, the at best middling reaction to the chatter in Forspoken c♏ontributed to BioWare higher-ups initiating a top-down rewrite of The Veilguard's dialogue. Due to time constraints and other problems, this wound up exacerbating problems by creating tonal gaps between characters and plotlines.

Testers and devs on other internal teams apparently thought the quippy tone was overdone and annoying in an early build of the game. Anticipating this sentiment car💝rying onto the general public, change was considered necessary.

A real storm of terrible conditions ensued, Bloomberg adds, between mandated overtime, layoffs, an📖d the voice actor strike, which limited how much recording time BioWare had. The atmosphere sounds dour, contributing to what we ultimately ended up getting.

Forspoken did indeed take a hammering for its writing. The humor doesn't work, and although complex themes are presented, they're not explored with any real depthജ. It's a shame because, like with Dragon Age, there were characters ꦍwho showed potential.

As can be seen here, though, reacting when you're working on a distinctly different series with an established team under an iconic studio may just strain the whole process and fray ends. We can only imagine how The 🦄Veilguard could've turned out if things were different, but this feels like one situation where the problems were spread around rather than fixed.

Dragon Age legend says even if he didn't leave BioWare 9 years ago, he still would have dipped over EA's live service Dragon Age push: "What a devil's contract that would have been"

Gamble, who is currently directing 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mass Effect 5, seemingly likes the look of Owlcat Games' new sci-fi action RPG. Responding to the upcoming title's debut trail🥂er in an online post, the lead p෴raises the developers and what he's seen of the game so far: "Looking pretty awesome, Owlcat Games!"

It's a wholesome interaction between the Mass Effect director and the studio behind CRPG gems𝓰 liꦦke Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader.

The response from Gamble is especially refreshing to see, as Yuliya Chernenko, game design producer on The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, recently revealed in a that the Mass Effect series is indeed one of the major inspirations driving Owlcat Gaꦗmes' production of the new action RPG. "The original Mass Effect trilogy was absolutely an inspiration to the team," said the producer, going on to dub the games "iconic" in her statement.

"It was iconᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚic for the Xbox 360 generation of gamers," continued Chernenko. "Many of us first played it in our teenage years, and it left a lasting impression. We are building on that legacy and expanding what players anticipate from this experience. Our story is deeply rooted in hard science fiction – one of the core reasons The Expanse universe resonates so well with its fans. The combat reflects the standards of modern action gameplay."

Much like in Mass Effect, Chernenko also explained that The Expanse: Osiris Reborn's own narrative "emphasizes political tension and moral complexity." And yes, just as there was in BioWare's beloved series, "there's romance too."

Searching for more澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询: new games to wishlist? Here's a full rundown of the澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询: Summer Game Fest 2025 schedule to look back on for a better idea of what happened when.

The first Baldur's Gate came out in 1998 and was developed by BioWare, the studio behind legendary RPGs 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mass Effect and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dragon Age. At the time, it was belove﷽d by critics and sold extremely well.

The sequel, Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, c🎉ame out just under two years later, in 2000. Remember thꦐe days when we didn't have to wait over a decade for sequels? How I miss those times. Baldur's Gate 2 also sold and reviewed well.

Both games, like Baldur's Gate 3, are top-down isometric RPGs. The first was remastered in 2012 and the second in 2013. A lot of the original gameplay is the same, but quality of life features such as cross-play for the multiplayer have bee🐽n added.

The remasters both include more modern UIs, higher reꦇsolution graphics, and widescreen support, so you don't have to play in a square window. The first remaster also added classes, subraces, and class kits that were in the original Baldur's Gate 2.

All in all, these are a great way to play a more modern version of some absolute CRPG classics. Baldur's Gate 3 is never coming to Game Pass because "there's a fair price to be paid" for "a big game" like this, but at least you can try the original two for no extra cost, over a year since their arr♏ival on the subscription service appeared to leak for a second time.

You can find them on Game Pass, .

Or, you could check out our ranking of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RPGs of all time.

Last week, Twitter user Gray commented that "Mass Effect 5 better stick to tradition and have an excessive amount of lens flare." As any good sci-fi project with🌼 its roots in the 00s should, the original trilogy makes plenty of use of lens flaring - a visual effect that occurs when light is scattered by passing through a lens.

In filmmaking, lens flares were once avoided but became so popularized by directors🌜 such as Steven Spielberg and particularly J.J. A﷽brams that they eventually became ubiquitous in sci-fi. Clearly, the original Mass Effect trilogy didn't have an actual lens to aim that light through, but that didn't stop BioWare from creating them in its series.

And it sounds like that's not likely to change. Mass Effect 5 project director Mike Gamble - who served as a producer and project manager across Mass Effect 2, 3, and Andromeda - re🥀sponded to Gray's tweet with an affirmative 'ok' emoji. It's a minimal clue, but it's one of still relatively few that we'🙈ve got to go on when it comes to the next Mass Effect game. If nothing else, it's evidence that the sci-fi visual language that the Mass Effect team has spent nearly 20 years nailing down isn't going anywhere immediately.

We have learned snippets of information about Mass Effect 5 over the years; back in February, we found out that 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mass Effe🌳ct 5 is officially in ♑pre-production; back in October 2024, he confirmed that Ma🐟ss Effect 5 "is photorealistic" and will be staying that way for now, and hinted that 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:it will feature "multiple endings." The recent release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard likely means 💟that we're still a considerable distance from Mass Effect 5, but at least the details are star𓃲ting to come together.

While you wait, check out our list of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RPGs.

Speaking to GamesRadar+, BioWare veteran David Gaider explained that before he left BioWare, his tastes had become somewhat "old-fashioned" in EA's eyes. "I was very vocal on the Dra𝓀gon Age team," he says. "I was always trying to push it to our traditional mechanicsꦚ. And that wasn't very welcome in the EA sphere."

He says that EA considered those mechanics - the kind that shaped games like Dragon Age: Origins - to be "slow and cumbersome," rather than the "action-y and slick" presentation that the studio was being pushed toward. That meant that Gaider's views "we꧋re often not very welcome" despite his long tenure at the studio and work on many of its most famous RPGs.

That's partly because, he says, EA didn't think the traditional RPG audience was one that was worth focusing on. He claims that the overseers referred to those mechanics as being "'in the cave'". The cave, he explains, "was where nerds went. The nerds were in the cave. You made an RPG and the nerds in the cave would always show ♚up for an RPG, because it was an RPG."

That devotion to their ch🅠osen genre, in EA's eyes, meant that "you didn't have to worry" about the nerds. "You didn't have to try ꧃and appeal to them. You had to worry about the people who weren't in the cave, which was the audience we actually wanted, which was much larger."

Rea𒊎lly, Gaider clari🦩fies, that was the audience that EA wanted, and it basically got what it wanted. Unfortunately for the publisher, the endpoint of that philosophy was Anthem, a live-service effort that flopped entirely at launch and was entirely abandoned within two years.

The benefit of that was that BioWare was able to refocus somewhat around its single-player RPGs, with last year's 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dragon Age: The Veilguard and the eventual release of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mass Effect 5 - although with that game 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:still in pre-production as of this year, it might be some time before we get to see it.

Whether you belong to the cave or not, here are the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RPGs you can play.

Speaking with GamesRadar+, Gaider says that if he had stuck with Drag🐼on Age rather than moving over to the doomed Anthem, "I think I would have stayed at BioWare longer than I did."

Even if he'd stuck with the series - through Joplin and Morrison, the two canned Dragon Age projects that eventually made way for 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dragon Age: The Veilguard - he thinks that eventually✱, the departure of Mike Laidlaw, the director behind those canceled projects, would have marked the end of his time at the stu🐓dio.

"I would have had no influeꦰnce on that sequence of events," he says. "I would have been rolling with the punches just like everybody else. My read on what was going on internally was that the very same thing that led to Mike Laidlaw leaving would have led to me heading off at the same time. I really don't see a universe where Mike would have left the team, and I would have been like, 'Alright!'"

Gaider maintains that even if he'd been offered a senior management role on Dragon Age - something he thinks was unlikely given his relationship with EA 🅘and a desire to stand up for 'old-fashioned' mechanics - he would have made the jump.

That's mostly because of what happened after Dragon Age Joplin🌜 was canceled by EA. , he says "I would not have survived the end of Joplin, because the end of Joplin would have been 'now we're making this live service Dragon Age'. Me, Mr. Old-Fashioned RPG Mechanics, and them coming down and saying, 'we're ca꧑nning this whole narrative-focused Dragon Age thing, and we want you to make a live-service version?' I would have been like, see ya."

Gaider makes it clear that he would have been gone regardless, even if BioWare and EA had suddenly bestowed a creative director title on him after he was passed over for promotions for years. "Even if t♔here was a world where they would have asked me to be creative director after Mike on Live Service Dragon Age - what a devil's contract that would have been.♒"

In this universe, Gaider did depart BioWare in 2016. Somewhat bittersweetly, he got to see his opinions somewhat v🐻indicated, the failure of Anthem pushing BioWare towards Veilguard's more traditional RPG stylings. I suppose it's just a shame that the studioꦕ had to lose so much veteran talent to make that happen.

Not just an RPG expert, Gaider also has some thoughts about JPRGs - as blacked up by Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

"Part of the excuse for moving people off of Dragon Age was this pivot from a single-player game into a multiplayer live service," Darrah says in a video about how BioWare changed fundamentally in 2017. "I believe that a large part of that pivot was done entirely as rationalization – as a reason to make it make sense that we were taking everyone away from Dragon Age.🍸"

After all, Darrah notes, "there's no reason have all of these people on the project because they are going back to 𓄧thꦇe drawing board, because we are making a live service game now. So we can start over again."

Darrah's timeline matches up with wh💛at we know from an extensive report on Dragon Age 4's development from Jason Schreier at in 2019. According to that report, DA4 – then codenamed Joplin – was put on hold in late 2016 to help bring Mass Effect Andromeda over the finish line.

In 20⛦17, Joplin was effectively canceled in favor of the new, live-service-flavored Dragon Age 4, codenamed Morrison, with much of the DA team moving to help finish the troubled Anthem, just as it had with Andromeda the previous year.

"I wish that had never happened," Darrah says in his vidꦯeo. "I wish that pivot had never occurred. But that's what happened. EA said 'make this a live service.' We said 'we don't know how to do that. We should basically start the project over.' And thus Joplin became Morrison, and myself as well as other very senior members of the team moved onto Anthem."

Darrah's video paints an unflattering portrait of latter-day BioWare, and while he acknowledges there's a certain amount of personal grievance at play here, several BioWare have the video that it aligns with their experience🃏s with the studio at the time.

"I talked a fairly long time ago about how EA✃ buys studios and then consumes them," Darrah concludes, "and they start to lose their cultu🐲re into the overall EA culture. To me, it feels like 2017 is when EA finished digesting BioWare, which they had bought 9 years earlier in 2008."

That might not posit the most rosy idea about what we're going to get from 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mass Effect 5, butꦆ Darrah has a note of optimism in the vid❀eo's comments, saying that "BioWare and EA seem to be fully behind the next Mass Effect." Here's hoping that commitment remains for the long haul.

BioWare is responsible for many of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RPGs ever made.

In a new video, former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah explains how, in 2017, he witnessed a BioWare first: In the "final push" towards the release of Mass Effect: Andromeda, he led a "final team" that came on to help the series' black sheep get oꩵut the door. Unfortunately, it seems that wasn't a decision Darrah wa♔s particularly happy with.

"My feeling at th🌌e time," he explains, "was the Dragon Age team was feeling jerked around. We were feeling like we were gett🐼ing no support from BioWare or EA, which was basically true."

He maintains that moving senior leadership away from a project - in this case the game that would eventually become 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dragon Age: The Veilguard many years la𒅌ter - was an "incredibly dangerous" strategy that stemmed ▨from EA being "disinterested" in BioWare.

That disinterest didn't last too much longer, however. Darrah says that EA wasn't "particularly interested" in 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mass Effect: Andromeda, "because they had little to gain from the success of Andromeda and little to lose from its failure." In fact, the company "had a lot more incen🍷tive for BioWare to move onto the next thing that they could tie themselves to."

That "next thing" was Anthem. While theoretically that loot-shooting service game could have become a ꧟major BioWare cash-cow, it failed utterly, grinding to an abrupt halt barely a few weeks after launch.

BioWare initially discussed rebooting the game, but those plans were eventually abandoned in favor of a return to the single-player RPGs that made its name - last year's Veilguard and the upcoming 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mass Effect 5.

BioWare remains responsible for many of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RPG games out there.

Sharing his thoughts on the tu꧑rn-based banger, Gaider, who was the mastermind behind the Dragon Age setting himself, reveals how he feels about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 in a new on🌳line . "I've been playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and wow... so far, it's kind of to JRPGs what Baldur's Gate 3 was to CRPGs," he writes. "It's beautiful and polished and well-written, and the turn-based combat is so fun!"

Gaider concludes his praiseജ with a little joke, saying he "cannot believe I *just* discovered what you need Lumina points for" – a reference to abilities in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. In response to a fan's reply regarding the game's "amazing tonal range," he further commends Sandfall Interactive for its storytelling. "To me, that's the way to do it. In order for the lows to have meaning, you need the highs. Too much of either and 🐓it would become unbearable."

The former Dragon Age writer isn't alone in thinking so highly of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, either. It's proving to be quite the hit on platforms like Steam, overtaking the likes of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历🦋史查询:recent JRPG gems such as Metaphor: ReFantazio in player count, and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:selling over 500,000 copies in just one day. Other developers, including the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:🐻Baldur's Gate 3 publishing director and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Palworld's community manager, have also spoken about it.

Following the release of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:The El♑der Scrolls 4: 🦄Oblivion Remastered just last week, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Bethesda Game Studios cheered Sandfall Interactive on as well when fans worried the remake wouldﷺ drown out Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's own🔴 launch. "We can't wait to play," wrote Bethesda in a cele🤪bratory post to which Kepler Interactive responded with a plate of sweet rolls, so it's safe to say Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been on everyone's mind.

Hopping in to play the new RPG? Here are our best 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 tips to read before diving in.

Those velvety transatlantic tones are barely a sꦜhade away from voice actor Brandon Keener's past performances as Garrus Vakarian in Bioware's Mass Effect series, and to hear them all over again in a very different RPG makes Kai a welcome comfort. But as I delve deeper into Avowed, that connection feels more and more apt – and it's all down to the inner workings of the companion system.

Strength in numbers

It might sound odd to see flavors of a sci-fi RPG in a medieval high fantasy one. Sure, Avowed is most often compared to Bethesda darling Skyrim in terms of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:combat and exploration – especially given how the former facilitates the return of a 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:sneaky beloved archer playstyle. However, in my mind, the narrative-heavy implicatio♍ns of Avowed's recruitable NPCs heavily evokes Ma𒈔ss Effect.

Having finally broken through the game's surface at a humble 12 hours, Kai and Marius' friendly rivalry is in full swing. They're my only 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Avowed companions at this mid-stage, each offering something new to support my magical Env🦹oy on her quest across the Living Lands. I'm loving developer Obsidian's take on the party system itself, centered aro🌱und racking up companion points to be invested into one of four nascent skills per companion. Immediately, it has me thinking of Mass Effect.

Much like in Mass Effect, the Envoy can only bring two companions on a given outing – which is fine for me, since two is all I have so far. While I can't adjust Kai and Marius' weapons or armor loadout a-la Bioware, I get to decide which of their skills best complements my own build. Kai's spiffy gun-like blunderbuss (I will never not chortle at that name) is great for drawing enemy attention away from my glass cannon mage, while I delight in how Marius' thorny gasp ability pins foes to the spot so I can get some whippy wandwork in. Both companions are capable of executing their own attacks and specials autonomously, but much like in the later Mass Effect games, I'm able to command them to perform certain skills too. The pair's smarter AI means Kai and Marius are a lot better at not dying on me – especially given how partial to kamikaze Gᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚarrus and Wrex seemed to📖 be in Mass Effect 1.

Their dynamic duo status is another reason I can't stop comparing Avowed to Mass Effect. Kai and Marius have a slightly complex history, I'm aware, marked by equal parts respect and ball-busting. While exploring the Living Lands at my side, the two frequently share their thoughts and feelings on a given conversation, and it's not uncommon for them to be at odds with each other. It reminds me of how Commander Shepard's own crew aboard the Normandy never held back with their opinions of each other, good or bad. Both games feature a similar level of interactivity between not only active party members, but those they meet while exploring the open world. For example, Kai's numerous silver-tongued attempts at placating those he's crossed reminds me of Garrus' running commentary while exploring Turian bases in Mass Effect. It's the kind of responsive, character-specific emerging narrative magic that can elevate an RPG and turn its NPCs into fully fleshed-out people to interact with.

While I'm aware that romance is off the cards in Avowed, I still love how refined the companion system feels – mechanically, and as a storytelling tool. There's still loads I have yet to experience in the game, with my companion n🍌umbers still two shy of a full set, but Obsidian has already thoroughly impressed me with what I've seen so far. And look at that, 💎not a single Skyrim comparison in sight!

Check out our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Avowed review and see why we gave it a solid 4/5 stars

Now, BioWare has confirmed its focus is shifting to 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mass Effect 5, with shedding light on the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:studio's restructuring – which, reportedly, has sadly resulted in the layoffs of several veteran developers that made Dragon Age the beloved series it is. While I'm looking forward to a new game as a big ME fan, I can't shake the f🃏eeling that as Mass Effect begins something new, Rook🎀's adventure in turn marks the end of an era for Dragon Age.

