BALDUR'S GATE 15 years on

30 November marked a special anniversay in PC gaming: the 15th anniversary of the release of Baldur's Gate. Released in late 1998, just a few weeks after the all-crushing Half-Life, Baldur's Gate had every bit as major an impact on gaming. It was the first RPG released by BioWare, still one of the biggest names in the business, and arguably saved the Western RPG genre from descending into obscurity.

Interestingly, the original box art de-emphasised the Dungeons and Dragons ties to a tiny logo at the bottom of the box.

BioWare was founded in Edmonton, Canada in February 1995 by three medical doctors. Ray Muzyka, Augustine Yip and Greg Zeschuk were newly-graduated, but more interested in games than medicine. Pooling their resources, they set up the company and quickly began work on their first game, a MechWarrior-alike called Shattered Steel. Unlike the rough road to success faced by many publishers, BioWare had some early luck in being courted by no less than seven different publishers. They eventually - and fatefully - elected to go with Interplay.

Shattered Steel was a modest success and BioWare began discussions with Interplay over their next project. They show off some tech ideas and demos they had been working on and one immediately grabbed the attention of the guys at Interplay for melding real-time combat with large, explorable areas. This was a good fit with the RPG genre which had made Interplay famous (they had made their name with Wasteland and the Bard's Tale series) but which had become less dominant in recent years. Interplay had scored a notable success with Fallout (released in 1996) but the age of massive RPG sales seemed to be a thing of the past. BioWare's nascent engine was attracted for combining the linchpins of RPG design - exploration and character generation - with real-time combat and drag-select capabilities more reminiscent of games like Command and Conquer and WarCraft, which were huge successes at the time. The final piece of the puzzle was that Interplay had secured the video game rights to Dungeons and Dragons from SSI and had been looking for a good fit for the franchise. So it was announced that BioWare's second game would be an RPG called Baldur's Gate. It would use the D&D game rules, be set in the Forgotten Realms fantasy universe and feature real-time combat.

To say there was scepticism over this news would be an understatement. There hadn't been a genuinely classic D&D RPG since Eye of the Beholder II, released in 1992, and the most recent high-profile releases (Blood and Magic and Descent to Undermountain) had been unmitigated disasters. The RPG fanbase was also lukewarm on the idea of the game being in real-time, as Fallout had show what could still be done with turn-based combat. BioWare's lack of experience was also a concern.

Most players will remember their first - usually exceedingly brief - encounter with Ankhegs.

However, this scepticism soon turned to cautious excitement. Early screenshots showed a (relatively, for the time) lush, vibrant art style. Interplay soon began showing signs of palpable excitement over the game as builds came in. In fact, the 'Infinity Engine' so impressed them that they had their own internal RPG development division, Black Isle Studios, use it for their own projects. Doubts over the combat were assuaged when it was revealed that the game could be paused at any time, but orders could still be issued. This approach mixed the very best of turn-based combat (being able to consider the battlefield and all available combat options at leisure) and the immediacy of real-time fighting. It was such a successful idea that it was implemented in every single RPG BioWare would go on to release (aside from the multiplayer-only The Old Republic).

Baldur's Gate was released in November 1998, barely one month after the release of Half-Life and six after StarCraft, two other games that completely redefined their genres. Those opening the box were greeted with an unprecedented sight: the game shipped on five CD-ROMs. A full install would take up about 1.5GB of hard disk space, a jaw-dropping amount at a time when most games still took up a few hundred at most (Half-Life clocked in at 400MB and was considered large; StarCraft scraped barely 180MB). The game wasn't in 3D, but its 2D artwork, complex animations and AI routines all put a heavy load on processors and RAM, with only the most powerful PCs capable of running the game at its maximum potential. But still, it was a huge achievement.

The game allowed the player to customise the protagonist character but all of the other party members were NPCs encountered wandering the gameworld, complete with their own motivations, backstories and goals (you could have a player-created party by 'cheating' using the multiplayer system, but this took away one of the key selling-points of the game). The game threw curveballs at the player to emphasise this point: two of the earliest NPCs you meet and can recruit into the party are evil, and will bicker with the 'good'-aligned members until someone loses their temper and violence erupts. Elements like this required the player to understand and manage their party-members and their interrelationships, something almost unprecedented up to that time. Another character the player can recruit, fan-favourite Minsc, is a mighty warrior but is on a rescue mission: should the player delay Minsc from completing his mission for too long, Minsc will leave the party and possibly attack the other characters in a violent frenzy. With a large number of recruitable characters available, this made the total number of party mixes very large and, combined with the ability to modify the main character however the player wanted, made with a high degree of replayability.

Montaron and Xzar are arseholes, seriously drop them like hot potatoes ASAP.

