EA's new Facebook game: Dragon Age Legends
Dragon Age 2
Dragon Age Legends is a Facebook-based strategy RPG launching this February. Perhaps more importantly, it’s a method through which you’ll be able to unlock stuff in the upcoming Dragon Age 2. Legends takes place in Kaiten, a city in the Dragon Age 2 setting of the Free Marches. Players ally themselves with a Viscount named Ravi (nephew of Khedra) in order to save Ravi’s son Elton from danger and protect the Free Marches.
“Alongside their Facebook friends,” according to EA, “players will take on challenging quests within an engaging storyline, earning loot, sharing rewards and growing their kingdom.” EA 2D general manager Mark Spenner hopes to “raise the quality bar” of Facebook games with this offering, in order to draw traditional gamers.
While we don’t know exactly how Legends’ cooperative tactical combat works, we’ll find out soon enough: EA will hold a beta for the title starting in January, with invitations distributed to lucky EA account holders who have Facebook accounts and subscriptions to the Dragon Age Newsletter — and who sign up for the beta, of course.
Information about the beta version of the game (which I’ve signed up for) can be found here. And speaking of the next entry in the Dragon Age saga, Joystiq’s preview thereof is worth a read. Basic takeaway: Dragon Age 2 is to its predecessor what Mass Effect 2 was to its predecessor.
The game has been tightened and the action amped up a bit to better capture (or should I say hold?) the attention of the console crowd. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, given that Dragon Age: Origins was, on consoles, nowhere near as good as on a PC (or so I’ve been told by my console-playing siblings), but it is still frustrating to see some of the more RPGish elements getting cut. At the same time, not all is lost; character classes are apparently also being improved and better-differentiated, so as to make an actual difference in the game.
Two final tidbits: The fact that BioWare is moving away from RPG elements in Dragon Age 2 could still be a promising sign, if there are any plans in the works for Dragon Age 3. They are, after all, bringing back (or bringing in new) RPG elements for Mass Effect 3.
Also, Square Enix just released a couple of free Facebook games. One apparently involves chocobos. So it would seem that elements, at least, of another major RPG franchise are creeping into the social gaming realm.
Oh, and by the way: because this post isn’t already getting disjointed and off-topic enough, may I just say that I really like the fact that the BioWare clothing store uses models, for both their men’s and women’s clothing, that look…well…average. I mean, it almost looks like they just grabbed a couple of people out of offices at the company, stuck the shirts/hoodies/whatever on ’em, and snapped photos. It’s…nice to see.
“The fact that BioWare is moving away from RPG elements in Dragon Age 2 could still be a promising sign, if there are any plans in the works for Dragon Age 3. They are, after all, bringing back (or bringing in new) RPG elements for Mass Effect 3”
To be fair, the sole reason they are bringing RPG elements to ME3 is because a lot of fans panned ME2 for its lack of RPG elements.
Oh well… it’s a safe bet that DAII will know a similar fate from fans 😛
The first DA also had an accompanying minigame – “Dragon Age: Journeys”, a hack-n-slash in the Deep Roads. It was a single player Flash game, though it did connect to Bioware’s servers to give you goodies in DA:O.
I wonder if this will somehow be a sequel to that? Probably not.
@Sergorn: Fair point.
@Infinitron: It’s doubtful that the two would be tied together; EA can’t really assume that people who play the second one will have played the first.
It really is a testament to how good the character dialogue and ministories in the games are that I stuck through and enjoyed the games as much as I did despite being sickened by the combat in every single one of them (though for different reasons).
… Except for the first Mass Effect, I couldn’t stomach that one. Wonky combat, combined with UNSKIPPABLE CUT SCENES (which killed my replay of Mass Effect 2 the split second I realized I was going to have to sit through that long intro sequence again – Your cutscenes aren’t oscar worthy dramas, let me skip them!) absolutely ruined it for me. It is sheer terror having to die because I chose a really dumb weapon specialty, then be reloaded to a checkpoint where I have to sit through 5 minutes of a very blue and angry Counselor Troy yelling at me.
Back on topic, is this the Ultima-ish Facebook game that was being whispered about all this time?
I dunno, I liked the Mass Effect cutscenes.
And no, this isn’t the Ultima Facebook game of rumour and lore.
