| Star Wars: Origins | |
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 Image via Wikipedia Welcome back to The Blog Unleashed. Recently I spent some time with BioWare's newest game, Dragon Age: Origins, and I'd like to share a few thoughts on just what this game might tell us about SW:TOR. First of all, this game really isn't fooling around with the idea that your actions and choices have real impacts on the world around you. I learned the hard way that trying to get two wrong to make a right was a great formula for getting one party member furious with me. Since how much a character likes you has an actual impact on the game this was a real setback for me. Thankfully, in DA:O I had the luxury of multiple save files so I was able to go back and find a better solution to the problem. But we know that there won't be any such option in SW:TOR which makes every choice that much more critical. I was a bit disappointed with the way romance worked in the game. A few obvious choices, a couple gifts and sparing a couple minutes for a sidequest had Luna Lovegoo...I mean, Leliana falling for me in no time. It felt like fish in a barrel. Love in life is never that simple so I was hoping I'd have to work for it a bit more. On the plus side, my efforts to romance both the good rogue and the evil sorceress proved to be too much of a balancing act for me so I eventually gave up and just focused on the one character. We've been told that in SW:TOR romancing multiple characters will be possible. The Smuggler, especially, seems to be being set up as a “girl in every port” sort of character should the player chose go that route. If that is the case I hope pulling it off is a tricky prospect. Oh, and I think it's worth mentioning that DA:O has options for those who might want to play their characters as being gay or bisexual. Sexuality has always been a PG/PG-13 sort of thing in SW so I doubt we'll get anything really all that racy in game. But I do have to give BioWare points for taking a bit of a risk and letting players control an important aspect of their character is such a way. Lastly, DA:O had it set up so some race and class combinations are impossible. Now I'm sure this was done for game space and story reasons. But it did make me feel railroaded a bit. Just how this will play out in SW:TOR is hard to guess at. Though at this point I think it's safe to say that a human can be anything they want to be. But the webcomic has shown us that Wookiees aren't welcome on Korriban. So while, as I've said before, I don't think playing Wookiees will be an option it does raise the question of if being non-human will fully close some classes to players. Frankly, I'm against that as that just cuts down on player options and thus reduces replay value. All in all DO:A says to me that we'll be getting what we've come to expect from BioWare but with things just ramped up a bit in certain regards. All of which sounds pretty good to me.  |