It also helped that the story was moderately involving, with the player drawn into a labyrinthine plot involving contaminated weapons and armour, political machinations in the city-state of Baldur's Gate and bandits and monsters engaging in raids and attacks up and down the Sword Coast. Atmospheric cut scenes would discuss the main character's role in all of this, and involve some major story developments in the Forgotten Realms world itself (adding an extra element of interest for players already familiar with that setting from the novels and earlier video games). The gameplay was superb, with the combat being fast-paced and challenging, although some complained a little too challenging at times. It was possible to meet creatures early in the game which could kill you with ease, and the game could be almost insurmountable unless you knew the maxim, "Give everyone ranged weapons!" Once you knew the game's systems, however, great enjoyment could be taken from beating its challenges.

Baldur's Gate would be a huge success, selling 1.5 million copies in its first year on sale. Chicken feed today for a triple-A roleplaying game (BioWare's Mass Effect 3 would sell 3 million copies in its first month on sale in 2012), but hugely impressive at the time. BioWare would quickly deliver a well-received expansion, Tales of the Sword Coast, before starting work on the inevitable Baldur's Gate II. Black Isle Studios would help bridge the gap, releasing Planescape: Torment (arguably still the greatest Western RPG of all time) in December 1999 and Icewind Dale (set in the same world as Baldur's Gate but a thousand miles away and seventy years earlier) in June 2000 before helping BioWare complete and ship Baldur's Gate II in October 2000. Dwarfing its predecessor in scale, scope and ambition (though fortunately, thanks to much better compression, not number of discs), Baldur's Gate II remains the largest and longest RPG made by BioWare to date, and still the gold standard against which all of their other games are measured.

Baldur's Gate's influence has been huge. Everything BioWare has done since, from Knights of the Old Republic to their currently massive Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises, stems from that first, 2D, modestly-budged game. Though their games have gotten flashier and moved into full 3D, the DNA of Baldur's Gate can be still be seen with their latest games still having pausable combat and a structure (a linear opening and concluding section with a large, open section in the middle) very similar to that of the original. In-jokes about the original abound (Commander Shepard getting his own miniature space hamster in Mass Effect 2, for example). Even the original game has found a curious new audience via Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, released by Beamdog in 2012 for PC, Mac and tablets such as the Apple iPad. Large numbers of hardcore fans of the game have spent thousands of man-hours modifying the original game, allowing it to run on modern PCs in higher graphics resolutions, with new quests and weapons added. Essential mods also allow the game to be run in the Baldur's Gate II version of the Infinity Engine, with better graphics and customisation available.

Baldur's Gate is one of the most important RPGs ever released, despite being overshadowed by its sequel and its label-mate Planescape: Torment, and still a hugely playable game even today.

Dragon Age II

As the lands of Ferelden are overrun by a Blight, the Hawke family escapes across the Waking Sea to the city of Kirkwall. Here they make their new home, but the city is riven by tensions between the templars, the Chantry and the mages of the city. There is also trouble brewing between the natives and the Ferelden refugees swamping the city, as well as a boat-load of Qunari who have taken refuge in Kirkwall despite their disdain for it. Over the course of seven years, one of the Hawkes will rise to become the Champion of Kirkwall and will decide the fate of the city...and possibly all of Thedas.

Dragon Age II is the successor game to Dragon Age: Origins, although not a sequel in the traditional sense. It takes place in a different location with a (mostly) different cast of characters with, unusually, a much smaller and tighter focus than the first game in the series. These changes have proved controversial, with praise for the focus, the writing and the characters being contrasted with harsh criticisms of gameplay changes and problems resulting from the game's rushed development.

BioWare released Dragon Age II in early 2011, only eighteen months after the release of Origins. Electronic Arts, which took over BioWare shortly before Origins's release in late 2009, is alleged to have mandated a 'quickie' sequel to be developed on a very tight time schedule and budget to help make up for the lengthy (and therefore expensive) five-year development of Origins itself. There was resistance to this at BioWare - the lead designer of Origins quit in protest, fearing the game would suffer from being rushed out of the door - but ultimately they had to comply. At the same time, EA seem to have been rather impressed with Mass Effect 2 and various mechanics from that game, such as the dialogue wheel and the loyalty missions, were transposed over to Dragon Age II.

The result is a schizophrenic game that hangs between some excellent conceptual ideas, characters and writing but in which the gameplay feels like it's been compromised to make up for it. It's still very playable and very enjoyable, but it does feel like a game that's been rushed out before it was fully ready.

To deal with the bad issues first, the most annoying problem is combat. Battles in the game start in the traditional manner with you spotting a bunch of enemies and engaging them. However, most battles will see additional 'waves' of enemies arriving (usually just as you think the battle is about to end) who can't be seen coming and can attack from any direction. Early in the game there seems to be more care taken about how these enemies arrive (jumping down from rooftoops or rushing in from nearby buildings) but by the end the designers have given up and enemies simply materialise directly onto the battlefield. This means that positioning your characters in the best place to have an impact on combat is now futile, as you can be swamped from any direction at any time and not be able to do anything about it. The developers help you out by turning off the 'friendly fire' option on area-of-effect spells (you can switch it back on again at the higher difficulty levels), so you can firestorm the heck out of massed gangs of enemy without fear of sustaining injury, but this simply removes the (limited, but still present) tactical realism of the first game and makes the whole thing feel too arcadey.

