BioWare is looking to their past to craft Dragon Age's future.
Now that Star Wars: The Old Republic and Mass Effect 3 are out the door, it’s time for BioWare to start looking towards the future. That future doesn’t include last year’s Dragon Age II, however; BioWare recently announced that all work on Dragon Age II, including a rumored expansion, has been halted.
Just when you thought awards season was over...
Last month we announced our Game of the Year award winners by genre, platform and overall game of the year, but we weren’t through showcasing the best that 2011 had to offer. With so many games deserving of the moniker Game of the Year we have decided to expand our awards ceremony into 2012 with the 2011 Supplemental Awards. These awards seek to recognize games that excelled in a specific area whether it be through technical achievement, sheer enjoyability or utter disappointment.
Proof positive that you need longer than 18 months to make a follow up to a great RPG.
Fabled RPG developer BioWare has seen great success with their two original IPs during this console generation. These releases are on opposite ends of the spectrum: Mass Effect is a grand sci-fi space opera that melds role playing with action, while Dragon Age is an epic fantasy that feels more at home on the PC. This dichotomy was the most evident with 2010's release of Mass Effect 2, a game that many considered to be the best release of the year, and yet it did away with most of the role playing elements that put BioWare on the map. It was hard to tell where Dragon Age 2 would fall in the BioWare pantheon. Would it hold onto the deep RPG roots of Dragon Age: Origins, or would it be an action game with branching dialogue trees, like Mass Effect 2? The answer, as with most things, lies somewhere in the middle. But we'll come back to that in a moment.
