percentage of those women love the company and their games because of their strong female protagonists, and thus will purchase new BioWare games by preference, not all women loved Mass Effect 3 or Dragon Age 2 and may abandon both franchises unless shown that DA: Inquisition will be different and more to their tastes.

What company can afford to ignore nearly a third of their current customer base? And what company wouldn’t like to grow their market share across more than one demographic? This question leads to the most pertinent one: what should BioWare do to make the most of each penny it spends marketing DA:I?

For this, I have a vision. Picture, if you will, a screen shot of the character creator. The invisible player selects a human male warrior. Bam! You see a cut scene of him catching a massive blow on his shield. Then back to CC and switch to a female dwarf berserker. Pow! She’s dropping a flying cleave with her two-handed axe on the head of some demon. Back to CC and a male elf. Thwack! A searing arrow of death hammers into a Red Templar. Then a female Tal-Vashoth, then her flinging a fireball into a group of whatever.

You get the idea: showcase the classes, their unique abilities, and the fact that you can customize your character all at once. The strengths of the Dragon Age games lie not in one gender or character but in their choices. These begin at the very start with the selection of appearance options. BioWare offers dozens of ways to play epic heroes and those options will appeal to the largest number of people. Why limit potential customers to those who want to play stubbly, lantern-jawed white boys when that’s not the only way to play?

Of all the genres out there, particularly on consoles, I’d argue that role-playing games in general and the fantasy types in particular, are most likely to appeal to women. In part I base that on my own preferences and in part I consider the stereotypes that most women are raised beneath to influence those choices.

Women are raised to love fairy tales and believe science and math are, if not beyond them, at least too hard for them to master to be worth the effort. Don’t believe me? See one or fifty of the thousands of articles, blog posts, and videos about bringing women into STEM fields. They’re also told that they’re too delicate physically and emotionally to handle a battlefield, leading to the current struggle to convince men that women willing and wishing to put their lives on the line as soldiers should be included there.

By extension, this discourages women from reading, writing, and playing science fiction. Certainly, you can name dozens of exceptions to this rule, women who have followed their passions and excelled. In general, however, women tend to be more comfortable with magic and dragons than space ships and gunplay. It’s more socially acceptable for them to enjoy fantasy than to criticize the accuracy of a sci-fi universe to real-world physics.

Should that change? Hell, yes. Is it? Yes to that, too. But remember that I’m refuting the argument that BioWare should exclusively target straight white males with their marketing of Dragon Age: Inquisition. That’s foolish. As it becomes more and more common for women to start gaming or try new platforms, the marketing of new games should find ways to include them in the target audiences.

The guys in the so-called target demographic already know that the games will have plenty to appeal to them. If anything, BioWare and the gaming industry in general should limit the stoic, manly, white protagonist of old and start promoting PCs of color, female leads, and LGBT relationships in games. Consider the size of this largely-untapped pool of players, people who don’t know yet how much they love Dragon Age. Tell me again why no one should market games to them, please.

All of this ignores one key element in the advertising of DA:I. We don’t know who has the final say over the marketing purse strings. If BioWare gets to direct the campaign over the next several months before release I have a great deal more faith that they’ll be willing to take a chance and expand their focus. If EA picks what will be shown, however, I fear that the “safe” route will stay the only one they see. Time will tell.

I wrote recently about my theory surrounding the genesis of the red lyrium with which we become disturbingly familiar over the course of Dragon Age 2. Because I’m so long-winded, I decided to stop speculating about the past and start spinning tales around what we do know and where BioWare might take us, as they have confirmed that they will in Dragon Age: Inquisition.

All of that last red lyrium post brought us around full circle to that idol that the Tethras brothers and Hawke find on the altar in DA2. Even presuming it existed when the thaig was abandoned, we know it’s far from inert. What we don’t know is whether it was corrupted when it was made or if it was subsequently tainted.

I see no reason to assume that lyrium requires direct, physical contact to absorb something as ephemeral as spirits. Even if it did, we cannot know how long the Profane have been lying inactive. The demon we meet there says that they hunger but it must have been a very long time since the dwarves drove the Darkspawn that deep. What they crave could, after all, be the spirits of the dead.

As the title above suggests, what I’m painting here is a best-case scenario. This is where I would like to see the game heading, not what I think will happen. A girl can dream SWOTR dreams, can’t she?