The Maker

From the moment I first experienced Dragon Age: Origins, I was hooked. Swept up in the world, lore, and storytelling, Origins and the RPGs that followed shaped a 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:big chunk of my life. That's why, in spite of my increasing sense of excitement and anticipation about the release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard late last year, I was also trying to push down some trepidation. Sure, part of that was a fear that I might not like the new RPG – which was put to rest once I tucked into the adventure – but it was mostly down to the feeling that this would likely be the last time I would play a n🀅ew Dragon Age game for years. I felt like I was preparing myself not just for an ending to the story of The Veilguard, but an ending to the current series as we've known it.

I'm feeling this more keenly in light of the layoffs we've seen at BioWare this past week, not to mention in the last few years. There's been an unprecedented number of layoffs within the industry, and BioWare is no exception, with the loss of so many talented developers that made their mark on the series. Dragon Age wouldn't be Dragon Age without them. From the likes of Varric Tethras' writer 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mary Kirby who was laid off back in 2023, to developers who have ✨just recently been impacted by the studios restructuring – such as Solas' creator, , it feels like so few are left who did so much to make the series what it is. We owe it to these writers and talented individuals – many of whom are sadly no longer at the studio – for the characters, stories, and moments that have stayed with us for all these years.

It's hard to reconcile the loss of so much creative talent at BioWare with a bright future for the series, butꦕ that's not to say we won't ꦇever see Dragon Age return someday. If we do see Thedas make a comeback following Veilguard, though, it does feel like whatever comes next for Dragon Age will walk an entirely fresh path, and signal a new era for the series. In many ways, the ending of The Veilguard leaves the door wide open for just that.

With Solas' story concluded, The Veilguard ties up several threads that have been woven through the entire series, such as the nature of red lyrium, the Blight, and the fate of the Elven Gods, which paves the way for a lot of future possibilities and directions. In fact, creative director Jo༒hn Epler spoke with me last💖 year about this very idea. But, as of rigꦫht now, the future of Dragon Ag൩e is uncertain.

Looking ahead

It's an understatement to say that making games is hard, and the more I come to understand development and the many moving parts involved, the more I appreciate just how much of a miracle it is when a game is made. With The Veilguard going through a lengthy development cycle in the lead up to launch, and an ever mounting level of expectation surrounding the RPG, it was never going to please everyone. But I loved how it delved into the theme of regret, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查🐻询:how Varric's role was woven into the story, and how it continued to explore Solas – who's one of the most complex characters in the series. With meaningful features such as 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:the mirror that✅ helps us see ourselves reflected,💙 and inclusive character creator options, so much of its design is great to see in a modern RPG. And while The Veilguard broug🅰ht closure to some of the major storylines of the series, it also marked an end I'm still processing as a longtime fan.

I'm also a big fan of Mass Effect, and the prospect of a new instalment o🎀f course has me excited. I can only imagine the pressure to deliver when it comes to something like Mass Effect 5, so I'm more than happy to let the team cook, and I look forward to seeing what comes of it. But it's sad to see so much of the talent at BioWare get pushed out, and only time will tell what that will really mean for Dragon Age going forward.

As BioWare shifts focus, it'll likely be a long time before we hear about the future of Dragon Age. With so many of its creators now gone, it's hard not to wonder if it'll ever really be the same, but I can only hope we do see one of my favorite RPG series make a great comeback someday. The Dragon Age series will always be a part of me, and I can only thank the teams behind it for that. I take comfort in knowing that I can return to Thedas through books, comics, and the previous games at any time. Just as senior writer Sheryl Chee put it: "DA isn't dead because it's yours now♎".

"I don't know how you played Mass Effect 2, but I was always like, 'I will take my friends on every mission.' I'm not gonna choose the most eff🅰ective combat squad. I just like those guys," creator Gareth Damian Martin told GamesRadar+ hours before presenting an award at The Golden Joysticks 2024. "Or I might be like, 'Oh, it will be interesting to take this person to this place, because I think they'd have an interesting reaction.' And so trying to think about it like that."

Companions are key in so many of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RPGs, from 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Baldur's Gate 3 to the Mass Effect trilogy Martin referenced. But this change to the established formula of Citizen Sleeper is just one way that Martin aims to 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:hone in on the sequel's TTRPG roots, styling, and ethos. "It gives the player a really interesting expressive space to be able to be like, 'well, I like this person and this person, I'm going to take them on contracts with me,' and that means ꦛI can then surface scenes with those characters in those moments that try to reward the player for making those choices."

We've known for some time that Citizen Sleeper 2 will be implementing a party-based 🌱squad recruitment s♑ystem, but that these moments feed into emergent storytelling in the vein of a Bioware game is a huge draw for Martin – and also, most likel📖y, for players.

"In Citizen Sleeper 1, it's like all the characters you meet, they're part of a story, and that kind of means that I want you to keep going with that story," they explained. "But because each crew member in Citizen Sleeper [2] does have their own story, you can also not like them, and yo🤡u can say, like, 'No, I don't want you on my crew.' Quite a fe꧋w of them also have complications," Martin hints, and players have the option to outright reject and remove crewmates if they cross a boundary. "I think that's a really fun space to be able to open up, because it allows for actually more expression of the player character," they finish up.

It sounds like Martin is doubling down on the player choice elements, and I'm re🐼ady to find my new space sweetheart – aka Garrus 2.0 – in Citizen Sleeper 2 when the RPG launches o꧃n January 31, 2025.

Check out all the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming PC games to look forward to, from Avowed to Assassin's Creed Shadows

As the months went on, surprise updates to older releases and new game launches alike had one big thing in common: each and every one took me back to 2015. Through some weird c𒁃oincidental magic, 2024 saw the return of characters and series that defined a rather strange, unsettled time in my life. But it's also a year that I look back on fondly because of what I played.

Turning back the clock

Following my foray into Fallout, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dragon Age: The Veilguard was front and center in my mind a few months later thanks to Summer Game Fest. At last showing off gameplay, it was really sinking in that BioWare's beloved series was returning this year. I'd been waiting since I rolled the credits on Dragon Age: Inquisition's Trespasser DLC in 2015 (there's that year again) for it to make a comeback, and it felt surreal to see it in action. The Veilguard's arrival in October signalled the end of a decade-long wait, and when I finally started playing it, I couldn't help but feel a similar ✃kind of 2015-fueled nostalgia.

I can vividly remember how excited I was for Trespasser, and how the ending left me wondering what would come next. I still think about how the me of back then would have taken the news that she'd have to wait for almost 10 years to find that out, but playing Veilguard also got me reflecting back on that period time just as Fallout 4 did. In 2015, I'd spent a year following universཧity applying for jobs and unsuccessfullyꦚ landing any of them. Wholly reliant on my family, I ended up working temp and retail jobs, and feared my dreams of becoming a writer would never happen. Games like Dragon Age: Inquisition and Fallout 4 became not only a comfort, but a big source of inspiration – with their storytelling and world building serving as a reminder of why I wanted to write and be involved in the world of video games in some way.

But when I think of 2015, I think of Max Caulfield and Chloe Price first and foremost. I played each Life is Strange episode as it came out back then, and the soundtrack became the permanent playlist of that year. Much like the aforementioned RPGs, Don't Nod's narrative adventure and its characters helped inspire me to keep writing in my spare time, even when it felt like it was leading me nowhere. So naturally when Max made a surprise comeback in 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Life is Strange: Double Exposure, that familiar nostalgia came back once again.

As if I needed any more reminders of that year or period in my life, the latest time machine came in the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:shape of a next-gen update for Assassin's Creed Syndicate. With a lifelong love for history, I've always been fascinated by the Victorian era, and I can still remember how excited I was at the prospect of venturing into Syndicate's Victorian England setting. That, coupled with the fact that it featured dual protagonists - including a playable leading lady - me🧜ant that it really spoke to me, and Syndicate soon became one of my favorite Assassin's Creed games of all-time. The update gave me the perfect excuse to reunite with the Frye twins, and when I did, that same 2015 nostalgia washed over me.

It's funny how things line up sometimes. Whether you want to call it coincidence or some weird workings of fate, I can't recall another year where its releases rewound the clock in such a personal way. I certainly didn't have "2024 will be filled with 2015 nostalg🥂ia" on my bingo card, but you never can predict how things will turn out.

The cinematic and survival horror games of 2024 prove that taking risks is keeping the genre alive.

As it turns out, The Veilguard did partly draw inspiration from the Mass Effect series. Speaking on the comparisons, creative director Johnღ Epler tells me the team looked at BioWare's past successes – including Mass Effect 2 – when it came to The Veilguard's approach to storytelling, as well as choice and consequence.

"I've been at Bioware for 17 years, so I worked on Mass Effect 2. Trick Weekes [Veilguard lead writer and narrative designer] worked on Mass Effect 2, there's a bunch of people who've been on a bunch of different games at Bioware" says Epler, who points to that tenure including Mass Effect 2's ending. "One of the things that we really wanted to make sure was that there was a sen🍨se of consequence [in The Veilguard] - not just to the choice you make, but to the content you engage with, the content you don't engage with."

Warning: some story spoilers ahead.

Past and present

Another struggle was making sure the actions you can take and the companion quests succeed at feeling meaningful, without your decisions "arbitrarily gating you off". As an example, Epler says that some origi𝄹nal parameters started to "feel really artificial" – like completing three follower missions before something would unlock. The solution – having all of your choices wrapped up in tꦇhe final questline, and making sure they all mattered in the end game – was an approach the team decided on to "give that balance of player choice". As a result, whether or not you chose to do something with your companions, there are still consequences to those actions.

Not unlike the way you complete loyalty missions in Mass Effect 2 as Shepard, inves🅠ting time and effort to help and get to know your companions as Rook will help them become a Hero of the Veilguard. Additionally, a major choice at the close of each personal questline influences a character's outlook and legendary armor set. This in turn feeds into the final quest of the game, with heroes having a higher chance at surviving as you face an ancient elven god.

Speaking on BioWare'꧙s previous two releasesไ, Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem, Epler says the team wanted to ensure The Veilguard "landed in a way that was satisfying and told a good cohesive꧒ story". To do that, the team wanted to play to the studios strengths 🎃by looking at what worked in past BioWare RPGs.

"Set piece moments"

Epler - who says he's a "firm believer in 'don't reinvent the wheel if you don't have to' - ꦆpoints to the Yakuza series as an example of a set of games that have found critical acclaim and success through this philosophy by taking place in a lot of the same places with different characters.

"Obviously, that's not what we do," Epler continues. "But a lot of the things that we pulled into The Veilguard, like the ending, the general structure, and also – honestly, I think something that I really wanted to do for this one, that Mass Effect has always done so well – is I love big set piece moments in the story."

Dragon Age: The Veilguard certainly puts on a show, with some very memorable "set piece moments" during main story quests. Each one really brings to life the impossible task you've undertaken in fighting Elgar'non and Ghilaꦬn'nain, powerful ancient elven gods and storied figures embedded in Dragon Age lore. From Ghilan'nain's presence looming above in the clouds during the attack on Weisshaupt, to Elgar'nan using his powers to cause a literal eclipse, Epler highlights Veilgaurd's sense of spectacle and how it was greatly influenced by Dragon Age's rich lore.

"I love getting [in] the Siege of Weisshaupt, having the face in the clouds. Elgar'nan bringing the moon and sun into an eclipse is still probably my favorite scene in the game," Epler says. "And a lot of that came down to us asking the [same] question each time: 'what is the coolest thing that we can do here, and does it make sense in the lore?' One of the stories of Elgar'non you hear in previous games is Elgar'non controls the sun and the moon. And it's like, 'oh, that's just a story' – actually, it's not. Elgar'non can actually do that. It's finding that reverence 𒐪for lore that I think has always been core to Dragon Age, but also bringing thꦉat sense of spectacle and excitement."

As a longtime BioWare fan, I can see how those big sequences that capture that sense of "spectacle and excitement" in Veilguard's questlines also drew inspiration from Mass Effect. For me, they immediately bring to mind the suicide mission in Mass Effect 2 through the Omega Relay, or th෴e opening moments of Mass Effect 3. But as Epler recalls, there was one particular scene in the first Mass Effect that's always stayed on with him.

"Part of the Mass Effect series' success in storytelling is they're not afraid to have those big set piece moments," E♏pler says. "And I mean, the Citadel walk in Mass Effect 1 is still, in my mind, one of the best final sequences in a game I've ever played."

As Dragon Age: The Veilguard resolves major story arcs and mysteries, the RPG's creative director says that means Dragon Age 5 is a "possibility" for BioWare to "tell any story we want".

Earlier this week went nuts and reduced the price of Dragon Age: The Veilguard to AU$75, an offer they're maintaining until෴ November 20. So if you have a Target nearby, you could go and grab it today.

Inevitably, Amazon caught wind of this discount and has price matched, offering Dragon Age: The Veilguard for both and for the same AU$75. Both offer꧒ free delivery, so it really just depends which you prefer.

Those retailers are quite emphatically the best when it comes to price at the moment. Unfortunately, if you're a PC gamer you🤪're a bit out of luck: Dragon ꧂Age: The Veilguard hasn't been released physically in Australia, and Steam isn't offering any discounts (still, its price is better than the RRP on consoles, at). Third-party key sellers like Fanatical and Green Man Gaming often offer a small discount at launch, but they're not stocking this one.

If you're after the Deluxe Edition, whic💯h includes a bunch of cosmetics for the playable character Rook, their companion, and their weapons, that's currently enjoying a 10% discount, bringing it down to AU$125.95 on both and . I personally doubt it's worth it, but maybe you love this stuff!

Black Friday 2024 is fast approaching. We're collecting the best early deals on our guide to the best Black Friday 2024 gaming deals in Australia.

I may not be the same person I was back then, but one thing remains the same: Dragon Age means as much now as it did then. For me, there's no other series quite like it. Since the day I first stepped into Thedas on my Xbox 360 in early 2010, it's been a constant presence in my life. It not only opened me up to the world of RPGs, it also helped me get through some of the toughest times, allowed me to better understand myself on a deeply personal level, and even partially inspired the direction of my career. It might sound dramatic to say it's shaped who I am, but there's a lot o♕f truth to that.

It's been a long time coming, but The Veilguard is at last here, bringing with it a decade of emotion to the forefront. It's at last taking me back to a world that's never been far from my mind💎, and continues♏ to capture my imagination and heal my heart.

Thank the Maker  

I grew up playing games from an early age, but nothing has had quite as much of an impact on me as Dragon Age. The series dr🉐ew me into engrossing storylines🎃, introduced me to characters I fell head over heels for, and opened me up to the wonders of the RPG genre. With rich lore, incredibly detailed worldbuilding, and memorable romances, each entry set in Thedas has consumed me like nothing else; there are corners of my brain and heart reserved for the series since Origins. While all of these ingredients work together to create unforgettable adventures, my love for the series also comes from a much deeper and more personal place.

Each game has gotten me through some of the most difficult times in my life, and it continues to help me in smaller ways. Dragon Age 2, for example, came during a period of huge change. Having just started university when the Mark of the Assassins DLC released, I﷽ returned to the second entry constantly. Feeling lost away from home, I was still also grappling with my sexuality back then, and it was the first game that really allowed me to understand my own feelings as a bisexual woman through characters like Isabela. A line Anders says when he speaks about his relationship with a male mage was one that I also n𝓰eeded so much to hear at that point: "Why would you shy away from loving someone just because they're like you?".

From helping me navigate 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:the unexpected death of my uncle in 2021, to being there when I felt the most alone and isolated I've ever felt, there are so many examples I could give from the last 14 years. There are also so many ways I've seen how the series and its characters have helped other fans, too. It speaks not only to the series' ability to immerse you in its world, but also to the strength of BioWare's writing; the studio brought to life so many meaningful stories and characters that helped so many feel seen.

Lost Elf  

Though there's been a decade-long interim between games, repeated playthroughs of the trilogy - as well as comics, books, and the Netflix animated show, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dragon Age: Absolution𒁏 - means the series has remained a constant companion to me through those years. In many ways, it feels almost surreal that Dragon Age The Veilguard is really here. Ever since I saw the credits roll on Dragon Age: Inquisition's stellar Trespasser DLC back 🐎in 2015, I've been waiting to return to Thedas and get some long-awaited answers to the questions it left us with.

But I've also been thinking about a new Dragon Age game and what direction it might take for a very long time. I've followed its development since the very first official announcement , back when it was only known as Dragon Age 4. Eventually, it would 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:become Dragon Age: Dread Wolf before its 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:renaming to The Veilguard, and ever since I started here at GamesRadar+, I've been dissecting updates, following every nugget of news, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:throwing out theories, and ruminating on 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:the future of the RPG. There have been many highs and lows along the way, from 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:heartbreaking layoffs to at long last seeing first scenes of the game in action. In ma🍌ny respects, I've already been on such a long journey with The Veilguard, which is why its arrival feels so significant – both in terms of its long development and from my own personal perspective.

As we inched closer to release this year, I saw the community come alive again, brought together by a shared passion for the series. From theorizing over every small detail in updates, trailers, concept ꧟art, and screenshots, to cheering on newcomers who were experiencing the previous games for the first time to prepare for Veilguard, the new Dragon Age adventure served to remind me why I love and care about games. They have the power to move your heart and bring people together, and for all the hardships this industry is going through right now, it can be all too easy to forget that. It's what Dragon Age has always done for me over the years, and it's continuing to do so now as we step back into Thedas.

That 2016 recording talking🌳 about my love for all things Dragon Age has only made the release day for Dragon Age: The Veilguard more poignant. Its arrival marks the return of a series that feels like it never really left me and helped shape me through the years. I hope it can do the same for a new generation discovering Thedas. Who knows, maybe one day I'll even make Hanging out in The Hanged Man a reality. But for now, I'll be enjoying✨ a long overdue trip home to a world I love as I spend more time with The Veilguard.

See our breakdown of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dragon Age timeline, story, and lore.

