Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I think I’ve just won the most literal title of the day award, and it’s my first post of the morning. Hear that, rest of RPS? You might try to defeat me, but I will bland you out the park. I hope I don’t get stuck in a rut. Can someone out there recommend a newly written guide to some sort of writing? What? Bioware‘s Senior Writer David Gaider has just written a blogpost on how to write fanfiction? What I do is essentially fanfiction to the whole of PC gaming. That’ll do!
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Activate the rumour siren! Bee-WOOP! Etc. Kotaku have posted saying that an “insider” has revealed a multiplayer Dragon Age game in the pipeline. Here’s the vague heart of the rumour: “The insider wasn’t sure if Dragon Age multiplayer was going to be part of a full, stand-alone title (ala Dragon Age 3) or available separately as a downloadable game. It is apparently being developed on DICE’s Frostbite 2 game engine (used for Battlefield 3), and even early-on the game apparently looks stunning.” Apparently! Apparently dragons will be playable, too. Take that, other dragon-based gameplay experiences! It does make a lot of sense, though – a dragon’s tail whipping through a destructible building as you mill about with chums trying to kill it with hammers. We’ll find out of if this is a true thing soon enough.

So, there’s going to be a Dragon Age The Third then. Eurogamer reports that BioWare are looking to hire staff to work on the game. While possibly no surprise to anyone, it’s still nice to know it exists. They’re after environment artists, if that happens to be you. Let’s hope they give themselves a little longer to make this one.

I love golems, best of all the magically animated constructs. They’re my friends. It’s fortunate for me, then, that Bioware have announced the next bit of DLC for Dragon Age as being Golems of Amgarrak, in which you can head out of Orzammar to hunt for the dark secrets of the big stone dudes, and recover a lost dwarven expedition. It features new creatures and new characters, apparently, and will turn up on August 10th for the sum of $5. I was going to post a trailer, via MMORPG, below, but it doesn’t work for some reason. See it here.

Why change a winning formula? That’s what I was left wondering after discovering that, on the one hand, Dragon Age sold better than any Bioware game ever as of November, and on the other, that the formula is changing dramatically for Dragon Age 2. It’s worth noting that the PC version isn’t changing as much as the console versions of the game. We will apparently retain “strategic combat”, which is a good news, while console chums will be “playing to their strengths” with more actiony combat mechanics. Conversation will also now be handled via Mass Effect’s wheel system. The biggest change, however, is that Dragon Age 2 will be getting its own equivalent of Shepard, with player character options reduced to the male of female versions of “Hawke” (pictured? I think). Bioware confirmed on their forums that you will have to play a human.

Hell, I enjoyed Mass Effect 2, but you have to wonder why Dragon Age was so successful in the first place. Not because it was copying its less successful sibling, that’s for sure. I enjoy almost all of Bioware’s work, but I think boiling one game down to another just makes gaming a less interesting place. Diversity is important.

The Steam summer sale thingamy is continuing to offer some ludicrously good prices, as it happens. I’ve just spotted some for which there’s only six hours left, which should fill in some vital gaps on your virtual shelf. There’s Thief: Deadly Shadows for £2.09, BioShock for £3.49, and Titan Quest Gold for £2.49. There’s also Dragon Age, about 80 hours of game, for £11.99.

I can’t get over Thief 3 for barely more than £2. This is one of those games that come 2014 we’ll be writing ten year retrospectives about. If you never did, you absolutely must right now. Just for the heck of it, I’ve pasted my review of the game from 2004 for PC Format.

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I came to Mass Effect 2 late, and after a couple of weeks of man-chat and man-shoot, finished it off last night. And so, I wandered off to Youtube to have a look for some of the choices I stepped away from and to relive my sexing of a mental lizard. At which point, I come across the make-up tutorials of UtopianDream (Who’s affiliated with the splendidly-named gamer-model agency Charisma +2 ). Her initial Miranda Mass Effect 2 one seems to have been linked quite widely back in February – which I missed – but her later ones for Morrigan Dragon age and (RPS IRRELEVANT!) Bayonetta (er) Bayonetta have been ignored. UNTIL NOW. Do you do requests, UtopianDream? If so, SHODAN. Go on. You know you want to. Her tutorials follow…
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…You’ll download this Dragon Age texture pack, and it’ll just work for you and it’ll look super-spanky and that will be that. Me, I’ve wasted over three hours trying to make this collection of spit’n'polished graphics take with my own DA install, hoping to be saved from the disappointingly muddy visuals of what was otherwise one of the finest games of 2009, but I’m still only getting itermittent, glitching results. Not the fault of the mod at all, I stress – something is just wrong with my install, and I’m avoiding re-downloading 18Gb of RPG to fix it. If the mod’s screenshots (poorly represented by the compressed JPGs herein) are anything to go on, though, it’s well worth it. But: why do mods like this exist in the first place? Why don’t the developers cater for this degree of detail themselves? Well, because it would be insane.
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UPDATE: SEE BELOW

I keep having these grand plans for writing about the Dragon Age DLC. Since the game came out I’ve intended a Wot I Think summing up the content subsequently released for my favourite game of last year. But at every turn I have been thwarted by a confusion of DLC management. An enormous array of bugs and errors are making it near-impossible for some to access their paid for content. And the tale of Return To Ostagar, originally due out on 5th January but still a no-show, is rapidly descending into farce.

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I’ve banged on quite enough about Dragon Age’s first expansion, Awakening, due this March, so I’ll not witter on more here. Just to say there’s a trailer for the new content below, explaining the outline of the plot, and not featuring any silly rawk music. Post-game spoilers below, naturally.

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