Dragon Age - Preview @ 1Up
 

1Up has teamed up with Dragon Age project director Scott Greig for an in-depth preview of Dragon Age which 1Up calls the "spiritual successor" to Baldur's Gate. Also included in the preview are a few words from Bioware's founders on roleplaying's past, present, and future.
More information.

Definitely a game I will be watching,
never liked BG but did like KOTOR, and I don't don't know but it sounds really interesting

I can't open the site. :(

I think phat loot stands a bit higher than moral choices and consequences in their games.

Sounds more like Blizzard to me …

I'm also interested in hearing about what the game mechanics will be like. If it's a BG-esque system that's true real-time, I think that will be pretty cool. I hope that the role-playing system is a good one too. They have to create that from the ground up. I'd be pleased with a D&D knockoff, as most original role-playing systems are boring Diablo knockoffs.

i was the opposite, liked BG, hated KOTOR.

as for moral choices, I don't know, for some reason when I play games and am forced to make a moral decision I can never seem to go outside of my real life character and choose the evil/bad options :) Like in NWN2 right now, seems everyone you talk to you can choose to save their kitty from the tree or light the tree on fire, and I can never force myself to light the tree, even though I really really want to just to see what would happen :) But I'd get tired of the constant saving/reloading just to see what happens. So I end up being a do-gooder throughout the whole game.

take for example the part in NWN2 where the orcs want to hire you to kill the ogres, and you talk to the ogres and they want to hire you to kill the orcs, so I figured i can go back to the orcs and explain the situation to them and perhaps find an amicable solution, but of course i don't get that choice, they just want to kill me outright, so I say 'fine' and slaughter the camp. then go back to the ogre hoping he'll want to back stab me and attack me, but no, he seemed like an intelligent fellow and i didn't get forced to have the satisfaction of killing them too and removing all evidence of the whole thing. i really wanted to kill the ogres at that point though, too bad.

anyway, i'm not sure what i'm talking about anymore… i think i need my first cup of coffee…

maybe i'm just saying that i personally never see any moral dilemas in games, i just follow my RL morals and play that way, I never seem to have to stop and think "hmm, do i really want to help him or do i tell him to shove off"… maybe these developers are putting too much wind into the 'morals' thing.

does anyone really have to make a moral DECISION everytime they come to some choices in a game? they make it sound like its some RL choice between colleges or something.

According to this preview Dragon Age is going to be the RPG of the century. Deep storyline, detailed handcrafted world, high character customization, multiple endings, starting location according to class, real time combat with weapon collision detection, ability to control a party of at least four characters, multiple cameras, tough moral decisions, pause and assign commands ala BG, world is shaping according to the player's actions (now where did I hear that one before?), ultra powerful toolset… The only thing missing from the list is the ability to kill all NPCs.

We'll just have to wait and see.

[edit] @araczynski

If you haven't played KOTOR with a female dark character who has fallen in love, you just don't know what you're missing…

There is obviously a difference between a 'decision' and a 'DECISION' as you state it … and morality (in RL and game) is really just the trend composed of a number of 'decisions' and perhaps a very rare 'DECISION'.

Which will make it second to Fable 2 … RPG of the MILLENIUM!

lol…10 characters

that's what i'm referring to, i have a very hard time trying to RP a bad person because it goes so much against who i am.

strange since i play games to escape from reality, and yet i have to drag my RL personality into it every time :)

i think i can go down as far as chaotic neutral, or chaotic lawful if there's such a thing before my inner self is screaming at me "you bastard don't you dare!" :) hehehe

I'm afraid games like NWN2 (and I hope not Dragon Age) fall a little TOO much in love with their NPC's. NPC's who never shut up, who act coy and evasive when you ask questions, who can't be killed or even avoided. NWN2 seems like it was written for the convenience of this group of bland, stereotypical whiners rather than the player who paid real money in the real world for the privilege of escorting them around.

Other than that little niggling worry, the game sounds great.

@araczynski

Roleplaying is not about 'dragging your RL personality into the game'. In fact, it is the very opposite.

I'm writing this not just for you, but for all those who superficially play RPGs.
I repeat: They don't know what they are missing! Most of us make the mistake of playing every RPG with the same archetype in mind (Scott Greig mentions this in his interview). A young male player, for example, will usually play as a male human paladin, because that is what he unconciously thinks he is -- a paladin.

But a veteran RPG player knows that the 'meat' is in roleplaying someone you could/would never be in real life. Trying to guess how such a person would react in various situations; eventually shaping up a personality quite different than your own. It is exactly this process, during which your avatar acquires an own independent existence, that leaves you a wiser - and better - person.

And yet, the last poll we conducted at the Dot, showed most people just played themselves!!

According to the above conclusion, I must have a multiple disorder personality disfunction (and I probably do) as I like to play as a plethora of my personal archetypes. However, I do admit that I never grew into playing really evil characters, as most games I've played offer limited choises in that direction, especially NWN and BG series.

I didn't like the preview and not only because I have my doubts about the outcome of the game itself. If it comes out, as for the last 2 and more years it shows signs of being the Duke Nukem Forever of RPGs. Only thing interesting about the game is probably the character system (sounds good) and the other - but we'll have to wait and see if it is done right - the different beginnigs part. Finally, we'll see someone do in this direction. However, obviously, the plan to offer just 2 choises per rase (or something like that), which I find limiting. And hopefully it would not turn out to be just a longer tutorial into the game that may be intersting in the first play through the game, and to be more of a cumberstone in subsequent new games.

You believe anything these 1UP morons spew forth? They're the fucktards of gaming website; I actually rank them below gamespot and gamespy, two scourges of dumbass gaming journalism at best.

As far as dragonage is concerned, you will hear bioware's "exciting news" about how it will change as CONSOLE rpg gaming of the future very soon.

Superficially, huh?
You cannot roleplay with any CRPG yet written. When you play one, the computer presents you with pick lists of dialog options and responds with prewritten text. Certain in-game actions will trigger responses in the same way that dialog choices do, and sometimes the game gets clever with a faction system, where your actions will modify a variable which triggers some effect once it passes some threshhold, but the game's characters don't *know* your character. They're animatronic puppets on rails. If you play the same character every time you play a game, then yes, you miss out -- on the rest of the dialog and cutscenes. You don't miss out on the chance to develop an avatar with its own independent existence, because that chance never arises when you're not a lunatic.

According to your logic, anyone who enjoys watching a good movie or reading a good book (which would be most of us) is a lunatic, since those activities involve a suspension of disbelief. After all, what are books if not piles of letters printed one next to the other?

It must be quite something for you to be one of the few healthy people in an insane world. Maybe you are the second Messiah or something?

and by your example are we to conclude that movies and books are RPGs?

No, that would be the fallacy of affirming the consequent!!

Maybe I am! Or maybe you're just chaining together demented non sequiturs. People suspend disbelief when they read books, therefore everyone is insane, therefore I'm Jesus. Nice one, Aristotle. "Suspension of disbelief" just means the willingness to not question the plausibility of a fiction. The highest communion which most of us can achieve with a work of fiction is engrossment: forgetting about everything but the book for a spell. When you suspend disbelief, you don't actually think you're Bilbo or forget that elves don't really exist. Well, no. You might. For the rest of us, creating alternative personalities with lives of their own is an entirely different order of mental problem to losing yourself in a book and ignoring its little impossibilities.

Please do tell us more about the process of creating independent avatars, though. I picture you gradually enfolding the kernel of a character in fragments of your personality, much as an oyster creates a pearl. What does it feel like?