"Fallout Day is coming on October 23,where we will be hosti🐎ng our first ever #FalloutDay Broadcast," the developer shared on its page. "Join Jon Rush and Bill LaCoste as they give you a glimpse at what we've been working on in Fallout 76." The Tweet goes on to link out to , a charity initiative championing a Community Parade as part of this year's Fall♛out Day, while a promotional Tweet from the offical Fallout account promises "developer interviews" and more.

For those not yet in the know, Fallout Day is an annual "holiday" commemorating the start of the Great War in Bethesda's Fallout universe. Not dissimilꦏar to BioWare's N7 Day for Mass Effect fans, or The Last of Us' Outbreak Day, Fallout Day gives franchise superfans space to talk about their favorite game with fellow die-hards – only now, it seems we'll be getting brand new information on 🍸the future of Fallout 76 as Bethesda steps up to take part for the first time, too.

Sadly, there seems to be no mention of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Fallout 5 news planned for the broadcast event, nor indeed any word of Amazon Prime's 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Fallout season two. That doesn't mean we can't hold out just a tiny bit of hope🎐 when we join the , currently scheduled for 3pm EST / 8pm BST on October 23, 2024.

You'll be able to play as a ghoul in Fallout 76 early next year and channel your inner Walton Goggins from the Fallout TV show.

With the current trends leaning toward remake upon remake of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best survival horror games of yore, though, it's a relief that Creative Assembly is doing something different. Instead of rebuilding the 2014 original, fans are to be treated to a full-blown Alien: Isolation sequel – and hot on the heels of this summer's box office hit 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Alien: Romulus, the announcement couldn't have been timed better. There's not much else to go on just yet, but the raucously positive response from the horror community indicates♉ to me that the genre might not be as stuck in the past as I'd feared. 

Ellen Ripley's believe it or not

You and I might consider Alien: Isolation to be a legendary survival horror game, but it didn't start off that way. That's because while critical reception seemed strong enough, with GamesRadar+ giving it a solid score in our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Alien: Isolation review, it seemed a vast majority of mainstream gamers just weren't hungering for horror the way they are now. Let's Play content on YouTube allowed many to experience the terror without having to take part themselves, and what's more, it was the year of Far Cry 4, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and Dark Souls 2 to name a handful of 2014's superstars. With no shortage of ♉games on the table for players to devour, Alien: Isolation would slink into the shadows, finding success in a passionate niche of the community instead of the bottom line.

Today, the landscape looks a little different. True, horror is still not the biggest genre in the industry, but its fans have grown louder as the community swells with each passing year. One large, Tyrant-shaped reason for the sudden increased appetite? You can thank the litany of remakes over the past five years. Leon and Claire returned to our screens in Capcom's 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Resident Evil 2 Remake in 2019, and suddenly, it seemed that atmospheric, nostalgic, run-and-gun horror games were cool again. You only need to look at 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Silent Hill 2's immense critical and public success this month, despite years of wariness from its dedicated fanbase, or Motive's thrilling 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dead Space remake back in early 2023, to see the trend for yourself. The 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:horror remake renaissance has been upon us for years now. T🌌hat much is clearer than the sta🧸rry skies above Raccoon City.

But Creative Assembly isn't following that herd in particular. Rather, it's doing an 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Alan Wake 2 and promising to deliver a brandﷺ new terrifying adventure, building on its legacy rather than reconstructing it piece by piece. In a world where new horror IPs are hard to come by in the world of video games, I'll take it. 

There's something special about a long overdue sequel that broadens appeal tenfold. Drawing in fans of the original is one way, sure, but more importantly, these sequels offer an entry point for new players to get on board too. With enough time having passed since the previous game, there's enough room for developers to rehash, revise, or reinvent a series in a sequel to ensure the new entry feels relevant to modern audiences. I might be alluding to Alan Wake 2 here – specifically, its 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:musical means of recapping events for new players and those with fuzzy memories alike – but this isn't something we only see in horror. Take 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dragon Age: The Veilguard, for example, and how Bioware's confirmation that 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:only a few player choiꦑces wi𒁏ll be carried across from Inquisition effectively positions the game as a great place to start for newbies. If Alien: Isolation 2 plays its cards just right, o🔜pening up the field to temper the familiar with the novel, it could end up being a horror game for the many instead of the few.

That said, working with a blockbuster Hollywood IP like Alien indicates a level of assumed knowledge on the pla♐yer's part. Having even a basic grasp of the context, lore, and events of theജ Alien movies might be helpful, but it shouldn't be a barrier. The inclusivity of the horror community has always been its biggest strength, and when the time comes that we learn more about Alien: Isolation 2, I'm hoping to see more of that welcoming spirit as we take on the xenomorphs again – or perhaps something else? – more than a decade later.

There are plenty of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming horror games to jot down as well as Alien: Isolation 2, from Directive 8020 to 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dying Light: The Beast.

That's why GamesRadar+ was so curious to finally get the chance to sit down with Dragon Age: The Veilguard. We've played seven hours of the new BioWare RPG, spoken with the studio&apo🔥s;s creative leads about its ambitions in the genre, and worked to better understand the surprising ways that Dragon Age is transformed for the modern era. Whether you've been following the series from its origins or are only now taking your first steps into the world of Th🤡edas, we're pretty certain that this is one game you won't want to miss. 

Keep reading on to discover our Big Preview of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, your guide into one of the most anticipated 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new games of 2024.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard hands-on impressions

Dragon Age: The Veilguard interview

Dragon Age's darkspawn in-detail

New Dragon Age: The Veilguard gameplay

Five of the coolest details in Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Will there be a Dragon Age Legendary Edition?

The Dragon Age story so far

Our pick of the best BioWare games

Everything else you need to know

But no title has gotten me quite as excited as Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Ever since the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:announcement of the new name for what was previously called Dragon Age Dreadwol꧟f, I've only grown to appreciate the change and what it means for the next entry more and more. Not only does it signal that our return to Thedas is going all in on what makes me love BioWare RPGs the most, but it also keeps making me think about our r꧅ole as Rook and who we will become. 

"Who will you be?" 

When the reveal of the official name Dragon Age Dreadwolf came back in 2022, it cemented Solas' return and put his past actions front and center. It was an undoubtedly tantalizing move, given that it suggested the divisive elf would be the central antagonist. In fact, in the original blog post, BioWare even teased that "using Solas's namesake no doubt suggests a spectrum of endless possibilities on where things may go". At that point, we really didn't know anything about Dragon Age 4, or where it would go, but the title had me thinking all about the weight a name can carry, particularly one you🔯've made for yourself on account of🌞 what you've done. 

As Solas says in the Trespasser DLC, he was Solas first, and the Fen'harel name came later, which he took as a "badge of pride". It came to mean different things to different people, with the elf adding that it "inspired hope in his friends, and fear in his enemies". In our role as the Warden, Hawke, or the Inquisitor in previous Dragon Age games, our name could also evoke a similar feeling depending on how we decided to shape our character. While I finally have a better idea of our role to come as Rook, it begs the question: who will we become as we try to save Thedas with The Veilguard? Will we inspire fear or hope? And just howꦰ will the RPG let us decide that through our choices? Even with the shift in name away from Dreadwolf to Veilguard, those questions are no less pertinent. 

The Veilguard in isolation is pretty stimulating, given what Solas is trying to do and what it implies we'll be doing. In a bid to restore the elves to their former glo♕ry, Solas seeks to tear do🎀wn the Veil he himself put up to stop the Evanuris - powerful mages who called themselves gods. As Rook, we'll be setting out to "face powerful Elven gods and stop the destruction they're unleashing on the world", with "guard" suggesting we'll act as protectors of the Veil. 

I've already seen a lot of discussion among the Dragon Age community about whether or not guarding the Veil is actually the best course of action. What if we want to help restore what was lost? Even if it does threaten to destroy Thedas as we know it, what would the world be like if spirits roamed the lands once more and magic was b🎃ack in full power? Could we actually choose not to guard it, and what would that mean? 

Recently, creative director John Epler said there will be no canon for Veilguard's st𝓡ate of the world and story, meaning that it's sort of up to you🍸 to decide. Epler also teases that there are "some interesting" paths we can take, mentioning his own preference of the "ꦰchaotic and strange paths through the game"... which does make me wonder what choices we might face as The Veilguard and what we can do actually when it comes to the Veil. 

The company you keep

How we'll guard the veil, and whether we can work with or against Solas remains to be seen, but w❀e crucially won't be doing it alone, which gets to the root of what makes The Veilguard as a title so appealing. As BioWare detailed in a blog 𓃲post, the companions are at the root of the decision to change up the title: "the Dreadwolf still has an important part in this tale, but you and your companions  - not your enemies - are the heart of this new experience." The Veilguard is meant to reflect how important they are to the overall journey you'll go on with them, as well as how much of an impact you'll have on one another, which really speaks to me. 

I've always been drawn to RPGs with companions, which is why I fell in love with Dragon Age and Mass Effect so deeply. BioWare has 𝐆always e⛦xcelled at making you care about its cast of characters in both series. All of the party members you encounter feel like fleshed out individuals with their own distinct backgrounds, personalities, and motivations, and getting to know them and fight alongside them is a constant highlight aboard the Normandy and across Thedas. 

It's hard not to get excited about the fact that BioWare is putting greater emphasis on companions through the title. As game director Corinne Busche explained in an interview with , Dragon Age: The Veilguard is home to "the most fully realized companions we've ever cra💧fted", with their own complexities and complicated problems, so it makes sense that they should be spotlighted and be the driving force behind the decision to change the name of the next entry. 

Interestingly, Busche also says that "in many ways, the companions are so fleshed out that it feels as though I'm going on a journey with them" as opposed to them going on a journey with you. "I'm exploring how they think and feel; I'm helping them through their prob෴lems. We're working through unique character arcs". Nothing could possibly sell me more. Ultimately, Dragon Age: The Veilguard as a title speaks to the fact that BioWare is dialing into one of its greatest strengths: its c🅺ompanions. And I'm so very here for it. 

After replaying Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: The Veilguard's "mission-based" direction is all the more exciting.

When I checked out BioWare's upcoming adventure last month with creative director John Epler, I got the impression that it'll featureꦕ the best character creator from the developer so far. Plus, with seven companions and the very exciting introduction of different factions - which will give Rook a background and special dialog options, not unlike the Warden in Dragon Age: Origins - I just had to start thinking about how I'm going to approach my return to Thedas ahead of time. After all, there's a lot to consider. Who will I romance? What race and class will 🍨I be? Wh🌳at faction will I choose? 

My excitement surroundin꧑g the upcomin𝓡g entry in the RPG series has recently gotten me returning to the world of Dragon Age comics and books, and one in particular is proving to be a great source of inspiration for my future Rook: Dragon Age Tevinter Nights.

The Antivan Crow  

Dragon Age Tevinter Nights is a compilation of stories by the BioWare team that tell original tales set across various parts of Thedas. Last year, when I was ruminating on who we might be in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, I turned to Tevinter Nights to throw out some theories, and I wasn't entirely off base - especially when it came to the idea that we might see factions come into play. But little did I know that my source was also holding the name of a future companion in another short story in the book. In truth, it had completely slipped my mind until I saw fans in the Dragon A💞ge community talking about it, and I couldn't open up Tevinter Nights fast enough to refresh my memory. 

"The man who's taken the contract is no ordinary Crow", t♏hese are the words of Felicia Erimond in the "The Wigmaker Job" by Courtney Woods. Felicia is a member of the Tevinter cult known as the Venatori, and she's also the sister of Livius Erimond, the mage who manipulates the Wardens in Dragon Age Inquisition. But the focus of the story is on the Crow assassin she speaks of, "Lucanis Dellamorte", aka the "Mage Killer", who is one of the seven companions 🎶who'll join us on our journey. Not only does it paint an insightful picture of the kind of corruption Tevinter is home to, but it also gives you little snippets of Lucanis' past, establishes his skills as an Antivian Crow, and shows how he operates with stealthy finesse. 

What I love above all, though, are the moments we see Lucanis genuinely affected by what he ౠsees, with slaves being horribly mistreated by his quarry, Ambrose. He also helps to free the slaves, showing compassion even while he has a job to finish. Now, I'm the kind of person who adores romances in games, and whenever I come to an RPG that includes it, I﷽ usually always end up eventually experiencing every romance route with every character in multiple runs. I suspect this will absolutely be the case when it comes to The Veilguard, but this story has really sold me on the idea of making a character that could lead to some interesting interactions with Lucanis. 

Rook 

In Dragon Age Inquisition, for example, there's some angst if you romance Cullen as a mage given his history, and you get some special dialogue if you choose the templar specialization as a warrior when in a relationship with Dorian. I hope The Veilguard's romances also acknowledge Rook's faction or class in some way to add the sense of role-play, and bring added weight to the choices you've made when it comes to character creation. So if I were༒ to, say, choose to be a rogue Antivian Crow too, that would surely lead to some interesting conversations with Lucanis. Sharing common ground is a surefire way to connect, right? 

But after re-reading the Wigmaker's Job, I'm actually toying with the idea of playing as a mage in the Shadow Dragon faction. Lucanis' skills have been honed in such a way that he's acutely aware of when💖 magic is nearby, or the veil is thin, and with the moniker "the mage killer", I'm so curious to see what avenues my being a mage may open up in conversation with him. He's also clearly seen the corruption of Tevinter up close, and as a member of the resistance against that said corruption, I'm likewise hoping he could respect a Shadow Dragon, or at least their opposition of slavery. Even if it doesn't end up being the Rook I initially play to begin with, the story is absolutely going to shape one of my runs in BioWare's RPG. 

The factions offer so many interesting directions, and it could be fun to gear a Rook to a specific companion to add some extra tension or conflict there. But there's also the context of The Veilguard and the history it promises to explore further that makes the idea of playing as an elf so tantalizing. After all of the revelations the Trespasser DLC left us with about the ancient elves and Solas, and the fact that the elves across Thedas starting leaving their posts under mysterious circumstances, it's haꦫrd not to think about the role-playing possibilities of being an elf. 

With so many potential options to play around with, this is why I try to plan ahead. As much as I can talk myself into an idea, though, you never know what direction you'll be pulled in, or which companion may end up winning your heart. But I'm incredibly excited to meet Lucanis, especially given the last few lines of the story. A magister says he's a Crow with a heart because he freed the slaves, which she perceives as a flaw that can be exploited. Of course, I don't see this as a flaw, at all. And I can't wait to get to know this Crow with a heart better. Whatever direction I end up going in, I'm looking forward to discovering how The Veilguard and its ✱companions respond to the choic🦋es I make when it comes to the creation of my Rook. 

I can't stop thinking about Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the history of blood magic, and the way BioWare's RPG series handles morality.

The brainchild of Parisian studio Spiders, 2020's Greedfall arrived seemingly out of nowhere. An intriguing blend of fantastical beasts, malevolent magic, and uncomfortably authentic 18th century colonialism – and yet against all odds, the gritty RPG was a sleeper hit. Shipping an imp♍ressive 2 million copies, Greedfall’s unique blen🔯d of action RPG and gritty questing struck a rare chord, offering a welcome throwback to the PC games of yesteryear. If this is the first that you’re hearing of Greedfall, fear not; Greedfall 2 is a great place to start. 

Character building

More prequel than sequel, Greedfall 2's prolog takes place three🌸 years prior to the events of the original, and despite missing the first game in a pandemic-filled haze, I still feel right at home in Teer Fradee. As I roam the tropical fantasy locale with my suitably derpy character-creator-conceived warrior – a time honoured RPG tradition – I quickly became entangled in Greedfall's Bio🙈Ware-esque web of dialog choices, beckoning quest givers, and strategic, party-led combat. 

Where the original casts players as an invading noble dispatched to the newly-colonized Teer Fradeen, Greedfall 2 flips the script, placing you into the leather-bound shoes of a native struggling with how best to🐬 respond to the onslaught of rapidly arriving foreigners. Should the clans befriend their strange new arrivals and learn from their tech? Or should they be feared?

"It is fantasy, but really it's based on history," explains a smiling Jehanne Rousseau, co-founder and CEO of Spiders and lead writer for Greedfall. "Greedfall is 💫more George RR Ma♛rtin than Tolkien, a story about political schemes and murders rather than elves and dwarves. There are no knights or noble archetypes here – it's a world that's more dirty than heroic."

Rousseau sports a grin that rarely fades throughout our chat, and given the journey she's been on, it's not hard to see why🌳. Cutting her teeth as an artist on '90s Gameboy tie ins, Rousseau has shipped everything from Inspector Gadget tie-ins on Gameboy Colour to Splinter Cell on the ill-fated Ngage. Yet despite working as both an artist and a producer over the years, Rousseau's true calling was always writing.  Filling her downtime scribbling campaigns as a D&D and Cthulhu games master, she'd pen scenario after scenario for her friends. Now, 25 years later, a world that Rousseau dreamed up has become beloved by millions.

"I remember the day of Greedfall's release," Rousseau reflects. "I was terrified. Literally ꦑterrified. I took the day off and I told the team, "I don't want to hear anything about what is in the press, [or] from socials, I just don't want to hear anything!" A deeply personal project, Rousseau couldn’t bear the idea of Greedall failing. Luckily, she didn’t have to. "Then finally, our musician Olivier called me and said, 'you can come out of hiding - it's okay. Everything is going ▨fine!'"

Fight or flight

Part Ava🌊tar, part Assassin’s Creed 3, even in its pre Early Access state, Greedfall 2 is a world that feels wonderfully lived in, a tale that's steeped in the kind of texture and nuance that can only come from a creator that lives and🐻 breathes their fiction. "It's really exciting to go back to a world and do a sequel for the first time," Rousseau beams. "I've got hundreds of notes that I took while designing the first game, of all these other countries, of what different people were up to – many things that were never seen in the first game. And now, finally I can show you!"