I’m glad to see that the big guns are aiming at browser-based games, but as always am cut with the back side of the sword because they’re almost universally based on Adobe Flash Player.
While I appreciate its functionality and the general effect it’s had on the web, from a technical and philosophical standpoint it’s pure crap and should either be grossly improved or replaced by something better.
Flash is closed source, controlled exclusively by one company, doesn’t use video hardware acceleration under Linux (and possibly Mac OS; I don’t know), rapes your CPU due to inefficient coding (VLC pulls of near 30-fps in 1920×1080@24bpp in pure software rendering), frequently has multiple security vulnerabilities that when exploited usually result in arbitrary code being executed on your system, crashes frequently (often taking down the browser with it depending on which browser you use) and uses a ridiculous file format for encoding video. In fact, downloading an FLV and playing it in VLC renders fullscreen with hardware acceleration as crisp and smooth as you like, yet the Flash player renders it like an old lady with a knitting needle between her ears.
The NES was better at bit-blitting with a 5 MHz GPU than Flash’s software rendering running on a modern dual-core 64-bit 3.2 GHz CPU, which is 640 times faster than the NES’s 8-bit GPU. Which reminds me, to date there is no release-ready 64-bit version of Flash.
Anyway, what is the deal with all these companies making Flash games? Is there no serious alternative? If Flash were a person I’d buy a gun and empty my clip into him, then happily sit in jail thinking about it for the next 25 years. Dammit…
For the record, Flash can now take advantage of hardware acceleration on the Mac platform, though it took Apple a long enough time to allow Adobe to access that part of the API.
Otherwise, I quite agree with everything you say regarding Flash, especially the security considerations.
Which is sad, because it will probably be the case that this new game will be implemented in Flash. From the handful of bits of media I’ve seen of it, it certainly has a Flash-type look about it, rather than (say) a Torque or Unity look (both of which engines have web players associated with them).
It’d be nice to see more developers moving away from Flash and toward proper engines that have web support, but I can’t see that happening for a few years yet.
My big worry about the continued success of Bioware’s original franchises is that they overlap so much with Origin’s IPs. Why take a risk relaunching Wing Commander and Ultima when you know you can sell Mass Effect and Dragon Age, respectively, to modern gamers?
I suppose that’s true, although:
1) The Mass Effect series will be ending soon; another sci-fi story to step in and fill the void might be nice. That, and no Mass Effect game has dogfights. At least…not once you can control directly.
2) The Dragon Age series will presumably end; it followed hot on the heels of a couple of other fine fantasy RPGs. Presumably, another fine fantasy RPG will emerge after it.
Not that these are any kind of assurances that Ultima and Wing Commander titles will follow in the wake of these series, of course (and truth be told, Wing Commander really wouldn’t be a great fit for BioWare anyhow; they’re RPG devs, not flight sim devs). Still, these series will end in time; perhaps we will recognize what follows?
I think LOAF’s concern is valid – I have been thinking the same thing at times. Though I guess we could probably find exemple of similar settings coexisting within a single publisher.
But arguable relaunching any of those license as AAA games would cosst a lot which probably explains why they’d want to test the water with smaller games like that rumored facebook Ultima project
On a side note, I don’t expect Mass Effect to end any time soon to be honest. ME3 will end Shepard’s story sure but I don’t believe for a second EA will not want to make other games with the license – it’s too lucrative to let it die after only three games.
Personally I wish they’d just do a Jade Empire 2…
Yeah–Mass Effect will keep going as long as they keep selling millions of copies of the latest game. They’re clearly building an expanding franchise around it now: we’ve got comic books, iPhone games, action figures and so on now. I wouldn’t even put too much stock into the idea of a trilogy being the hard limit for the story. Including rough concepts for two potential sequels is almost a standard part of a pitch–so many games can say they were planned as trilogies when they make a big splash (… for example, I’ve got a paragraph about how Privateer Online 3 is going to improve on Privateer Online 2 somewhere…).
We know EA continues to spend money to try and figure out how to revive Origin’s big four IPs… but they aren’t willing to spend *a lot* of money at one time. There must have been a dozen sub-million-dollar projects in the past five years, with two making it out the door (Wing Arena and Lord of Ultima)… their philosophy is to start small and try to catch interest. My question is–what if it works and we have the spike of interest in an Ultima Facebook game or a Crusader PSP title they deemed necessary? A new project would then have to compete with all the other AAA games fighting for a budget… and when it comes down to $10 million for Ultima 10 or for Dragon Age 3, who’s going to win?
