New RPG takes us back into time

by Mike Fauls

It’s 2:00 a.m. on a midsummer’s night and you’re playing your favorite game on your console. You’re in the zone. Then suddenly the enemy is all around you and you’re stuck with just a few arrows and you’re crouching behind a box knowing that you’re going to die and have to restart because you can’t pause the action and take in what’s going on.

Well my friends all of that is soon to change with Bio Ware’s (God bless ‘em) new game called Dragon Age: Origins. This is a return to their roots because it’s an RPG (Role-Playing Game) that is very similar to the Baulder’s Gate games that they’ve made. This is a game where, just like in Baulder’s Gate, in the middle of a fight you can pause the game, take a bird’s eye view of the area, select a character(s), make them do specific options, and un-pause the game so that whatever you want them to do will be done simultaneously.

It comes out for the PC in the second half of 2009, but here’s what’s really cool: it comes out for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 a little bit later…still in the second half of ’09.

A lot of people would say that RPG’s are fine the way they are right now and that they’re still really good. And I can completely agree; Mass Effect and Fable II were great, and still are. The replay-ability that each game gives you is massive. I still play them when I can. It’s just that a lot of gamers forgot where RPG’s were from and many people actually miss that feeling of control in a game. The latest PC Gamer has more of a detailed description of this magnificent-looking game. I know that I’ll be counting down the days to get this and as the saying goes, “There’s no school like the old school.”