Made by a team of less than 100 people, Greedfall 2 is th𓆏e kind of AA project that feels refreshing in an industry that can feel creatively risk-averse at times. Still, if you're a fan of the original Greedfall, there's likely one major change you'll be wary of: the new combat. While its predecessor saw you take on man and beast in real-time battles, its sequel instead opts for a 'real time and pause' combat system; one that, if YouTube comments are anything to go by, has divided fans.

"It's true that it's a huge change," Rousseau agrees on the shift in combat styles. "But I think that ℱsubconsci𒆙ously players were asking for these types of controls. It's now more consistent as a [party-based] team game – you've got your team of characters that will evolve together, some will die, some will leave, but it's still a team."

For Rousseau, it was clear that the combat in the original was the weakest link. "We were happy with the first game, but the combat was the thing that [players] were more critical about. People were saying we've got these companions, and they're just messing around. You're doing your own fight, and [your party is] always in the middle of what you're trying to do." That, to Rousseau, was disheartening. "The companions are really important in the experience of Greedfall – people liked to have them around, to share stories with them, to romance them and to use their skills and talents during dialog options, but there was this strange feeling that we are doing everything with them except fighting."

Go forth

Even in this slightly shaky pre-release state, I have fun with the 'real time and pause' approach to battꦏles, happily switching between characters mid-skirmish in order to save a party member from certain death. It's fiddly and 🌟a bit hectic, but with the right amount of spit and polish, it's an approach to combat that could lend itself well to the party-first story that Greedfall 2 is aiming to tell.

While I embark on a variety of quests, I soon find myself relying on the dice roll-esque quality of my chosen character stats in order to see me through. Venturing through the mountains, I discover two of my clansmen howling in pain, ensnared in bear traps left by the invading foreigners. My first attempt at liberating them goes well, and one grateful kinsmen thanks me as he leaves, leg happily intact. The 📖second of my friends? Less lucky. As I try to release his ensnared leg from its metal claws, my rudimentary skills fail, and the trap clamps shut, spraying the poor trapped man with a fountain of blood as he screeches in pain. Uh, sorry mate!

There is a lot going on in Greedfall 2, and while it still has a way to go,꧙ its scope is certainly impressive. After a Summer Game Fest that showcase🌳d the best and brightest in the indie and non-blockbuster space, Greedfall 2 slots perfectly into the landscape. Combining high fantasy elements with real-world historical contexts, Greedfall 2 tackles a refreshingly weighty breadth of themes, and that is to be applauded. Much like Baldur’s Gate 3, Greedfall 2 is launching first via Early Access, arriving on PC this summer. Rousseau tells me that the EA release will contain approximately 30% of the full game, lasting around 10-15 hours, with the full fledged launch arriving on PC in 2025, flanked by PS5 and Xbox versions. In other words, there’s more than enough time to transform this sequel into the kind of epic tale that it deserves to be, and with this much passion behind it, I'm hopeful that Spiders can fulfil its RPG destiny.

Greedfall 2 is just one of the many 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming PC games to get hyped about this year.

"Each Dragon Age is an iteration," creat♕ive director John Epler tells GamesRadar+. "We take what worked before, we see what didn't and evolve. And this one to us is an evolution of all those other Dragon Age games kind of pulled together into a perfect package."

As part of Summer Game Fest, the devs demonstrated the first hour of the game to the media, playing straight through from title screen to a jaw-dropping title card cliffhanger that I certainly won't be spoiling here. You've already seen some of this if you checked out today's public gameplay reveal, and The V𒀰eilguard is certainly giving us a more action-focused Dragon Age experience than ever before, and that action looks polished, weighty, and complete. 

This has all gone a long way when it comes to assuaging my fears about the game following so many rumors, reports of development hell and – let's be honest – a string of disappointing games from a once-legendary studio. But The Veilguard gives me hope that BioWare will be back with the good stuff this year, and ཧI couldn't be more relieved.

Creating with class

The Veilguard opens, of course, with character creation, which looks to be the richest creation suite BioWare has ever offered. There's face customization, yes, but there's also body customization, letting you fully define the look of your character from head to toe. There are four voices to choose from: two feminine aꦺnd two masculine options, split between American and British accents. And yes, there are four races – or rather, 'lineages' in The Veilguard&apo🦩s;s parlance – to choose between: Human, Dwarf, Elf, and Qunari. You can pick your character's name, but as with BioWare heroes like Shepard and Hawke, you're referred to in the dialog by one title: Rook.

Throwing back to an old BioWare staple, you also give your character some backstory, here by selecting a faction to be associated with. The six option🙈s even include the likes of Dragon Age standbys like the Grey Wardens, and they'll each unlock unique dialog and a few gameplay perks as you go. Epler says that this faction choice comes i🦂n the same spirit as the Origin choice in the original game. "There's definitely intended to be that throwback," he explains. "It's not the same, there's not the unique missions, but it sets the course for your character throughout the rest of the game."

And, of course, character creation includes class selection. There are three principal classes – warrior, mage, and rogue –  and three specializations within each. Each of those subclasses promises to offer some meaningful distinctions from each other, though we only got to see one rogue option in action. But the three main classes are distinguished by how they generatᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚe and spend energy for abilities.

"Each class has its own resource meter," Epler explains. "Rogues have momentum. You build momentum by attacking, by dodging, by parrying, and you lose it by being hi💞t, so there's really a 🧔focus with rogues on avoiding damage, avoiding attacks. They build momentum quickly, but they lose it quickly. Warriors have rage, which they build a little bit more slowly, but they don't lose."

Putting the 'action' in 'action-RPG' 

The combat's not quite God of War, as the rumors suggested – if anything, it looks a bit more like modern Assassin's Creed in my eyes, but even that's not quite right. It's quite fast and fluid, and looks like a natural evolution of the sort of strategic action comb🐬at BioWare's been building for years. I don't know how good that action will feel in practice – this demo was all hands-off, after all – but it looks at least as effective as an action game as any game the studio's done before. You can cancel attacks, execute quick dodges, and build up combos.

On the strategic side, enemies might have elemental weaknesses, or barriers 🐼and other defenses that are more vulnerable to specific types of abilities. Combat, then, looks to be a matter of managing your abilities to best whittle down those defenses and take advantage of those weaknesses. And, of course, your companions will have abilitꦛies that play in here, too.

"Over the course of the game you get access to three abilities per companion," Ep🐻ler says, "as well as an additional two abilities you can slot, and an additional ability that comes off of items that we won't talk about right now." The devs intend to give you "a lot of tools 🐟for every encounter."

You can also pause at any time in or out of combat to pop open a tactical command menu, letting you pause the action at any time to choose your abilities and issue orders to your companions. The action fully freezes here, giving you all the time you could want to plan your next move. This scre𒅌en will also give you the lowdown on the weaknesses of whatever enemy you target. You can't fully escape the action combat if you want a more old-school experience, but there is a way to have a more strategic view if you want to – another way The Veilguard attempts to court multiple kinds of RPG fans.

Love and war

There are two things I remember about my time in the old Dragon Age games: firstly, that Varric is cool, and secondꦦly, Solas is a jerk. That's pretty much where the story of ꧑The Veilguard picks up. 

Within the first hour, you're directly confronting Solas with Varric at your side, immediately bringing a ten-year-old storyline to a dramatic head. That drama is enhanced by the setting of the opening quest, the city of Minrathous, an opulent location driven by advanced magic. Things very quickly get explosively bad as monsters start to overwhelm the city, building a set piece action sequence to rival anything BioWare's done before꧙.

"ꦯOne of the things we wanted to do with this game is make the prolog feel like the final mission of a different game," Epler says. "We really needed to get the stakes, the spectacle, right off෴ the bat. Obviously, players who had been waiting to confront Solas have been waiting for just this moment." It's an effective opener. It certainly set the hook for me, building the stakes and introducing lore without getting bogged down in the deep details.

Part of why the introductory storytelling works so well is that it's driven by a group of characters –✨ your companions – who play off of each other well, feeling like adventuresome heroes who never lose sight of the stakes they're up against.

"The companions have always been ꦜthe beating heart of Dragon Age," Epler says, "and especially in The Veilguard, we f🗹ound as we were building a story, more than ever before, it's a story about the people around you; a story about building this team, and working with them. 

Each companion has their own storyline that runs parallel to the main story. But beyond that, something that we've never really done in Dragon Age [before] and that we've really done a deliberate job with this time, is you c♋annot succeed without them. Each of them has a reason why they need to be a part of your party, why they need to help you stop the end of the world."

But yes, of course, there will be opportunities to get to know your companions on a more𝓡 intimate level, Epler confirms. "Romance is a Dragon Age thing. Romance is absolutely a thing we're doing, and each character's romance flavor is going to be different. So you know, we don't want every character for the romance to feel the same. We want everyone to have their own flavor that's appropriate to them as a character."

There's still so much we don't know about The Veilguard. We don't know the overall structure of the game, the nature of side quests, or how the classes and skill systems work together. We don't know where the story goes, or whether it will be able to thread the needle of paying off a decade-long plotline without alienating new players. I'm glad to r♍eport that The Veilguard doesn't feel like it's suffering under the weight of all its baggage, even after all these years overshadowed by uneasy rumors. This first look has, at a minimum, convinced me I could love a BioWare RPG one more time.

Check out the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RPGs to play while you wait for Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

A decade earlier, Damian Martin had graduated into a recession, with a degree in puppetry. The next few years were spent bouncing between jobs, working on everything from theatre to QA at Sega – and in between, doing an awful lot of zero-hours contract work. They poured all of those exܫperiences into a cyberpunk RPG in the truest sense, putting you in the shoes of an android Sleeper scraping by on the streets of the future. 

During the game's development, Damian Martin recruited two collaborators to help define the look and sound of that future. Composer Amos Roddy had worked on their debut game, In Other Waters, and returned to produce a moody synth soundtrack for the next one. Guillaume Singelin, meanwhile, was a French graphic novelist who'd liked In Other Waters enough to draw fan art for it, and who brought a cartoony lightness that complemented the grittiness🐼 of the new game's futuristic world. "They lifted each other," Damian Martin says. 

The next frontier

There was an alchemy at work here, and perhaps it catalysed Citizen Sleeper's breakthrough success. On Steam, the game sold♉ as many copies in its first week as In Other Waters had in two years – not counting the multitudes more who played it on Game Pass – and was nominated for three IGF awards and four BAFTAs. Another aspect that struck a chord with players: the plight of the Sleeper. A real human personality ⛎copied into a robot body as a way of creating cheap labour, you had to wrestle with your built-in obsolescence, taking any job available to pay for the Stabiliser that kept you from falling apart. It proved a pliable metaphor, resonating with personal experiences of everything from poverty to disability. "People have a strong relationship with it," Damian Martin says. "And I've got to respect that. I don't have… You know, I feel certain things about it, but I don't feel like those people do. Because to me, it's a knowable object. To players, it's a world – it's alive to them." 

The experiment paid off, then, enough so that Damian Martin says others are already replicating its conditions: "In three years' time, you will see a lot of Citizen Sleeper-likes." That's part of the reason they're immediately returning to its world. "But also, I don't want to just walk away and leave it. I want to make sure I've fully explored this form." You might expect the game's success to push them towards expanding Jump Over The Age, their studio, but they're keeping development within the same tight bunch of collaborators. Still, there are some perks. While their previous games were made from home, or a shared office, today we find Damian Martin in a shiny new studio. Citizen Sleeper has brought a certain level of stability to the developer's life, it seems. And they've re꧙turned the favour to your brand-new Sleeper. 

Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector leaves your original character where they were, living out whatever ending you might have foun🦋d for them. The Sleeper you pick up with has a rather different life: no longer reliant on Stabiliser for survival (thanks in part to longtime companion Serafin), and proud owner of a spaceship. "It's not like the Starship Enterprise," Damian Martin c🐈larifies. "It's more like having a canal boat." Still, it certainly beats waking up alone, inside a claustrophobic shipping container, as you did at the start of the original game. 

"I wouldn't want to tell the same story again," Damian Martin says. "That's just not interesting to me – I have to spend every day of two, three years with this thing." So instead of urban science fiction, keying into their love of William Gibson, the model for Starward Vector is a "'monster of the week' sci-fi show". The developer rattles off examples: "Far💯scape, Firefly, Cowboy Bebop," all of them following the episodic adventures of a tight spaceship crew. "My feeling is that's never really been done well in games. Mass Effect 2 comes the closest, I think, but the problem there is that you're everyone's boss, so it's like a combination of that and The Office in space, where you mooch around and see if you can get a date from one of🐻 your co-workers." Rather than a workplace, Damian Martin wants Starward Vector to feel more like "flatmates in space". 

If that all sounds a little freewheeling and carefree for the sequel to a game about the precarity of existence under capitalism, then there are a few extra details we should fill in about this new Sleeper. The game once again begins with you waking up – except this time, it's halfway through the surgery to excise your Stabiliser dependency. What happens next makes good on every warning about the dangers of rebooting a PC mid-update: your memories are gone forever, including any recollections of your closest friend. "Serafin has an existing relationship with the player," Damian Martin says – but you can no longer reciprocate. "It's up to you to decide, like, how are you going to be with him?" Meanwhile, that ship of yours? It's stolen, from yo𓂃ur former boss. Who also happens to be a gangster. 

And so you begin Citizen Sleeper 2 on the run. "It's good to have th𓆉at propulsive energy behind you," Damian Martin says, "to push you down a path." Note the indefinite article there. Because while the original game stuck to a single location, the Erlin's Eye, Starward Vector opens up an entire asteroid belt of possible destinations and routes to you. 

Your first stop, however, is fixed – and it's here, on the spacജe station of Hexport, that our demo begins. "Think of it like a fugitive movie," Damian Martin says. "This is the first town they get to and are like, 'Oh, we're out of fuel'." Your ship has been damaged in the escape, a ruptured fuel line limiting your ability to travel. Hexport itself will look fairly familiar to anyone who visited the Eye: a 3D environment viewed frไom afar, peppered with hotspot locations where you can chat with the locals, spend some Cryo on supplies, or complete tasks. As is Citizen Sleeper tradition, every Cycle (essentially an in-game day) begins with you rolling a handful of dice. These represent your possible actions for the day, slotted into tasks with the number of pips on their face altering the odds of it going well or poorly. 

In the first game, the number of dice you had to work with was based on your physical condition. A kind of persistent health bar, running from 'Stable&ℱapos; to 'Broken', it could be depleted by taking injuries, but also simply by existing, the built-in obsolescence of your robot body causing it to wear down day by day. It was a simple system that powered the "sense of inexorable decline" at the game's core, something that had to be constantly battled against. In retrospect, though, Damian Martin can see the shortcomings of this design. "It became predictable," they admit. "If you had a good supply of Stabiliser, as the game went on, you could feel increasingly comfortable." That served the the♊matic arc of your character, but while making the DLC chapters, the developer began to realise the limits of the stories it could be used to tell. "Because I made it quite quickly, and with a kind of minimum viable attitude, I ended up with this very simple dice system that works great but it doesn't expand well." And so condition has been ditched along with the Stabiliser. 

"Condition implied damage," Damian Martin says. "I liked the idea of a resource that you could gain by trying to persuade someone of something, just as much as by using a welding torch to cut open an airlock." That resource is stress, represented in the HUD by a row of ten red lights, waiting to flicker on when things get too much. Every second light is marked with dice pips, from one to five; allow yourself to get that deep in the red, and any matching roll will be harmful. Not to your Sleeper, directly, but to that ✤die, each of which now has its own dedicated health bar. That consists of three yellow dashes – empty them, and you'll lose access to the die permanently. 

"You can sneak by on high stress. If you keep rolling high, you're safe," Damian Martin explains. "I'm trying to encourage this be🐼haviour where the player is running on the edge of their capabilities at all times." After all, when stress is bubbling away at a manageable♔ level, only one in six rolls will be any problem. Damian Martin is rolling a handful of physical dice on the desktop to illustrate the point: nice healthy fours and fives. Until eventually, inevitably – snake eyes. "You can end up damaging all your dice in one turn. And all of a sudden, you're in trouble." 

In place of the inexorable decline, Starward Vector presents a boom-and-bust cycle, in which bright periods can turn dark without warningꦿ, leading to spirals that are hard to climb out of. The answer isn't cure but prevention – managing your stress levels by making sure your Sleeper has perio🌳ds of downtime before things get bad. A new metaphor, then: "It's more like burnout, and long-term damage." 

Next port of call

On Hexport, it's easy enough to keep stress on an even keel by balancing work with rest, in a rhythm more or less consistent with that of the first game. But now you're 𝓰also always working towards something: your next contract, which Damian Martin describes as "very much like an episode in the 'monster of the week' format." Seen through that filter, your ship's ruptured fuel lines are a classic first-act setup. Visiting the local mechanic, Karsten, they turn out to be – surprise, surprise – very expensive parts to replace. But if we don't fancy paying the 500 Cryo, Karsten adds, he'd be willing to barter. Would we mind fetching him a data core from a nearby shipwreck? 

Cue a heist-style preparation sequence. First up, supplies, which decide how many Cycles you have to complete the job before starvation kicks in. You're lit🦩erally buying time, and not at a favourable conversion rate. "Supplies are very expensive," Damian Martin says. "So there's a big trade-off there." Then it's time to gather a crew. Each contract allows your Sleeper to take two allies, picked from the residents of your ship and any locals who happen to be looking for work. For this contract, one slot must be filled by Serafin. One of the other two options, Nia, is greyed out; we'd need to earn her trust first, Damian Martin explains, before she'll be willing to come along. 

