Tipa@West Karana and Pete@Dragonchasers have both written about the new Dragon Age: Origins character creator that was released yesterday. Dragon Age: Origins, for those who don’t follow upcoming games, is due to be released in November by Bioware and is a single player RPG, along a similar style to the Baldur’s Gate series. It’s going to be a large game and Bioware have been churning out loads and loads of trailers for it —Â for example, each different character origin has its own video.
I love these kinds of games, even though I have a really poor track record for actually completing them. This one is going to involve lots of downloadable content (the first DLC module that you can pay for is going to be available on the same day that the game is released, which is possibly being just a little over-eager), and … err … vast amounts of blood spraying all over the place if the website is anything to go by.
What’s more interesting is that Bioware are launching a new social website based around Dragon Age. You can upload character portraits from the character creator already to your account and share them with friends, and will be able to upload achievements, information about where it is in the story, and talent/skill choices. Naturally you can also message other people through the site, use it to host dragon age blogs, and organise project teams to create new dragon age modules and addons with the toolset that’s coming with the game.
It’s a different take from Blizzard’s battle.net which seems to be more about being able to message people while they are in game and organise good matches for SC2 battles.
I do wonder how many social networking sites most players really want to keep up with — one for every different manufacturer is already starting to feel like a hassle. But I applaud Bioware for letting me create a pretty female dwarf (whilst cursing them for putting together a city elf background that actually tempts me to play an elf) and if anyone wants to friend me there, my username is Spinksville.
Welcome to Spinksville! 
I forgot my EA login and my Bioware forum login. Reclaiming them one by one took some time. I am not so happy about the many social networking sites, I am part of too many networks already, and I am not even on Facebook. This is getting out of hand. 😛
Regarding Dragon Age, it seems to be pretty hot! But I have not even finished the last two Fallout 3 DLCs by now, Mothership Zeta and Point Lookout.
Prior to the release of NWN, I had started building a website where toolset users could gather and collaborate, but someone beat me to it. It’s good to see Bioware themselves hosting this kind of service for DA. However, I’m not sold on these game-specific user “blog” features. I would think that would be like preaching to the choir, no?
Shame they don’t provide a facebook connect/twitter/other openauth style login.
That said from another point of view it’s turning their game forums into something a little bit more, which makes it seem less of a “oh god not another social site” and more of a “nifty forum”.
Have they got anything to tie it into people’s other existing forums? The smart move would be to have people plastering their facebook/twitter/whatever with bioware/dragon age achievements (at a socially acceptable noise level) to passively recruit their friends to play the games too.
Bah, by other people’s existing forums I meant other existing social networks, obviously.
In the second Dragon Age novel, there’s a female dwarf who is essentially a bad-ass monk class. While everyone else is swinging swords she’s using her bare hands to take down the bad guys. 🙂 I hope the game is as good as the books are when it comes to turning traditional fantasy tropes on their heads.
That punk street elf origin is definitely tempting … I almost went for that, and still might.
I’m glad it’s not just me. I think they did some good work on making those origins appealing.
My first character was an attempt to make a pretty female dwarf as well… cool!
I constantly forgot my details for such- So i try and keep my range small but quality of posting and sharing higher.
I think its great and its clearly a good idea because people not only like to play things they like, they like to talk about things they like, and some games or situations you just can’t talk about even with your bestest, closest most understanding friends.
They just won’t get what you mean.
And I love RPGs in general, I think its the sense of “leveling up” or “getting better”. 🙂
Pingback: Social Overload « Bio Break
Pingback: Looking Ahead: Will November 2009 Be Another Great Month of Gaming? « ITG! I'm Talkin' Games