With the release of the Makeb expansion for Star Wars: The Old Republic and the interview which seemingly spells out the abandonment of class-specific stories, my mind wandered to what I would like to see from future content. As I’ve got one character of each class (and a series of duplicates) I’m pretty familiar with the beginnings of all of the classes, though I haven’t yet finished but three stories. That’s due to hitting level cap, which the expansion fixed, so I’ll be spending a lot of quality time on Corellia in the near future.

My thought was this: wouldn’t it be lovely if Makeb were simply an interlude in class stories, a setting for the next stage of your PC’s involvement in galactic matters?

There’s an interesting discussion about game play length taking place over at the BioWare Social Network. Rather than post several hundred words (the dreaded Wall of Text) there, I thought I’d post my thoughts here.

I see complaints with, to me, ridiculously small total hours into BioWare’s games. Most of my Dragon Age: Origins plays end up about 90 hours. I do my best to find all gifts, max out conversations with companions, and have an essentially empty quest journal when I head into the final string of battles. I wander around towns and talk to random NPCs, read some codex entries, click on everything that lights up, and generally act like my completionist self.

While many Mass Effect and BioWare fans feel betrayed, abandoned, and otherwise shunned by their formerly beloved game company, you may have noticed that I feel different. It seems I have different in-game desires than many.

When it comes to the recently announced Dragon Age 3: Inquisition, my excitement stems not from blind love of whatever BioWare does, though they’ve not utterly let me down even with ME3, it comes from having found something to love in each game, no matter the flaws.

In particular, the Dragon Age series has captured my heart. There isn’t a particular character or love interest that I feel the need to continue, as much as I’d love to see what happens with my Wardens. The characters and setting in general have, instead, drawn me into that world.

I’m violently opposed to spoilers. I’ve avoided watching or reading anything about Mass Effect 3 for months, as hard as it has been to resist looking. I wanted to be surprised by every plot twist and retcon in the game.

In part it’s because I wanted the intended effect of BioWare’s writers’ and actors’ efforts. I don’t want to know if someone is going to die or blow me off or betray me. Commander Shepard doesn’t cheat.

Imagine my shock at the Horizon scene with Kaidan in Mass Effect 2! Had I known what was coming it would have all but drained the impact from the confrontation. (I’m avoiding spoilers with this example. See how nice I am?)

Release Date: November 11, 2011
Platforms: PC, X-Box 360, and Playstation 3
Price: $59.99 (all platforms) or $149.99 for the Collector's Edition

Skyrim, the name of the fifth installment of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls RPG series, has become a major buzzword since the game’s release. People the world over post tweets and Facebook updates that allude to their having popped up for a breather but intending to return to Skyrim.

But if you haven’t yet been sucked into the wide-open world of Nords and trolls and elves and giants, and particularly if you have played an older Elder Scrolls game and didn’t care for it, you might be wondering if Skyrim is for you. The wild popularity and constant claims of addictive play make a pretty convincing case for giving it a try, after all.

To help you decide, I’ve tackled a few of the issues I see with the game and outlined the reasons I keep playing despite them. I’ve written about the important aspects of any RPG: the story, the role playing for which the genre is named, and interaction with non-player characters (NPCs). And, inevitably, I’ve compared Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls to BioWare’s Dragon Age.

Release Date: December 20 ,2011
Price: $59.95 ($379 if you want the Collector's Bundle)
Monthly Subscription: $15

I'm a complete and utter MMO noob (that'd be an inexperienced Massively Multi-Player On-Line game player, for those even less in the know than I). I decided nonetheless to take Bioware up on their invitation to beta test Star Wars: The Old Republic, or SWTOR as it's commonly known.

I love Bioware and I love Star Wars so what could possibly go wrong, except for the part where I had no idea what I was doing? So there I was, waiting for the SWTOR to start, waiting to review this brand new game, but still undecided: Jedi Knight? Imperial trooper? Smuggler? Bounty Hunter?

Half an hour before the game started I was reading through the SWTOR forum for some hints. I thoroughly intimidated myself by reading posts from people who had been playing MMOs for years, confused myself by wondering if I was supposed to be in a guild, and generally got so nervous I decided to stop reading.

This will be a long review so let’s be clear from the beginning: I leapt into the Star Wars universe as interpreted by the talented Bioware writers and the great voice actors with both feet. I played the game for three days, until five minutes before the test ended, trying to see and do as much as I could. Star Wars: The Old Republic offers expansive worlds and vast story lines that intertwine and split in interesting ways.