Instead we take Juni, a charming street-urchin hacker sort who actually approaches us about this job. She's certainly got the rig꧟ht CV, given her maxed-out Interface stat: good for hacking data cores and the like. This is one of the game's five skills, making their return in Starward Vector along with the starting classes th🔯at define them. This time, however, the differences are much more pronounced. "In the first game, you could pick up the other skills to flatten out your skill tree, basically," Damian Martin says. "You can't do that any more. And you're punished much more aggressively for not having a skill." On contracts, these shortfalls can be made up by your crew, who add their own dice to the pool. 

There are, however, complications to bringing people along. Crew might have their own motives for taking the job, leading to unexpected narrative developments. And even when you're all singing from the same hymn sheet, there's the matter of stress to consider. Crewmates use a simplified version of this system, without any dice pips – a straight health bar, essentially – but stress matters more than ever when꧂ you're on a contract, since it can't be recovered until you're done. You've no time to relax when you're on the job. 

There seems to be an awful lot of ticking clocks in play, even before we learn that contracts can have their own stress bars. Here, the shipwreck is falling apart around us, something we can slow down by sealing up a breach in the hull, but doing that requires spendiꦜng dice – and also using up valuable time as you burn through supplies. Contracts are the dramatic peaks of the story, Damian Martin says, and it's not too hard to map the events of this o𝐆ne onto a TV episode structure, complete with guest stars, cliffhanger-friendly peril and a final-ad-break twist that we've been asked not to spoil here. 

Vitally, though, this episode didn't need to play out as it did in our de♋mo. "There are a few different way🔜s out of Hexport," Damian Martin confirms. "It's important to me, even in the early part of the game while we're still tutorialising, to try and have opportunities for the player to be able to express [themselves]." We could have decided not to take this contract after all, and instead scraped together the cash by taking jobs from a contracts board – which may in turn have helped us build trust with Nia, opening up the possibility to take her on the data orb contract. 

That change of personnel might have made things simpler, given what we learn about Juni aboard the shipwreck. Instead, though, we'd have had to deal with Nia's big brother back in Hexport, angry she was dragged along on such a dangerous contract, and insisting we pay half the earnings out to N🌜ia as recompense. Assuming, of course, that we even managed to complete the objective, without Juni's hacker skills at our disposal. "In the original game, it was hard to have failstates," Damian Martin says. "But you can 100 per cent fail or, like, fu🤪ck up contracts – and that allows for these situations where you have to come back and deal with the consequences." 

Mass affect

Space Missio🦋ns going badly wrong and a wide cast of colourful characters who might join your crew on a more permanent basis? It's not hard to see why Damian Martin des🃏cribes this sequel as "my Mass Effect 2". They admit to having a "conflicted relationship" with BioWare's series, but that just makes it grist for the mill. "I really enjoy the process of playing a triple-A game and being like, 'I'm gonna steal this, and I'm gonna do it better than they do'," they say. "Part of this is me looking at Mass Effect 2 and going, 'I love that game, but there's so many things about it that don't work for me'." 

Their biggest target in this respect is granting your supporting cast greater autonomy. Crew members might well choose to hop off the ship at the next stop, and possibly st🍬ay there for good. "Your crew aren't just hanging around in the engine room, waiting for you to talk to them," Damian Martin says. "They're in the same place you're in, doing their own thing. And sometimes, after a few cycles, there'll be a scene where that crew member has done something." A mischievous smile. "I'm always trying to find ways to get you into trouble." 

Your role on the ship, it seems, might well be that of responsible adult. "In Citizen Sleeper 1, you're very much an individual, and that affords you a certain kind of freedom, almost," Damian Martin says. "Whereas in Citizen Sleeper 2, you've taken responsibility for people." This is why you begin the game alongside Serafin, they explain. "Someone needs you to do the right thing, even when you don't know what that is. And then more and more of those people are going t🍌o come to you." Having your own spaceship (legal ownership be damned) makes you useful to other people – for transport, for shelter, for empowering them to work. 

Thinking back on those zero-hour jobs that fed into the first Citizen Sleeper, and how it has changed its maker's life, weღ can't help but wonder if there's an element of continued autobiography at work here. "It does reflect a kind of change in my feelings, and in my life as well," Damian Martin says. It might be easy to suggest this very studio is, metaphorically speaking, the ship. But, of course, the developer has been careful not to make themself the captain of a crew here (a decision that's hard to argue with, given the results of the industry's recent expansionism) and they set us straight on that 𒁃point soon enough: "Well, I mean, my house is the ship." 

Which isn't to say that their concerns, making Starward Vector, are entirely domestic. Damian Martin describes a development ritual they've settled on over the years – one we first heard about in E369's preview of Citizen Sleeper. "I write on a Post-it note what the ꧑game is about, and stick it somewhere in my field of view. For In Other Waters, I wrote 'symbiosis'. For Citizen Sleeper, I wrote 'precarity'. For this one…" They peel the note from 👍the corner of their monitor, and hold it up to show scrawled biro capital letters: 'CRISIS'. Below that is a later addendum: 'ENTROPY/NEED'. 

It's worth noting that Starward Vector is set against the backdropꦗ of a war, between the Conway and SenetStat corporations, but not actually in it. The asteroid belt you call home is "on the shore of the war," Damian Martin explains. "And no one knows when the war is going to come here, or if it will." It's a uniting concern of every character you meet in the game, we're told, their particular focus and urgency differing from person to person, just as it does in our own lives. 

"People's psychological distance has a big effect on how they feel about crisis, and how present it feels," Damian Martin says. They're speaking from experience here. "A big influence is the war in Ukraine. My partner's Romanian – Romania is literally on the shore of the Black Sea. It's a place where mines wash up from the war." But that distance can be less literal: "If you talk to people about clima🦹te change, there are some people who feel that they're on the shores of that war." 

Damian Martin is less interested in the nature of the crisis itself than how we process it, from a distance, and how it impacts our personal relationships. In particular, they want to dig into the idea that the closest bonds are forged in crisis. Questions of what we need from one another, and what we owe. These are enormous topics for any artist to tackle, of course, not least in a game that's expanding out in multiple other directions at 🍸the same time, but Damian Martin felt a responsibility to try. "Citizen Sleeper established this idea that, like, this is a game about now. I guess 'now' also changes over time. And so Citizen Sleeper 2 should continue to be about now – as opposed to being about five yea🎐rs ago or whatever."

This feature originally appeared in 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Edge magazine. For more fantastic features, you can or . 

It's taken me far too long to finally sit down and play BioWare's beloved Mass Effect series. The first entry was a nice introduction to the Normandy and her crew, but with Mass Effect 2 lauded as one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RPGs ever, I know I'm in for a treat. That doesn't stop me from wanting to test the boundaries of badness when it comes to the game's morality system. Each dialog or QTE option shapes the future of my 🧸newly-resurrected Shepard and her budding partnership with Cerberus – but just how rogue is she willing to go? By testing out how "evil" ME2 w꧑ould let me be, I've come to a triumphant realization: my Renegade Shepard feels more like an action hero than a supervillain. I've yet to finish the game, but right now, I'd take this guns-blazing, no-nonsense, quick-witted Shepard over a meek little Paragon any day. 

Hero, complex

From 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Baldur's Gate 3 to 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Hogwarts Legacy, my choice-based RPG mission has always been to do things most players would deem too cruel. No one likes upsetting their favorite NPCs, but I can't help but let curiosity get the better of me whenever a particularly interesting dialog option comes my way. These are roleplaying games for a reason, right? Why not go full method?

I'm aware that most ME players probably want to achieve the best endings for their Shepards. Me, on the other hand? I just want my synthetic zombie FemShep pseudo-Cerberus double agent heroine to have a rollicking good time. After all, you never know when your ship is going to explode on you again. I'm leaning into one roleplaying element to further explain her more brazen attitude in ME2 compared to a more even keel between Paragon and Renegade last t🐻ime around: she's not fully human anymore.

After being killed in a deep-space collision, it makes sense to me that resurrectedඣ Shepard would be more than a little bit discombobulated to begin with. Then, I think she'd be angry. So angry, in fact, that she'd turn her back on The Alliance that once governed her shrewd military-minded protocols in favor of Cerberus. To an extent, anyway; I don't see myself having Shep indebted to the Illusive Man forever, but while our goals align, there's no harm in keeping the people with revivification abilities on-side.

So far in my ME2 journey, I've only reunited with one of my old compatriots. Garrus Vakarian, aka Archangel, is more than relieved to see FemShep again after hearing of her death. The best part is, though, Garrus is somewhat of a lawful evil type in himself, and makes an excellent ally for Renegade Shep. I considered ✨Miranda as my third-in-command, but with Cerberus still firmly on my maybe list, I go for DLC character Kasumi instead. She's no goody-two-shoes herself, out on some kind of revenge mission following the death of her beloved. That's exactly the kind of unbridled angst I🍨 want fuelling my team. With that, I don a set of armor that makes me resemble a black and red Power Ranger and set out to see what the galaxy has in store for Shep.

Badass to the bone

In truth, it&🧸apos;s been a rough ride for anyone who's dumb enough to piss off the ex-Spectre. 

I've seen what happens wh๊en NPCs get on the wrong side of Renegade Shepard, and I don't think Cerberus would enjoy it, should push come to shove. Blink-or-you'll-miss-it QTEs let me lean into the joyful chaos of the Renegade 🥃pathway; as soon as one flashes onto the screen during a cutscene or conversation, I can't squeeze my Xbox controller trigger fast enough. Whether or not you dependably have the stomach to be brutal in RPGs, you have to admit that untethered Shep is formidable. 

My girlfriend probably thinks I am the devil for making certain choices, and has full on prevented me from making others – "if you had killed Wrex in ME1 I think I'd have always been a little bit sad about it" – but I know I wouldn't be having as much fun with these games if I wasn't leaning into all of my options at opportune moments. It's the same reason a lot of people play Arthur Morgan just a touch meaner after their first 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Red Dead Redemption 2 playthrough: you want to give him that redemption arc for the sake of the story, your own moral quandaries be damned. I'm excited to see how Sheparﷺd develops over the course of the trilogy, and who knows? Maybe I'll want to be a Paragon purist after all come Mass Effect 3꧂.

When it comes to ME2 though, one thing's for sure: reducing aliens to mumbling messes with a glance, forcing a💞 racist bartender to die by his own poisoned concoction, headbutting a Krogan to assert dominance, blowing the head off a mech before it has time to panic…it can all part of the fun. If you forgive yourself long enough to join the not-so-dark side, of course.

Not all morality systems are created equal; I really wanted to be evil in Hogwarts Legacy, but the game just would not let me.

On April 15, David Gaider—who now heads up Summerfall Games—shared his opinion on what game need🦂s a TV adaptation next. Surprisingly, the developer's answer isn't Dragon Age. Even though Gaider is responsible for🐷 the game's setting, he thinks bringing the story of the title to TV is a "terrible idea." 

Replying to a tweet asking what video games fans would like to see adapted for TV, Gaider says, "I imagine everyone would expect me to say Dragon Age, but tဣhat'd be a terrible idea." Instead, the developer looks to other studios' work: "I want to see a David Lynch-style (on acid) Disco Elysium. Or🎶 maybe Banishers."

Fans of Gaider's work have also replied to him with their suggestions. One follower suggested an Animal Crossing TV show, to which the former BioWare veteran replied: "If it had little to no resemblance to the actual game, sure. Animal Crossing but it's a tense poli♏tical thriller." That wouldn't be my first choice but I can see the potential.

Elsewhere in the replies, some have questioned why Gaider doesn't think a Dragon Age or even a Mass Effect series would work, to which the developer explains: "You take away the interactive element and you're left with a pretty stock standard fantasy story." The 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical writer continues: "It would take a pretty deဣep dive to distill the elements of each that make them unique and interesting. Not impossible, but it would take🔜 more than a rote adaptation."

As for Mass Effect, Gaider says: "Much like Dragon Age or BG3, I have a hard time picturing a Mass Effect show that does anything we haven't alread🐎y seen a dozen times. The Halo TV show𒁏, for instance, could just as easily have been Mass Effect."

Despite this, if there was interest around a Dragon Age TV adaptation, Gaider he'd be up for the challenge of helming it on one condition. "I'd be happy to write a Dragon Age TV show," the writer replies to a fan, "but I can tell you right now that a pa♛rty-based fantasy trope-filled ꧋romp a la Honour Among Thieves would not be my first choice. Or second. Or even third."

Speaking of the BioWare RPG, here's everything we know about 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dragon Age Dreadwolf.   

Over the weekend, Michael Gamble - who has been part of the Mass Effect series since 2010 - cleared up some confusion amongst fans. The interaction began with on💦e BioWare fan that they were under the impression that the Mass Effect 5 leadership team is "mostly original trilogy veteran devs." 

In respons🧸e to this, another Twitter user asked how they knew this, to wh🐬ich Gamble stepped in to straighten things out. In his reply, Gamble revealed the executive producer (himself), art director, creative director, and game director are all trilogy veterans. The developer's reply was to the point and didn't name any names, but since he's the one leading Mass Effect 5, we can most definitely take his word for it. 

Last month, it was revealed that Mass Effect 5 is reportedly still in pre-production as developer BioWare focuses on 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dragon Age Dreadwolf. This has seemingly been the case for 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:some time now meaning the Mass Effect sequel could still be quite a ways off from release. Before this update, the studio celebrated N7 Day 2023 by sharing a brand-new teaser trailer whiℱch has kept fans theorizing for quite a whꦯile now. 

Speaking of Michael Gamble, the Mass Effect 5 director recently gave props to Exodus, the upcoming sci-fi game from other former BioWare developers. Not only did Gamble sha🌺re the game's latest trailer from Archetype Entertainment and reply: "Science fiction is amazing," but he also responded to a fan adding: "The more - the better," in terms of new sci-fi RPGs.

While we wait for news on Mass Effect 5, find out where the BioWare series lands on our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RPG games list. 

It's a moment that's forever lodged in my heart, and just writing about it is getting me all choked up again. If I even hear a single note from the score that plays during their conversation, tears are 𝓡almost always guaranteed. This month marks 12 years since th𝄹e release of Mass Effect 3, and 11 since the arrival of the Citadel DLC that brought us this particular scene. The anniversary of its launch got me thinking about how much I needed the expansion when it came around, and even after all these years, nothing has ever really topped BioWare's swansong addition that let me say a proper goodbye to my favorite sci-fi RPG trilogy. When it comes to expansions, Mass Effect 3: Citadel is still the very best in my eyes. 

"I should go" 

Say what you will about Mass Effect 3 and its endings, but I loved the third installment. Mass Effect 2 is an all-time favorite of mine 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:that took the series to new heights, bringing us closer than ever to a crew of characters thanks to its high stakes suicide mission. Naturally that meant that when Mass Effect 3 came around, expectatio🀅ns were high. But even so, I had the best time with it. I enjoyed every opportunity it gave me to spend more time with the characters I'd gotten to know so well as I tried to prepare myself for the eventual end. When the Cita🔴del expansion came around a year later, it felt like such a fitting finale, rounding off the RPG with a memorable shore leave adventure that took us away from the war and the reapers to throw a party and get some much-needed R&R. 

Of course, trouble always finds its way to Shepard and soon enough, you get swept up in 🐻a wild conspiracy. From an undercover stint at a casino to an encounter with your own clone, it's an absolute riot; packed full of self-aware jokes that poke fun at the long established habits of the cast – like Garrus' obsession with calibrations, or Shepa🅺rd's overuse of the line, "I should go" (which is a personal favorite). Happily, you do also get to spend a lot of time with the crew, both on the Citadel and in the swanky apartment lent to you by admiral Anderson. Inviting up each crew member and spending some down time with them is a treat, as is the party you get to throw to see out the expansion just before the bittersweet scene that had me sobbing. With its blend of action, hijinks, humor, and heartwarming moments, it's everything I could ever want from an expansion and more. 

Fond farewell  

That's not to say that we haven't gotten some stellar expansions in the years since. The Trespasser DLC in Dragon Age: Inquisition, for example, is about as close as it gets to the heights of the Citadel in Mass Effect 3. Superbly finishing up the story of the fantasy RPG, Trespasser also leaves off on a moving group shot of the companions, and then sets up what's to come in 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:The Witcher 3 also ꦑhad a very strong showing in this department with both the H🎀earts of Stone and Blood Wine expansions, the latter of which brought Geralt's epic adventure to a memorable close. 

I'm sure there are many, many other examples I could pluck out of the last 10 years, and everyone will have an expansion that forever sticks in their mind – regardless of how long ago it was released. But for me, nothing has had quite as much of an impact from a personal perspective. It likely speaks to my great love for Mass Effect overall, but everything about the Citadel DLC just feels like a big love letter to the trilogy and to us as the players. Not only did it let me enjoy the com♉pany of characters I'd come to care about a lot over the years, but it also let me bid farewell to a series that has meant so much to me in the most fitting way. 11 years later, I'm still thinking about that one scene. You're right Shepard,🍃 experiencing the Mass Effect trilogy really was "the best". 

A big fan of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:games like Mass Effect? Check out our pick of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RPGs you can play right now. 

EA announced the layoffs on February 28, alongside a statement that it would be effectively shutting down "development of future licensed IP," and pivoting back to its major franchises. Now, has reported that BioWare's Mass Effect 5 is still in pre-production, while 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dragon Age Dreadwolf remains in development.

"IG✤N also has learned that a team is still working in pre-production on the next Mass Effect, though BioWare's current focus remains on Dragon Age," the full report from IGN reads. We've known for years that Mass Effect 5 was in ൲pre-production at BioWare, but IGN's new report reassures fans that development hasn't been halted in the wake of EA's layoffs.