My big worry for Wing Commander/Mass Effect isn’t so much that Mass Effect 3 or later would take the place of a Wing Commander–it’s that someone else will have a hit space combat game again and EA will want to cash in with their own take… and they’ll have to decide between a new Wing Commander or doing a spinoff of a current sci-fi IP like Mass Effect or Dead Space. (I believe Bioware Austin actually still has a chunk of the Wing Commander Prophecy team working on Star Wars–they went from Origin to Bootprint to Sony Online to Bioware.)
(Speaking of which: as much as I’d love to see Bioware bring back Ultima I also wonder why Richard Garriott hasn’t done anything with the fact that he owns the ‘Lord British’ character. It feels like he could build a story around that ownership that lets him make an Ultima game in everything but name. I guess I’d like to believe it hasn’t happened because he hopes EA will let him have the whole IP back again someday…)
I always got the sense that Lord British intended to finish off his virtual self’s story with Ultima 9 (certainly, that would have very literally been the case had the Bob White plot been the plot of the released game); he may now only use the label as a self-referential thing.
Or, we may see Lord British appearing in whatever new Portalarium game Garriott has been intimating is in development. Though I’m not personally betting on that outcome.
I guess it is true that Mass Effect will keep going past the end of this trilogy, in much the same way that Microsoft is planning on continuing Halo well past Halo: Reach. But in that same vein, it’s quite possible — I’d almost argue that it’s probable — that BioWare will pass off development of later Mass Effect titles to some third-party studio (Obsidian?) while they move on to new work.
It’s harder to tell, at present, whether the same will be true of the Dragon Age series; they almost seem to be positioning that series in a way that would allow them to churn out new sequels in perpetuity. (Their decision to abandon straightforward character transfer in favour of transferring the “state of the world” (as it were) between games is novel, to say the least, and very much enables that sort of thing.) Then too, they might push that off to another developer, or another BioWare studio (Montreal, maybe?) to handle past a certain point.
BioWare like to switch up titles and franchises; that just seems to be their thing, their forté a new Ultima title from them might not be that infeasible at some point (though I re-iterate that I really can’t see BioWare getting tapped to push out a new Wing Commander title).
Time will tell, I suppose.
Well… keep in mind that Lord British did appear as a character in Lineage, and that there was a General British in Tabula Rasa. So there will probably be a Garriott-like persona in his Portalarium project, and if it is some sort of medieval fantasy game it might Lord British I guess.
Altough to be faire I’d wish EA would strike a deal with him to use the Lord British character in further Ultima games if it goes down that route sometime. There would be something gritting about not having any mention of British if they say, did a post Ultima IX kind of game (kind of liked UO2 ended removing the whole “Lord British is in a deep coma in the Cathedral of Britain and ended refering to him as the “Lost King” due the whole trademark issue)
As for Garriott getting the Ultima rights back, I don’t think this is ever going to happen – and EA will probably keep the Ultima license as long as UO makes some cash for them and it’s probably gonna be for a long time (remember they have that UO for the Asian Market being worked on a well). I guess the “best” that could happen would be to have an Ultima outsourced to Portalarium somewhere down the road – but even that seems unlikely to happen.
Regarding Bioware developping an Ultima, I’d actually would be very skeptical about it. Now granted Bioware has said multiple times that Ultima inspired them (but then what modern RPG studio hasn’t been inspired by Ultima ? :P), but let’s be fair the RPGs they are designed are a FAR cry from an Ultima game. Which is not to say Bioware couldn’t make an Ultima game but that would be different from what they’re used to.
Bioware Mythic might be different based on their UO experience – albeit it’s quite different from crafting an actual single player Ultima game. Also would EA even LET Bioware Mythic work on a single player RPG? AFAIK Mythic has always been a MMO company so…
I would say that this effectively clinches the Lord British issue:
He’ll be back!
Always bet on Lord British.
😛
Except in the courtyard in U7.
Then, bet on the hanging sign.
I really can’t wait to see what Portalarium comes up with.
Please don’t take five years to make a game this time !
The world needs many many more Lord British games.