David Gaider's comment is:

My take is that if awakening's end is already X years into the "Dragon Age" (as a time period), then there are still another X years before this Age ends. TLDR: lots of stuff can happen in DA world, lots of stories to be told.

Origins beginning may not be day 0 of Dragon Age (as a time period), there could be stories to explore even before that I guess.

yes that what I understand as well. They wanted to get freed from D&D licenses, so they created their own world, their own rules and do what Bethesda & Blizz do.

What can I say, people love to whine for every part of this game, they may as well whine for that. Anyhow a Bioware dev said if they were to do so, they'd use a hawt girl, so it's fine by me, not that I'm too interested.

from David Geider's Post http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/to...1453/1#3061696:

Update: Hawke is voiced http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/to.../index/3069976

Guess thats why a male is on the cover, they probably voiced Hawke to be a male. Tbh I'd rather see them spending their resources on other stuff than a redundant female voiceover.

Redundant? I guess they will do the same as Shepard, so a female voice has to be present.

I played ME only as male but e.g. in kotor, where I played a female toon, it was pretty obvious the game was designed around a male protagonist. Also in Dragon Age: Origins, again, how do you

Spoiler:

have a child with Morrigan when the protagonist is female

?

Sometimes games are designed around specific genres, even if they don't specifically claim so. This doesn't mean you can't play as the other genre, but rather that one genre is more polished. Choosing the "other" genre has its limitations.

If DA2 is more polished for male characters, in case something they haven't already done it, I'd prefer it if they focused their money, time & energy elsewhere than a female voiceover.

Cheers, I'll put spoiler tags on my question as well, someone may not have played the game.

It seems in Origins, plot-wise, both genres well taken care of tho.

The mass effect series is overwhelmingly marketed with a male Shepard but the female Shepard voice artist is unarguably the better of the two and all kinds of awesome.

I don't mind them semi rolling a pre-made character to facilitate fully voiced lines. Conversations really do flow better, but its not without its drawbacks. Just try playing a back guy with Mark Meer's voice in ME2 (awful).

Its surprising just how much more punch NPC dialogue has when your character's name (ie:Shepard) is spoken. And how bloody awkward dialogue can sound when NPCs cannot say your characters name (Dragon Age banter is rife with this).

Side note: Jade Empire was marketed almost exclusively with the female protagonist Wu the Lotus Blossom, on the cover and all. Still no sequel for that...

ok, after Dale's reply on the plot DA plot thing and the re-assurance that in ME2 a female character also works well, it makes sense to have female voiceovers. My prejudice was based mainly on kotor, where

Spoiler:

A female Revan seemed to be unfit in several occasions, including totally missing the romance with Bastila. Carth romance was inferior imo.

About the voice overs, it has good and bad points. The good ones are obviously the improved cinematic experience and we wont have those awful moments where our protagonist don't express emotions and stare to the infinite.

However we also have a bad points. We will loose the role play aspect around our character (it will be his/her story, not our story), the game will probably be shorter and it can cut immersion, its a bit annoying when we choose a line and he/she delivers that line with a completely different tone and emotion that we want to express.

Spoiler:

I agree that the bastilla romance was better (mainly cause i love her character) but the Carth/Revan romance was not that bad either, at least i enjoyed it and it didn't seem unfit at all. Their romance was a lot better than the terrible Shepard/Kaidan... that guy was such a boring character :Z

When we play adventure games, is we not playing our story? then. I also figured we did, but that must just have been me, I'd guess?

Nearly every adventure game (modern at least) have a voiced over character and I've always felt that I was playing, assuming the role of say Sherlock Holmes or Kate Walker.

Also, the whole point about playing our character, I don't seem to get. We're playing a role, as in a character that is not us, even when the main character in an rpg like Baldur's Gate was not voiced e.g. didn't have voice over. The story is not about me in a strange land, it is about my character i.e. the character I'm playing in the game. And like in a play, this character may perform acts, I, as myself, would never do, in real life.

The point of an RPG is for the player to... role play, for the player to imagine himselft as that character in that world and play the game based in our decisions.

That obviously doesn't happen on adventure games, the characters are predetermined and we can't change his/her personality. In most cases the protagonist talks to the player, is more like a journey of two, player and character.

Not quite. It's all a part of the 'suspension of disbelieve' and the nature of the player's duality, even in adventure games, is not quite as simple as you put it.
On a certain level adventure games wouldn't work, if that were the case, I think.

Well i guess... but in most adventures we can't mold the character personality and abilities and thats the essence of role playing.

This is quite interesting but a little off-topic, maybe a mod could move this to a new topic like "comparing adventures to RPGs".

Anyhow, my take is this, roughly speaking RPGs can be divided in Hack & Slash, like Diablo, Dungeon Siege, Icewind Dale, and more heavy on RP elements (e.g. Planescape, Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate ect). Of course there are many games somewhere between those categories.

Hack & slash games are usually lighter on story elements and don't share much with AGs.

Some of the RPGs with heavy RP elements, do have allot in common with AGs and in fact I'd like to see AGs, borrowing elements from them. Some of these games, like Planescape and the older Fallouts don't even require combat for their completion, or if they do it's very little.

Planescape gave us the nameless one, who was like a tabula rasa, instead of pre-fixing things. Planescape could have been an adventure if it was made without combat -which I'm not sure is needed for completing the game-. Of course people still cite torment even today for it's deep roleplaying but couldn't AGs be made in this fashion? I think yes and I'd be interested to see some developer doing it.

I'm a bit concerned about the new art style (which I hope it isn't too stylized) and about the improved combat style (I adore RTwP, and I wouldn't like for that too change).

With that said, I trust BioWare. They haven't let me down yet, so hopefully this won't be the first time. And in the meantime the announcement has convinced me to play through DA:O once again.

Cool, I didn't know that. Of course, it does point out that Dragon Age was released across more platforms (mainly including a PS3 release that MEs lacked) but still, I didn't realise DA:O did so well, especially since I remember reading somewhere that it didn't perform greatly during its first few weeks on the shelves (can't seem to find the link though, I may remember wrong).

Also, the piece compares DA:O to ME 1 (if I understand correcly), while, I believe, it wasn't until the huge success of the second game that the ME franchise reached its full potential for the Bioware-EA executives.

Anyway, it seems that the "total convertion to ME" that has been shouted from forum rooftops for the last couple of days may not be completely true after all. Conversation wheel aside, the combat is said to have retained much of its initial qualities with the rumored changes being more heavily intoruced to the console versions in order to make them equally user-friendly this time around.

I admit getting minor chills when a visual style reminiscent of Samurai Jack was hinted at by some speculators, though...

The info in this thread

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/to...4393/4#3074424


should put some of our fears to rest. Here's something about the combat (from an article in the Game Informer Magazine)

According to the article (from which The Elite Elite) has made a summary, the dialogue will be carried out through a dialogue wheel similar to Mass Effect and the games narrative will be like this:

I'm getting a fairly intuitive feeling that the story might be told like an adventure game then, but we shall see...

Ah excelent news! If they keep the combat in the same lines as the original my biggest fear is gone now :)

Well no-one from Bioware said combat is changing, all they said is "combat like a spartan" :P.