Mass Effect 5 was first announced back in 2020, and since then, we've seen a few artistic teasers for the new game. A new teaser in November 2022 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:pointed to a futuristic cityscape for exam🌟ple, and a year later, one piece of art had fans speculating that the Paragon and Renegꦯade system could be returning for Mass Effect 5. 

Elsewhere for EA, it was the original IGN report yesterday that revealed Ridgeline Games had been✃ shuttered and development of a new Battlefield game had been scrapped entirely. The report also revealed that a new Star Wars FPS, which was in devel🦄opment at Apex Legends and Titanfall studio Respawn, had also been entirely canceled.

The news follows 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Sony laying off 900 developers earlier this week and shutting down its London Studio. Studios like Naughty Dog anꦏd Insomniac were also affected by the layoffs, and just like EA, Sony also revealed it had canceled unannounced games.

A report earlier this month indicated that the majority of developers weren't positive about the overall direction of the games industry. 

In many ways, Baldur's Gate 3 has a lot in common with the 14-year-old RPG. You could say that isn't so surprising when you consider BioWare worked on the first two Baldur's Gate games prior to creating the adventure in Thedas. Buꦛt as one of my favorite games of all-time, and the first RPG that wholly consumed me, Dragon Age: Origins is the blueprint I've measured all other games in the genre against since. Each time I got lost in Faerun in Larian's adventure, I was reminded of Origins in some way, and the desire to once again revisit it would only g🧸row. So, now having stepped away from Baldur's Gate 3 at long last, I decided to return to the 2009 RPG that never really left me. 

Role-play 

I return to Dragon Age: Origins every few years or so, and it 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:always feels like coming home. What draws me right into the adventure is the way you can experience the opening of the game differently depending on the class and race you chose. True to its name, there are various origin storiesℱ attached to humans, dwarves, and elves, with each one adding to the sense of worldbuilding by helping to establish their cultures and traditions. Above all, it makes it easier to feel like you're really role-playing as your chosen character by stepping into their world before their path leads them to become a Grey Warden and fight against the blight. 

With mages having their own unique origin in the circle – an organization where those who can use magic are trained and monitored – 🤡elves and dwarves even have their own unique set of origins to choose from that tie into their history and cultures in different ways. Then, as the story progresses, you come across unique interactions and story moments that call back to your oriꦑgin story later down the line. 

In my recent playthrough, I became an elven rogue who grew up in the city under oppressive circumstances. The elves of Thedas have a long and storied history which only gets more interesting and uncertain as the series goes on, but in Origins, you first see how the elves living in human cities are mistreated by those in power. It could quite easily set you on a path of vengeance, where you're less inclined to trust any humans you🎐 encounter thereafter if you so desire. I love how so many dialogue options are available to you to let you shape your character, with some feeding into your origin. 

I've yet to play anything since that does this, which is why I was so excited to see origins feature in Baldur's Gate 3. Origins aren't exactly the same in the sense that they don't entirely alter the opening of the game, but who you choose to play will also factor into how others respond to you as you venture through the Sword Coast. The unique origins – such as those that let you play as the established companions, or the Dark Urge opti🧔on – also give you a backstory that adds unique story moments – whicಌh again makes the role-playing experience that much more immersive. 

Approval  

The characters and the way you can develop r🍬elationships have always resonated with me the most in Dragon Age: Origins, and every time I return to it, I'm reminded of why. As I once again spend time with my companions as my elven rogue, I feel as close to them as I ever did, with the story effectively bringing us all together as we face up against various hardships. As I get closer to Alistiar and a romance begins to blossom, I feel as attached to his character as I did the first time I played so many years ago, and I experienced that same kind of attachment to various characters in Baldur's Gate 3. 

As well as featuring romance options, Larian's RPG also has a camp where you can spend time with your companions, along with an approval rating system – both of which can be found in DA: Origins. With your companions' ꧃affection towards you growing based on your actions and responses in both games, it's no wonder I was quick to feel right at home in the Sword Coast's camp set-up, and begin to care for the characters as I worked to develop relationships and bonds. 

Returning to where my love for RPGs began with Dragon Age: Origins just makes me appreciate why I enjoy so many of the features in Baldur's Gate 3. The first Dragon Age game may be quit✅e dated by today's standards, but every time I become a Grey Warden, I'm reminded of why it continues to have such a hold on me all these years later. From its story to its characters and worldbuilding, nothing has come quite as close to rivaling it for me until Baldur's Gate 3 came along. 

Karlach's heartache in Baldur's Gate 3 spoke directly to my own isolation, and it caught me totally off guard.

Certain Affinity has announced it's become a co-development partner on Archetype's a🥃mbitious game. In a , it's revealed that the two studios have been working closely on the new AAA project since 2022, long before we first got a glimpse of the project late last year. 

In case you missed it, Archetype - formed in 2019 - comprises several industry veterans who have worked on various projects over the years, including Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and more. Now, ꦿfollowing the new partnership, Exodus has gained the co-developer of Halo, Call of Duty, Hogwarts Legacy, and more - which should help with the shooting aspect of the game. 

"As one of the world's premiere independent studios, we've worked on a huge variety of great games, but nothing quite like this exciting new sci-fi IP, Exodus," Certain Affinity's CEO Max Hoberman writes in the same🤡 press release. "Our mission is to add value in development across the board and to complement their efforts in bringing this amazing storytelling experience to players around the world."

"We are creating a new universe that we hope willಌ be the beginning of a decades-long narrative-driven adventure for gamers," Archetype founder James Ohlen🐟 adds. "I've known Max for a long time and was thrilled to partner with Certain Affinity on a project. With his support and the addition of his outstanding team, we're excited to bring this new AAA Sci-fi universe to life."

You may remember 澳洲幸运❀5开奖号码历史查询:seeing Exodus at The 💯Game Awards 2023 where we not only found out that the game existed but also got a cinematic trailer an🍬d extended story trailer. What makes this project so interesting is that it feels like Christopher Nolan's 2014 sci-fi flick Interstellar and also has its leading actor, Matthew McConaughey, in a key role. 

With so much RPG expertise on board, Exodus is definitely one to keep an eye on, especially if you're a Mass Effect fan. Speaking of BioWare's long-running series, shortly after Exodus' reveal, Mass Effe🐬ct 5's director gave props to Arch꧙etype's upcoming game, sharing its announꦿcement and adding: "Science fiction is🍌 amazing."

It's too early to know when we'll be able to get our hands on Exodus, but we do know that when we do, it'll be available on PS5, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Xbox Series X/S, and PC. 

Find out what else is on the horizon with our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new games 2024 list. 

From its story systems and choice-driven gameplay, Baldur's Gate 3 and ✃The Ol💦d Republic share a structure and standard few narrative-based games can match, and while they may not obviously share the same lineage, they've more in common than you might think.

A chance encounter

I ended up jumping back into the game over the holidays while cat-sitting for a ꦬfriend. I took my laptop with me so I could get some work done, but felt the hankering to start up another playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3. Unfortunately, my laptop wasn’t capable of running it, so I decided to look for other games to play. Dragon Age: Origins came to mind, but I played that game into the ground on release. So I instead ended up spending about an hour recovering my Star Wars: The Old Republic account, logging into several♑ different email accounts I’ve made over the years, to eventually find my password reset link so I could download the game and give it another try. And I was hooked from the outset. 

Much like Baldur’s Gate 3, Star Wars: The Old Republic is a game focused on its narrative and the choices that accompany it. The Old Republic is very much a BioWare game, but did you know it was BioWare who worked on the last mainline Baldur's Gate outing – Baldur's Gate 🍃2: Shadows of Amn, released on September 21, 2000. The Old Republic follows the now iconic BioWare formula providing players with a unique storyline based on your character’s origin or in this case starting class. 

One thing players will immediately notice is the fact that you are presented with a dialogue wheel when interacting with NPCs, even major and minor characters, with alignment-based choices thไat even go so far as to determine your relationship with your companions (that you can romance, of course), and in some cases your appearance. While not all choices are make or break when it comes to your class-specific storyline, the way NPCs interact with you expand beyond your given role in The Old Republic.

Now, to be clear: I’m not the biggest Star Wars fan on the pla♌net, but I do love BioWare games. This is mostly because of how intricate the Mass Effect studio's games are, and how much of their focus targets player interactions within their worlds. After firing up The Old Republic for the first time in years, I started off with a Chiss Imperial Agent which meant I would be on the 🔯side of the Sith Empire.

Generally in MMORPGs, what race or class you pick is mostly inconsequential to how you interact with the world around you, outside of a handful of instances. Final Fantasy 14 acknowledges what Job Class you started with in a quest in Stormblood; World of Warcraft quite literally has NPCs throwing rotten food at you if you play a Death Knight due to the general stigma and association to the Lich King. The Old Republic, on the other hand, has baked in these interactions in your personal class quests an🦋d even side-quests, and the fact that NPCs actually commented on my character being a Chiss in great detail reminded me of how rolling a Half-Elf in Baldur’s Gate 3 earned me some specific dialogue options with the game’s Half-Elven companion Shadowheart. 

Even being an Imperial Agent colored my interactions with NPCs, with some being more guarded, in fear of being reported to the Empire. Engaging with NPCs outside of the Empire also meant that my character would completely change their dialect, solidifying their role as an Impe🍌rial spy. And again, this extends outside of your personal quests and even extends into dungeons.

The new republic 

When I first restarted The Old Republic, I wanted to be the most ambitious and ruthless Inquisitor out there – meaning a lot of NPCs would likely fall to my hand, leading down a path of questionable morality. Th🔴is bled into the decisions I made in dungeons – which are called Flashpoints here – with me more of than not opting for Dark Side dialogue options whenever the chance presented itself.  When I ran a Flashpoint with 𒅌some friends, a Sith Warrior and a Bounty Hunter, I was able to see in greater detail just what the game would acknowledge and respond to. 

I won the first roll and one of the NPCs acknowledged that I was running reconnaissance for the Empire. They provided a quick breakdown of w�𓂃�hat was going on, but once our Sith Warrior won a dice roll and became the dominant voice of the party, the NPCs cadence immediately changed. They were in reverence to the Sith, showing unquestionable loyalty even as he decided to keep a prisoner alive that otherwise should have been executed. 

All three of us were in awe of the amount of character-building a simple dungeon provided. It reminded me how certain choices in Baldur’s Gate 3 would ripple down through the game’s three acts to impact what NPCs you could or couldn’t interact with, or what the game would acknowledge in terms of certain narrative choices such as keeping th𝔉e Tieflings alive or saving the Nightsong. The Old Republic adheres to the same logic, and like Larian’s smash hit CRPG, will see companions leave your party depending on choi🐼ces you’ve made — or worse, you may end up killing them.

I wasn’t exactly in awe of Star Wars: The Old Republic when it released back in 2011, mostly because BioWare games were coming out at a relatively steady pace, and with that came the trend of choice-based gameplay. But with BioWare still whittling away at Dragon Age: Dread Wolf, and Larian Studios picking up where they left off with the Baldur’s Gate series, I’ve come to the realization that The Old Republic was actually something special. It was an ambitious take on an otherwise booming genre at the time, and if I think too hard about how the game clocks your individual choices, small or otherwise, to weave it into how your c💧ompanions or major story NPCs regard you, I get a headache. It’s just so vast, and much like Baldur’s Gate 3 is completely rooted in intricate and sophisticated player choice.

Here are the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Star Wars games you should play today 

Time dilation can be known to affect memory, so let’s take a step back. Exodus was 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:recently announced by Archetype Entertainment, a new studio with James Ohlen, Chad Robertson, and Chris King at the helm. Their shared gameography includes some of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RPGs ever, with Ohlen in particular cre😼dited as the lead designer on BioWare classics such as the original Baldur's Gate, KOTOR, and Jade Empire. 

♒Exodus' announcement trailer certainly had a Mass Effect-flavored sheen, and we now know that the RPG has something else in common with the classic trilogy: multiple endings. "The ending is something that we’re putting a lot of work into," Ohlen says in the team’s first video. "Time dilation, and how it impacts the choices you make, is the core of the game. It’s what Exoꦇdus is all about."

For those who haven’t gotten around to Exodus' first trailer - embedded above -𝓰 the general setup borrows from Interstellar, whereby time moves differently for our spacefaring main character than it does for their family or the entire civilization. That means our choices will have tangible effects for decades to come and we’ll be able to witness the 'future' first-hand. 

"You're gonna be able to make momentous decisions and you'ꦺre gonna be able to see the results of those decisions over the course of years, decades, and even centuries," Ohlen continues. 

Space-time shenanigans aside, the team also delved into the game’s third-person combat, fantasy in🌠spirations, Centauri Cluster setting, and the now-mandatory alien romance. There's no release date just yet for Exodus, but it'll land on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC when it's ready. 

While we wait for Exodus, check out 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:what else is coming in 2024. 

In an interview with , lead writer Mac Walters discussed his new studio 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Worlds Untold and the lessons it's learning from BioWare’s past, specifically with avoiding the procedural world generation seen in Mass Effect An𝓰dromeda.

“I like the bespoke moments,” says Walters. “I am very focused on telling an🌸 incredible story… I think that interactive games have the opportunity to at least match [TV and streaming] if not, surpass it in the future, because of that connection we have with the world, with the protagonists, the characters in it, and our kind of that ability to co-author our own story.”

Naughty Dog’s dreary opus was apparently used as an example for the studio on how to create such an experience: “We referenced The Last Of Us a l꧅ot because of how much focus they put on really trying to tell a story that felt like you were watching a TV sh▨ow, but also blending in the interactive elements.” However, the studio head is still conscious that, in the end, he’s still making a video game. “If it was just about the story, I could just go write a screenplay.”

Walters then agrees that the studio’s upcoming game is more Last Of Us as opposed to something like Baldur’s Gate 3 - and the industry’s ballooning costs are paওrtly to blame. “We did it with Mass Effect. Look at what Baldur’s Gate just did. But look at the teams requiꦉred to do that, especially in today’s world," says Walters. "If you're going to have these incredibly branching, choose your own adventure, choose your own story, choose your own romance, whatever. It’s a huge undertaking.” Worlds Untold might still go down the RPG route “one day,” but the team’s focus is squarely on telling a “really compelling, incredible story” in a world that people “just want to be in all the time.”

Other BioWare veterans recently announced their own new sci-fi endeavor. 

Infinity and beyond

Baldur's Gate defined the shape of the Western RPG as we know it, setting the stage for Dragon Age: Inquisition and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:The Witcher 3 many years later. In fact, we're so familiar with its inn🐓ovations today that it can be difficult to appreciate just how strange and experimental Bioware's pitch was back in 1998. 

The prototype the studio brought to publisher Interplay was an unprecedented fusion of tabletop-style RPG stats and fast-moving isometric combat, the latter inspired by the rise of speedy str🧸ategy games like Command & Conquer. Feargus Urquhart – then a producer at Interplay's Black Isle division, later the head of Obsidian – took a chance. He pushed to grant Bioware the Dungeons & Dragons licence, and it proved an ideal pairing.

Charac𝄹ters flowed straight from the Canadian developer's tabletop sessions into Baldur’s Gate, providing the story with both its villains and memorable companions, such as the dunderheaded yet endearing barbarian Minsc. Bioware worked wonders with the Forgotten Realms setting, drawing from a series of tie-in novels to spin a dark yarn about mortals vying to take the seat of a dead god. Its depiction of the Sword Coast saw magic and prophecy collide with more grounded geopolitical concerns and iron shortages. At the same time, dire warnings in dialogue mingled with Pythonesque comedic interludes.

Somewhere in that juxtaposition, the Realms began to feel real. Baldur’s Gate was a hit, and its sequel shored up Bioware’s success. That game replaced the Sword Coast’s patchwork open world with a more curated collection of druidic forests, visiting circuses, and dragon dens. Its map was dense with chance meetings, terrifying battles and meaningful choices, and it’s still regarded 🐭as a high water mark for the RPG genre. 

Winds howling

In such glowing company, you might expect Black Isle’s spin-off series to lack luster. Icewind Dale was made with Bioware’s engine, but without the developer’s involvement, and took a less ambitious path through the Forgotten Realms, its developers opting for linear dungeon crawling rather than freeform overland adventuring. "Chris Parker laid it out pretty clearly," Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer recently told🎐 the Designer Notes podcast. "We are going to make this in 14 months. We are not going to have companions.'"

Back then, Sawyer was one of a handful of junior designers working on Icewind Dale – without the direction of a le♊ad designer. It sounds like a project primed f✃or disaster, but the narrow focus and deep D&D knowledge of Black Isle's staff saw it through. These dungeons weren’t simply dank caves, but stuffed with sights pulled from the Realms' bestiaries and lore books. 

One level of Sawyer's abandoned dwarven fortress, Dorn's Deep, was home to fire giants, salamanders, and pools of orange lava; another was a villa housing a master thief. A third took the player through a series of botanical domes occupiไed by a dark elf wizard. Meanwhile, umber hulks from the Underdark ploughed unexpectedly through the walls, like abyssal Kool-Aid Men. If the battles were sometimes too grueling, they were correspondingly rewarding for those who'd mastered the Infinity Engine’s ruleset over multiple games. 

Alas, Icewind Dale II has never made it to PlayStation – but even in its absence, you can spend hundreds of hours revisiting the golden age of single-player Dungeons & Dragons on console as enhanced editions of Baldur's Gate, Baldur&a♎pos;s Gate 2🎃, and Icewind Dale came to PS4 in 2019.

Dungeon matters

There are two branches of Bioware's development that you can follow in the wake of Baldur's Gate. One leads to Knights Of The Old Republic, Dragon Age, and Mass Effect – the style of cinematic, story-driven blockbuster that made the studio a household name. The other ends firmly with Neverwinter Nights, the online RPG-slash-development-tool designed to capture the creative freedom of tabletop D&D (re𓆏leased as an enhanced edition for PS4 in 2019). You can co🐼nsider it either an evolutionary full stop, or a starting point that has enabled countless community adventures ever since.

The making of Neverwinter Nights actually predates Baldur's Gate. This was a five-year commitment in an era when games typically came together in less than half that time. Its long gestation can be explained in part by its technical complexity. Not only was this Bioware's first 3D RPG, it was one tꩵhat would connect players together for co-op and competitive encounters across the millennium-period internet.

It would launch with a fully-featured campaign comparable in scope to Baldur's Gate that could be played s🥀olo or with friends. And every element of that campaign could be pulled apart and used as the building blocks for brand-new adventures, which could in turn be shared as tiny downloads online. 

In the end, the🌳 Bioware-directed adventure starting in the titular city of Neverwinter didn't prove the equal of the studio's previous RPGs. But the toolset was taken up by fans, who created MMORPGs, fighting arenas, and sprawling sagas. Bioware did a marvellous job of spotlighting the best player inventions, even funding further community expansions with the backing of publisher Atari. Some of the finest Western RPGs of all time are still to be found within the walls of Neverwinter Nights.

For 🔴several years afterwards, Neverwinter Nights was Bioware's primary recruitment tool for new developers.♊ And over in Poland, CD Projekt Red made its first ever game on the foundations of Bioware's engine; switch to isometric view in The Witcher's original PC release and you can clearly see the resemblance. 

Forever Winter

Don’t mistake Neverwinter (released for PS4 in 2016) for a direct sequel. Made by City Of Heroes developer Cryptic Studios, it’s much closer to a traditional MMORPG, with the muddy graphics and conꦅfusing fights to match. 

Yet it has its perks, including a guest questline – guestline? – written by celebrated Drizzt Do’Urden novelist RA Salvatore, and a history of expansions that keep up with changing events in D&D lore. If you want to be kept abreast of ༒local news in the Forgotten Realms, Neverwinter is the game you ought to be playing. That said, the closest thing to a proper successor to Neverwinter Nights on PlayStation was Sword Coast Legends, released for PS4 in 2016, which replicated both Nights’ Forgotten Realms setting and its desire to empower p✨layers. 

In its Dungeon Master mode, one player could resize dungeons, place chests, designate quest givers, hide secret rooms, and design monster encounters. Then, when adventurers entered their nest, the DM could steer and antagonise them in real time. Sadly, its story campaign failed to live up to the pedigree of Dragon Age: Origins game director Dan Tudge, and the multiplayer mode that once gave Swo꧑rd Coast Legends its USP has shut down, its servers closed. As it stands, no new developer has stepped up to the daunting task of representing Dungeons & Dragons in its entirety on console. Most adaptations of the tabletop game settle for nailing either the lore or the ruleset, but leave out the shared storytelling that sits at the centre of the tabletop hobby.

Daggers out

There's an umber hulk in the room that we haven't been addressing. The vast majority of celebrated D&D games have been developed for PC an🐽d only belatedly ported to PlayStation. As such, they bear the hallmarks of their original platform: a slow pace; an isometric perspective; and an awful lot of tiny boxes filled with text and numbers. 

While you can have a wonderful time with any of them on a telly screen, it's not wrong to want an adaptation that plays to the traditional strengths of Play💞Station: speed; immediacy; and an undeniable sense of cinema. Game developers have been working towards that end for decades now, with mixed results. 

There’s no clear and obvious way to turn dice rolls and character sheets into flowing action, but with Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance (PS2, 2001, re released 2021 for PS5 and PS4), Interplay happened upon a formula that clicked. Similarities to the other Baldur's Gate end with the backdrop. After arriving in the city of the title, you're sent into a cellar by Jennifer Hale to clear out the rats, before stumbling into the sewers ♓to fight thieves, and the crypts to smash skeletons, and then through a portal to kill drow, and so on. 

This momentum and simplicity made the original Dark Alliance a hit on its release – that and the fact that it made tactile use of the DualShock 2 via straightforward melee mechanics. Rarely have clay pots cracked open with such a satisfying crash. A dwindling Black Isle handled the sequel directly,﷽ with diminished results. And if you played Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale in 2012, only the PS3-era light pooled beneath the torch brackets hinted that a full decade had passed since Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance. 

The formula rema✤ined untweaked, and when Diablo 3 arrived on consoles a couple of years later, there was no reason to return to any hack ‘n’ slash pretenders. 

New alliance

When Dark Alliance was rebooted in 2021, the results were less reminiscent of its namesake than 2004's Demon Stone (PS2). Both games pulled heavily from the storytelling of RA Salvatore🧔, slotting adventures in the gaps between the bestselling author's existing works, and enlisting the man himself as an advisor. For Demon Stone, Salvatore even wrote♔ the script, plotting the scrapes of an unlikely trio of new characters – fighter Rannek, sorcerer Illius, and half-drow rogue Zhai - and weaving their stories into the novels he was writing at the time. 

Demon Stone's other draw was its development talent, Stormfront Studios having put together a popular Two Towers adaptation in time for the release of Peter Jackson’s movie. While Rannek was no replacement for Aragorn, Demon Sto💖ne recreated much of the same drama in the Forgotten Realms setting, filling the screen with clanging swords and marauding trolls in heightened siege scenarios. 

Today, 2021's Dark Alliance is your best bet for a followup to Demon Stone, and for a hands-on D&D spectacle of any kind. Rather than give 💝Drizzt another fleeting cameo, Tuque Games stuck Salvatore’s drow hero front and center alongside his closest pals, and had them engage in close combat with gobby goblins beneath the mountains of Icewind Dale. Thanks to the modern business of blocking, dodging and parrying, Dark Alliance is a much deeper battler than its predecessors – and unlike in the RPGs, you get to run a sword through a verbeeg named Gutnir Widebelly yourself, rather than directing somebody else to do it.

This feature originally appeared in Play Magazine. For more great features, interviews, and more, . 

Mac Walters, who worked at BioWare from 2003 - 2023, has given an insight into his career at the Mass Effect studio in an interview with (thanks, ). Walters talked about working on the Mass Effect Legendary Edition a few years ago and how its success helped to convince the writer that it was time to move on and start his studio - which 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:he did earlier this year. 

"One of the great opportunities I had, which kind of came out of the blue, was wor🅺king on Legendary Edition," Walters explains. "That was a project I think we wanted to have greenlit for years. We've been asking to do it, and when the opportunity came up, EA came to us and said, 'Hey, can you do this?' and we were like, 'Yeah, we can do it' - but it wasn't on a roadmap."

Walters explains that it was around this time the studio was also working on other upcoming games, including 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, which made things complicated for the team at BioWꦏare. 

"If you think about a lot of the planning that goes into these games, like with their cycles, that can be four years long," Walters explains. "You plan all thꦍat stuff out, and all of a sudden, we've got this project that's unplanned." The developer says he had to be "a little bit rogue" and "entrepreneurial" to keep Legendary Edition on track without disrupting the other teams. 

"That process reminded me a lot of early days BioWare be꧟cause we were a small scrappy team," Walters recalls, "there was a lot of camaraderie that was formed with that team, I think, because we stayed sma📖ll." The Mass Effect writer then reflects on this experience, adding: "I was like, 'Yeah, this is the future; I think this is how triple-A gaming needs to go.'" 

Due to the success of the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, both financially and critically, but also in terms of how the team performed and got along during development, Walters says: "It just felt like this is the bow on my all the things I've done in Mass Effect […] I don't want to do any mor♍e Mass Effect after this. Why tempt fate?"

Walters says he🃏 then wanted to get stuck into a new IP again - especially after having the op♕portunity to work on BioWare's other IPs from the ground up, including Jade Empire and Anthem. The developer says they asked around to see if this would be possible at BioWare or EA, but "it became pretty clear [that] there probably wouldn't be, at least not for the foreseeable future. That's when I started thinking like, 'No, okay, I think I think I'm done." 

Walters may have moved onto new things, but BioWare's sci-fi series is still ongoing - find out everything you need to know about 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mass Effect 5 with our guide. 

On December 4, aka Dragon Age Day, BioWare celebrated the annual event by finally sharing some news about its upcoming RPG. We finally got a new 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dragon Age Dreadwolf teaser which gave us a good look at Thedas, promised locations we've "never heard of before," and revealed we'd be getting a more in-dep📖th reveal in 'Summer 2024' - which is something to look forward to.

In all the excitement, Gamble shared something on Twitter but deleted it shortly after. "Deleted my post about Dreadwolf because I realized it might be too teaserಞy," the developer revealed in a follow-up tweet. 

The only problem is that Gamble was so quick on the delete button that bar𓆏ely any Dragon Age fans got to see what the original post was. I've searched everywhere and can't seem to find any trace of the original tweet, which is actually kind of impressive considering how easy🧸 it is to screenshot things.

"SCREENSHOTS!!!!! I NEED SCREENSHOTS!!!!!!" one Twitter user has responded to Gamble's tweet. "It’s all good. You can make it up to us by posting about the next Mass Effect game! We’ll call it even," another has suggested - although there's little chance of this happening considering just last month we got a new 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mass Effect 5 teaser trailer for N7 Day. There are also a few people who claim to have seen it but who suddenly go silent when asked for a rundown of what they saw - which seems a little suspiciouඣs. 

For now, we'll just have to hope someon⭕🍷e (mainly Gamble) shares the post again or wait for that summer 2024 window for some more news. 

While we wait, find out what else you should play with our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RPG games list. 

Is there any gameplay? Does this teaser tell us how the game will look? 🧔Have new story details been teased? No, no, and sort of but not really. The 48-second teaser is mostly just set dressing and evocative narration. It's bread crumbs, but after months of eating sand, I reckon Dragon Age fans will happily take bread crumbs. 

"We fight🦂 for everyone, and we always will," begins the first of four sꦑpeakers in the trailer. "The Crows rule Antiva."

"Glory tಞo the risen gods that come to deliver this world," adds another. 

"Grey Wardens don't hide in our castle," says a third speaker, whose voice sounds a lot like Hawke from Dragon Age 2 according to one of our resident Dragon Age scholars. That's just a passing observation, and cou🥃ld just be voice acting overlap rather than canon, but I do hear it. Our mystery Grey Warden concludes: "I won't ask good soldiers to turn tail and run."

Finally, the presumed villain of Dreadwolf – seemingly Fen'Harel, says: "All the w🍌orld will soon sharꦜe the peace and comfort of my reign." 

If we rather generously assume that Dreadwolf's visuals will match or closely resemble the lovingly lit environments featured in the teaser, the RPG ought to be very pretty indeed. In a , 🦋game director Corinne Busche says "we’re sharing a look at a few of the in-game locations you’ll explore on this new adventure (and perhaps a little more for those who listen closely). The stage is set. The Dread Wolf is ready to mꦚake his move." 

The same post teases that, "You’ve visited the lands of Thedas thrice before in our game🅠s and many more times in comics, books, art, and short stories. This time, you’ll be venturing to places unseen and returning to places from long ago."

"This time, however, much more of Thedas is yours to see," BioWare adds. "The desolate, beautiful badlands of the Anderfels with curtains of distant mountainous spires. The twisting canals and gleaming towers of Antiva, where Crows may lurk in any shadow. The turquoise seas of Rivain with its ru👍shes of greenery and hardy sea-faring people. And of course, there’s more.

"We felt this was best for the tale we wanted to tell this time and we hope you enjoy it as much as we have! It’s allowed us to create many more locations than past games, including both some you’ve longed to go to… and some you’v✅e never heard of before!" 

The most tantalizing line in the post may be this: "This long-await🔯ed chapter of Dragon Age is fast approaching – the time close at hand. We’ll see you next summer with answers to your questions, including ones you have yet to ask."

Of course, BioWare's definition of fast is sort of like Bethesda's definition of mostly bug-free, but with trailers and gameplay coming in sum൲mer, we may act𓆉ually be approaching the finish line, folks. 

Earlier this year, BioWare shifted its Star Wars MMO to a new studio to double down on Mass Effect and Dragon Age. 

Mac Walters, who worked at BioWare for 19 years before l𓂃eaving in 2023, is now leading a new studio called Worlds Untold. The remote studio is based in Vancouver, Canada, and joins China-based tech company NetEase Games' portfolio of studios. 

Prior to heading up the new studio, Walters worked as project director for Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, lead writer on Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, and production director on 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. So if you♏'re a fan of those games, you may like what Worlds Untold is cooking up. 

In a press releaౠse, the company reveals that the brand-new studio is developing AAA action-adventure games with "an emphasis on narrative and worldbuilding." Elsewhere, NetEase says Worlds Untold plans to create franchises with "endless possibilities" and "IPs with depth and possibility that can't be contained in a single game, or even a single medium." So expect quite a few related proje🐷cts coming from the new studio. 

Finally, NetEase announces that the team's debut project is currently🐠 in development and is an action-adventure game that takes place in "a near future" and is set in a "breathtaking world filled with mystery and exploration." There are also plenty of roles looking to be filled at Worlds Untold, so if this sounds like the kind of game you'd like to work on, now's the time to apply. 

"We&apos♛;re creating incredible and meaningful stories that we believe are best told and experienced through play. We are starting by crafting worlds that we all dream of discove🅘ring and then will put the player in the leading role of the most unforgettable adventures," Walters reveals in that same press release. 

The Mass Effect de𝓰veloper isn't the only industry veteran on the team. Worlds Untold also features developers who have worked on games like ﷽Metal Gear Solid, Halo, The Sims, Dragon Age, Assassin's Creed, and more. 

Find out about the future of the beloved BioWare series with our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mass Effect 5 guide. 

We still don't officially have a release date for Dragon ♍Age: Dreadwolf, aka Dragon Age 4, but one developer who has worked on the highly anticipated sequel may have just given fans a huge clue. Kevin Scott, a Senior Cinematic Animator at EA, has listed Dragon Age: Dreadwolf as releasing in 202ꦓ4 on their profile. 

In the 'experience' portion of the developer's profile, Scott has written: "Animated gameplay characters using mocap and hand keyed animation for Dragon Age: DreadWolf (2024 releaseꦿ)." This isn't quite confirmation that we're definitely getting BioWare's highly anticipated game next year, but it's enough to get fans excited.

To add more credibility to Scott's suggested release date, this isn't the first time we've had inklings of the game releasing soon. In May of this year, EA inadvertently confirmed that Dragon Age: Dreadwolf is at least a year away in the company's Q4 and FY23 financial report. Here, the studio listed all of the games it plans to release in the next 12 months, and Dragon Age: Dreadwo🎉lf was nowhere to ꦆbe seen. 

Again, this doesn't mean we'll definitely be getting the game next year, just that we very likely won't see it until at least after May 2024. However, things can always change. A few months after the financial results, it was reported that Dragon Age: Dreaꦯdwolf was dealing ཧwith internal delays at BioWare, which was also affecting the development of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mass Effect 5.

Things also appear to be a little unpredictable with Dragon Age: Dreadwolf at BioWare at the moment. In August 2023, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:BioWare laid off 50 developers as part of a plan to ensure "Dragon Age: Dreadwolf is an outstanding game" before later letting go of 澳洲幸运5开奖号🔜码历史查询:all union༺ized Dragon Age: Dreadwolf QA testers in October. This had led to some of the affected employees 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:su🀅ing BioWare for for "shortchangi✅ng" them with low severance pay.

Basically, we'll have to keep our fingers crossed and wait and see when BioWare and EA plan to release Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. Until then, we can always rewatch the upcoming game's 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:leaked gameplay footage which was shared almost a year ago now. 

Need something to play in the meantime? Take a look at our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RPG games list. 

Earlier this week, on November 7, BioWare released the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mass Effect Epsilon teaser, which, alt🔯hough exciting, left fans with more questions than answers. The trailer is only 30ish seconds long and is purposely vague. In it, we see a mysterious figure wearing an N7 uniform and helmet walk down a hallway before pulling out a weapon and the screen cutting to black. Unsurprisingly, theories are already circling about who this character is and what it could mean for the series' future. 

Shortly after the trailer was shared, the 𝔍Mass Effect went into overdrive trying to figure out who this person is. There hav🍸e been some expected guesses, like Commander Shepard or maybe the next game's new antagonist, as well as some less likely predictions like one of the members of the French electronic music duo Daft Punk. 

"Looks like our new protagonist is, in fact, one of the Daft Punk robots🌳," one user shared on the si💟te. "You'll never be HARDER, BETTER, FASTER, STRONGER than Commander Shepard," another replied. 

Other fans have said the character looks like a Warlock from Bungie's MMO Destiny: "Didn't know N7 recruits Destiny Warlocks now, lol," one player said. No wonder the teaser trailer sent GamesRadar+'s Heather Wald's 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:fan theory brain into overdrive.

Unfortunately for us, we'll probably be questioning things for the next few N7 Days as 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mass Effect 5 is still in pre-production as of June 2022. On a more positive note, we did get an update around a year ago which revealed, that although the game is still a little ways off, development is "澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:proceeding very well" with the team at BioWare. 

While we wait to find out more about this one, find out what else we could be playing with our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:games like Mass Effect list. 

Not unlike the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:cryptic relay message that sent 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:our minds reeling in 2022, our latest glimpse gives us more questions than answers. And with pre-production said to still be ongoing earlier this year, it'll likely be quite some time before we find out what this is all pointing towards. But whenever this day comes around, it's always exciting to see the community come alive with thoughts and theories, and as a longtime fan, I just have to join in. If nothing else, the art and teaser h🍬ave once again brought the big questions surrounding Mass Effect 5 right back into𒐪 the spotlight.

A universe of possibility   

In an , franchise director and executive producer Mike Gamble addressed fans on N7 Day – the community event that runs on November 7 every year – and spoke about how rewarding and challenging it is to envision the future of Mass Effect: "We’ve asked ourselves many of the same questions you’ve asked us over the years!," Gamble says. "What happened to everyone you know and love in the games? Who really died? Who had kids with whom? What does a baby Volus sound like? What about all the galaxies? The endings!♐ What the heck is going on with our Asari scientist-turned-Shadowbroker? What about S— nevermind… you get the idea. And of couꩲrse, to those questions, there are answers, but you’ll have to wait to hear them. And anything we do say won’t be easy to find, just like you’ve come to expect from our #N7Day teases." 

Just as Gamble outlines, there are so many questions surrounding the future of the series following Mass Effect: Andromeda. Since Mass Effect 5 was first announced with a trailer featuring Liara T'soni, the biggest areas of speculation have surrounded when the next installment will be set in the timeline of events, and whether or not Shepard will make a return. And with three different possible endings in Mass Effect 3, which one will be considered the canon ending in the follow-up continues to be 🐭one of the biggest debate🐓s among fans. Th⛦is teaser doesn't outright answer any of those questions, of course, 𝓀but the vague teases do add more fuel to the fire of speculation - just as the team intended.  

The mystery figure in N7 armor was naturally the first thing everyone started talking about, with the same thought on most everyone's lips: could this be Shepard? In all honesty, I still don't thౠink the next entry will see Shepard make a comeback. The initial announcement trailer showed an older-looking Liara, and given that Asari can live up to 1000 years, it feels far more likely that we'll be seeing Mass Effect 5 set in the future. The N7 armor we saw in the teaser is also a little different to what we've seen before, and it's giving me future timeline vibes. Given how Mass Effect 3 wraps up, it also feels like Shepard's story is done, and the next game presents an opportunity to introduce us to a fresh cast, with a new protagonist. I'd be more willing to bet on Shepard popping up in the story referentially, rather than having aℱ direct part to play. 

What is more of a head scratcher is where it would be set in relation to the events of Mass Effect: Andromeda. The start of Andromeda takes place between the events of ME2 and ME3 in the year 2185, with Scott or Sarah Ryder awakening some 600 years later in the Andromeda galaxy. In one of the transmissions, there is an Andromeda distress signal detected, which may point towards either the timeline, or the fact that the Aꦕndromeda 💮galaxy will factor into the story of the next game. In the blog post, my eye was also drawn to Gamble cutting off: "What about S-". This could be any number of things, but Scott and Sarah Ryder would absolutely fit the bill. Maybe, just maybe, we'll see the main playable characters of Andromeda🌠 surface. 

Naming a space opera  

Each transmission we got during N7 Day had a specific name: "Epsilon", "Oculon", and "Post-Nebula". Curiously, in the book BioWare: Stories and Secrets from 25 Years of Game Development, there's a section about "naming a sprawling space opera". In it, the book details concept titles for the first game before it ultimately becomes Mass Effect, with words from project director Casey Hudson. All of the transmission names for each fragment of footage put out over 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:N7 Day was originally a conceptual title, With🎐 The Epsilon Effect, The Oculon, and Nebula: Guardians of the Citadel. 

Project director Casey Hudson also goes to give a bit of background into the process of naming Mass Effect, saying: "We knew that the game would have a central space station that would figure prominently 𒁏in the setting, so some of the ideas were about basing the name on that - The Citadel, the Optigon, The Oculon". The Citadel plays a massive role in the story of the Mass Effect trilogy, and the fate of it is determined by the different endings of Mass Effect 3. While it can be severely damaged, it's ultimately still intact in some capacity, whatever the outcome. The name "Post-Nebula" is particularly intriguing, and could feed into the idea we'll be going into the future. If Nebula is tied to the Citadel as a previous concept title suggests, then would it take place after the Citadel? Meaning, it could take place long after the conclusion of Mass Effect 3? Definitely some fo📖od for thought. 

The artwork is also a little trove of eyebrow-raising figures, and the actual location it seems to depict reminds me of the Afterlife club in Omega. Could we be making a trip back there in the future? But what if the relays are destroyed? Honestly, the art just piles questions upon questions. What's more, my eyes immediately honed in on a Turian that looks suspiciously like Garrus Vakarian. Complete with his signature sharpshooter visor, he can be seen standing next to an Asari, which just makes my eyebrows go all the higher. How can Garr🌊us be in the game if it's set in the future? Turians only live for up to 150 years as I understand it, so that would limit the timeline. If Andromeda is referenced, could it take place shortly after ME3 instead of the far future? Or maybe that isn't even Garrus at all. It could very well be a red herring. After all, Gamble has that "not everything is as it seems". 

Interestingly, as many other fans have pointed out, there also appears to be a Geth dressed up in clothes, which if true, could suggest we may not be following on from the Destroy ending option, which sees you eradicate synthetics to rid the universe of the Reapers. The Geth have been a curious inclusion in past teasers, with an earlier piece of artwork⛄ shown within the shape of a Geth head. How or why they play a part is one aspect I🗹'm 🤡dying to find out more about. 

So maybe after all of this I don't know much more than I did to begin with – but as a fan, it's fun to try to get to the bottom of it all. As Gamble , N7 Day is never meant to be "a big thing" and it&♌apos;s all about celebrating the Mass Effect community. Seeing how this little snippet, however brief, brings everyone together to speculate is a part of that "experience of community". Sure, it can all be a little too cryptic for my tastes at times, but it certainly keeps the next installment on our minds. What the future holds for the Sci-Fi RPG remains to be seen, but whenever Mass Effect 5 does arrive, it'll be interesting to look back on all of this and see if we can finally connect all the dots. 

Mass Effect fans and devs use N7 Day 2023 to send a message to BioWare following layoffs and low severance pay.

On November 7, aka N7 Day for Mass Effect fans, developer BioWare shared a vague message with fans that was actually full of binary numbers. This message ended up revealing the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mass Effect Epsilon teaser video - which features an even more mysterious 30-second vide♈o. The jury's still out on what exactly BioWare is trying to tell Mass Effect fans, but♓ one thing that has been discovered by fans is that this isn't the first time we've seen the word 'Epsilon'. 

As highlighted on both and , in the deve༺loper's book, BioWare: Stories and Secrets from 25 Years of Game Development from 2020, we got to see some of the rejected names for Mass Effect during deve🦋lopment. 

Alongside names like 'Eleme🍷nt', 'The Oculon', 'Element Zero', 'Unearthed', and many more, you'll find the name 'The Epsilon Effect'. Again, this doesn't really tell us much but it's interesting that BioWare has brought the word back into conversation over 25 years after it originally pitched it. 

To add to the speculation, it's probably not a coincidence that Epsilon just so happens to be the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet. This has led fans to theorize that BioWare could be bringing back 'The Epsilon Effect' for its next game in the series, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mass Effect 5. It couꦅld even be a huge hint to th💦e upcoming game's title, perhaps Mass Effect: Epsilon is the name we've been waiting to hear from the developer. 

Following all the teasers we received yesterday, Mass Effect 5 devs have revealed they're thinking hard about canon debates: "who really died?" Unfortunately, we're not much closer to getting the answers we desperately need, as BioWare didn't reveal any release date or really any hint as to when we'll be getting a full reveal for Mass Effect 5. It is, after all, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:still in pre-production as of June 2023. 

Not everyone was celebrating yesterday: Mass Effect fans and devs use N7 Day 2023 to send a message to BioWare following layoffs and low severance pay.

As all Mass Effect fans will know, November 7 marks 'N7 Day', where fans of the long-running series come together to celebrate the game, its characters, and everything in between. Things don't feel quite as celebratory this year though, after 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:BioWare laid off 50 developers, "shortchanged" those former employees with low severance pay, and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:laid off all unionized QA workers working on 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dragon Age 4 (at🔯 outsourcing company Keywords Studio) last month. 

As reported by Kotaku's Ethan Gach, seven of the 50 employees let go last month are in the process of suing BioWare and have releasওed a statement (below), revealing that the company is going to court instead of negotiating a settlement. In the statement, the employees involved in the lawsuit mention N7 Day and ask fans to show their support by sharing memes and images relating to the layoffs using the #N7SeveranceDay hashtag.

"The developers involved in the lawsuit are hop🔥ing N7 Day this year will be a reminder to BioWare of the importance of loyalty to your crew," the statement reads. Fans of Mass Effect have come together to take part in #N7SeveranceDay hashtag on , with o𒈔ne Twitter account, @, leading the effort.

This is just one of the ways peop꧋le are sendi🎃ng a message to BioWare on N7 Day. As also reported by , the former QA testers are planning to picket outside of BioWare today (November 7). EA has reportedly released a on the protest, writing: "We hope that Keywords and the union are able to resolve their differences but ultimately BioWare has no role in that process."

The statement continues: "It is our view that any activ🃏ities targeting our offices are mꦅisguided as BioWare is not involved in any way in the negotiations and Epcor Tower has never been a place of employment for Keywords employees." According to , EA attempted to block the protest but the Alberta Labour Relations Board sided with the workers.

Find out everything you need to know about BioWare's current project with our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mass Effect 5 guide.

Will Shen was the lead quest designer and eventually design director on Starfield - meaning he’s responsible for some of the space epic’s very best moments - but he’s actually been working on Bethesda RPGs since Fallout 3. In an interview with , Shen confirmed that he’s now joininꦰg developer Something Wicked Games, a studio that was founded by another ex-Bethesda lead. The team now🅺 houses an all-star lineup of RPG developers with former BioWare, Bethesda, and Obsidian staff employed at the new studio.

Shen said his new role w🔯ould bridge the gap between the studio’s narrative and design teams to help the game achieve a more cohesive vision. “I think one of the things that makes triple-A role-playing games really come together is when it feels like the game has some kind of singular direction,” he said.

Something Wicked’s debut game is a brand-new RPG called Wyrdsong, which combines a dark fantasy setting with real-world myths and historical horrors. We 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:interviewed the studio’s CEO, Jeff Gardine𝓰r, last year to chat about the Lovecraftian horror, and he shed some light on the game’s differing tones.🌺 

“I’m a big fan of contrast, so there’s times when it’s more relaxed and you’re having fun and it’s s🌳ort of seren𝔉e,” Gardiner said. “Then there are these moments of abject horror.” Gardiner also likened the world’s moody but fun atmosphere to Fallout - a shattered world that can still make you laugh.

While we wait for those frights, here are the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RPGs to play right now.

Twitter and Reddit users are reporting receiving Xbox Game Pass app notifications, revealing Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2 were now on ♕the service. We should clarify that the two RꦺPGs aren't on the service right now, and neither Xbox nor developer BioWare - Overhaul Games, if we're talking about the enhanced editions - have ever announced such a move to the subscription service.

It's not even just several Twitter users that have reported receiving the revealing notification. Just below, you can see one example of a Reddit user being notified abo💃ut the two new games, and there's a litany of other examples on of Xbox Game Pass subscribers getting a heads-up about the two older BioWare RPGs.

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It's pretty damn good timing for Xbox users to get access to the two classic Baldur's Gate games. 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Baldur's Gate 3 is set to launch out of early access tomorrow, August 3, but only for PC users, with a PS5 launch set for next month on September 6.

Baldur's Gate 3 is coming to Xb🦄ox consoles, eventually. Unfortunately, there isn't a confirmed release date for the Xbox port of the new RPG, so while Xbox players patiently await the arriva☂l of Baldur's Gate 3, they might want to head back into the vaults of the D&D RPG's storied past.

Check out our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming Xbox Series X games guide for a look ahead at all the console exclusives players can look forward to in the near future. 

This brief status report was actually part of the studio's on the future of Star Wars: The Old Republic, the aging MMO which the studio 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:has now confirmed is being 🤡passed to developer Broadsword. Bioware reiterated its "renewed focus on our two key franchises: Dragon Age and Mass Effect," and offered a brief update on its goals there.⛎ 

"For Dragon Age, we continue to build, polish, and tune an exceptional experience we know our fans will love," general manager Gary McKay writes, giving us the first official word on 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dragon Age 4, Dreadwolf, since EA's indirect confirmation that it's at least a year away. "We can’t wait to share more on this soon."

"For Mass Effect, we continue pre-production with a core team of veteran storytellers who are bringing the deep 🐠franchise history forward in a spectacular new way," McKay adds.

We heard similar assurances 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:back in November 2022, with a blog post from EA telling fans that "pre-production development has been proceeding very well." Just one month earlier, McKay explained that the team was 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:still "envisioning what the future holds for a new single-player Mass Effect game."

McKay's new comments on a fresh approach to the lore or history of the franchise do raise an eyebrow, though for now we can only speculate as to how Mass Ef⛦fect 5 𝓰may apply or explore the rich universe differently. 

We haven't properly seen Mass Effect 5 since a batch of artwork revealed for N7 2022, which quickly divided fans looking to interpret things. 

In a , BioWare general manager Gary McKay said that "while EA will remain SWജTOR's publisher, development of the game will move to our partner and friends at Broadsword, a boutique studio with expertise in ma𝔍naging online games."

McKay saꦇys that current content plans around the game remain in place for the future, but that "new features" will come to🍷 the game under Broadsword, a company that "will give SWTOR the room to grow and flourish."

The statement confirms a report from earlier this month that SWTOR would be moving to allow BioWare more room to work on Mass Effect and Drago𒆙n Age. That lead to concern from fans of the long-running MMO, but senior developers 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:urged them not to panic as details were ironed out. 

McKay's statement confirms not only the studio move, but also BioWare's focus on its single-player RPGs. For 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dragon Age 4, McKay says that BioWare "continues to build, polish, and tune an exceptional experience." When it comes to 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mass Effect 5, he says that that game remains in pre-production "with a core team ⛄of veteran sto🌳rytellers" expanding on the existing franchise lore.

The statement closes with a message from SWTOR executive producer Keith Kanneg, who notes the ongoing success of the MMO, and says that while "no change is easy, [...] it ceಞrtainly helps ⭕that we're all excited about the future of this very special game."

Star Wars: The Old Republic sits firmly on our list of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best MMORPGs.

Earlier this week, it was reported that Star Wars: The Old Republic could be leaving BioWare to continue development at another studio - Ultima Online developer Broadsword, to be exact. As you'd expect, fans were a little apprehensive about the change,ℱ with many concerned that this meant the🍬 popular MMO was heading towards the end of its life. 

Following all of the news, some of BioWare's former and current developers shared their thoughts on the proposed switch, reassuring fans that their beloved Star Wars MMO was safe. One of these developers is Bi🥃oWare executive producer Keith Kanneg, who worked a senior developer on SWTOR having joined the development team prior to its 2014 expansion.

"Whoa whoa, everyone... I was hoping me telling you about the upcoming releases would help you understand this is a new beginning, not the end," Kanneg posts on Star Wars: Theಞ Old Republic . "We have more stories, modernizations, and MMO content already being planned out beyond 7.4." The post ends: "While details are being discussed and finalized behind the scenes, let's not spin this into incorrect theories. I am asking you to hang tight and we'll follow up later with more details when we can."

Elsewhere, Chris Schmidt, former design director at BioWare (now a game director at Infinity Ward), shared a detailed explaining exactly what they think of EA's recently announced 𒅌plans. "For SWTOR: this is a good thing," Schmidt explains, "for BioWare: This is a big loss."🌌  

The developer elaborates in several follow-up tweets. After giving context to what it was like working at BioWare Austin (the studio behind SWTOR) as well as the MMO business in general, Schmidt adds: "Thi﷽s feels like an excitiﷺng new chapter to me, and I’m optimistic about what this means for that team and the game." 

The thread continues: "As far as [BioWare], it would have ce🔴rtainly been in their best in🐼terest as a business to maximize exposure and support for SWTOR publicly over the years since the SWTOR revenue has allowed for the…unusually long…dev cycles to continue for the last several games." 

"But now, without SWTOR," Schmidt adds, "there will be less places to hide heads, R&D, and time. You’ve got blockbuster single-player experiences hitting high Metacritic scores with…2-3 year dev cycles? And the [BioWare] pattern has been…double? Triple that? I think it will be interesting to 🐻see how the EA/BW relationship cඣontinues to evolve in this new world." 

Looking for something new to play? Take a look at our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best MMORPG games list.  

Original story follows...

A new report suggests that development on Star Wars: The Old Republic will soon be moving to a third-party studio, as BioWare refocuses on single-player RPGs like the upcoming 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dragon Age 4 and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mass Effect 5.

According to sources, BioWare parent EA has signed a letter of intent with Broadsword Online Games, which would see "ongoing development and operation" of The Old Republic move to the third-party studio. The deal would see over half of the current development team (estimated to be around 70 to 80 people) on The Old 🌠Republic move to Broadsword, while the remainder of the team could seek other roles within EA or face layoffs.

Broadsword currently handles the ongoing service of other legacy MMOs like Ultima Online and Dark Age 🐎of Camelot. As IGN notes, Broadsword is run by Rob Denton, a BioWare veteran who previously worked on The Old Republic.

The Old Republic remains one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best MMORPGs out there today, launching to strong reviews and keeping an extensive enough fanbase to support ongoing updates evܫen now, a decade later. That's particularly notable given that it's outlasted its era of Star Wars. With Disney revamping the non-movie Star Wars canon in 2014, The Old Republic was among the material that was excised, and it's now the only source of new storytelling in the old continuity.

The Old Republic served as a semi-sequel to the beloved single-player Knights of the Old Republic games. A remake of the original Knights of the Old Republic was announced in 2021, but the project ha⛎s been plagued by reports of development trouble ever since.

This all leaves BioWare to double down on the single-player content it built its fanbase around. After the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:dismal response to projecꦰts like Anthem, BioWare has repeatedly assured fans that the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:next Dragon Age is a fullꦆy si𒉰ngle-player game, and has 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:done the same for Mass Effect.

Time to revisit the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best BioWare games of all time.