This is not helped by the fact that Dragon Age II has simplified inventory management beyond even the heavily-streamlined mechanics of the original. Your companions' armour cannot be changed at all, although you can give them different magical amulets and rings. Only Hawke's weapons and equipment can be changed at will.

Another major problem is the re-use of the same maps for locations. All the mines in the game have exactly the same lay-out as one another. The same is true for mansions, caves and sewers. The developers drop different partitions into the maps to try to change things up, but they are all clearly the same places (and the mini-map never changes to take into account the partitions, often resulting in you going down dead-end passages which are shown as being open on the map). Obviously this is a result of the crippling budget issues, but even so it's repetitive and monotonous to the point of boredom.

The final issue is the lack of choice in the game: major events happen in the game which it is impossible for you to influence, even when it feels like you should be able to (some of Anders's actions in the endgame, most notably). This silliness reaches its zenith in the climactic battle where you have a lot of choices to make and the battle ends up unfolding more or less the same way regardless. The much greater freedom and resonance from your decisions seen in Origins is absent here.

So, weaker combat than Origins (and Origins itself was riddled with some major problems in that regard anyway), a lack of choice and some seriously bland locations should all make for a poor game, right? Not entirely. Dragon Age II does do a lot of other things right.

Most importantly, it is far better-written than Origins. Dialogue is less expositionary and portentous. Instead, it's more naturalistic and enjoyable. The voice acting is superior right across the board and the companion characters are more interesting. The 'loyalty mission' mechanic from Mass Effect 2 also helps in this area. Each companion has their own interests, problems and issues to deal with, and by helping them out you can improve their loyalty to you. This will determine who stays with you, who turns against you and who flees during the culminating battle. It's a nice idea as completionists will want to complete all of the companion quests, resulting in a better understanding of the characters (in Origins there was a whole bunch of characters I left in camp and never bothered with because the game never gave me a reason to use them over my core team) and their relationships with one another. BioWare have done a better job of giving the characters their own arcs (some rather tragic) and making them deeper and more complex than those from the first game.

Additionally, the story and worldbuilding are much better-integrated with one another. Origins suffered from presenting Thedas as yet another epic fantasy identikit landscape, with the more interesting background elements (such as the the templar/mage tensions and the Qunari) kept to one side in favour of dealing with the generic horde of generic monsters. Dragon Age II, on the other hand, brings these elements front-and-centre and makes them far more compelling as a result. The game also tries to make up for its lack of scale and smaller number of locations by using Kirkwall as a city in which the affairs of the larger world are both reflected in micro and can also cause reverberations across the continent, acting as a sort-of medieval fantasy version of Babylon 5's titular space station. It's an idea that almost works, though the fall-out from the events of this game will not fully be explored until Dragon Age: Inquisition (the forthcoming third game in the series). Dragon Age II substitutes the epic scale of Origins for something more focused and intimate which has its drawbacks (Kirkwall is a well-designed city but you'll be sick of it by the end of the game) but broadly works in furthering the game's themes of tolerance, coexistence and family.

Dragon Age II (***½) is a far cry from the unmitigated disaster some have labelled it as. It has some problems, sure, but then so did Origins. In fact, the two games seem to have swapped their issues: Origins had better combat but poorer writing. Dragon Age II's combat is less satisfying but the writing, story and characters are superior. Ultimately, the two balance out, leaving Dragon Age II a reasonable - if flawed - companion game to the flawed - but enjoyable - original game. The game is available now in the UK (PC, X-Box 360, PlayStation 3) and USA (PC, X-Box 360, PlayStation 3).

Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening

Several months have passed since the last surviving Grey Wardens in Ferelden defeated the Blight, ended the Ferelden civil war and restored peace to the lands. The hero of that war has found a new job as commander of Vigil's Keep, from where he (or she) will rule over the province of Amaranthine and try to replenish the ranks of the Grey Wardens. However, when Vigil's Keep falls under attack from the supposedly-vanquished darkspawn before she (or he) even arrives, it becomes clear that Ferelden is in danger once again.

Awakening is the expansion pack to Dragon Age: Origins, adding a chunky new storyline (weighing in at around 20-odd hours), numerous new locations and five new companion characters to the mix, as well as a number of modest improvements to the game engine and a plethora of new spells and skills. The default review for expansion packs is, "If you liked the original, you'll love this," and whilst that's true for Awakening it is also true that it may appeal to you even if you disliked the original.

Awakening is a tighter, marginally better-written and characterised and considerably better-paced game than Dragon Age: Origins itself. It often took a conscious effort of will to force myself to load up Origins during the interminable midgame, whilst I tore through Awakening in a couple of days or so. The storyline is more interesting, since rather being another epic battle against the vast forces of evil, it instead explores the aftermath of such a conflict and also delves back into the reasons for it. Looking back, there's rather a lot that Dragon Age: Origins left unexplained about the Blights and why they happen, and Awakening is happy to fill it in, adding depth and understanding to the first game whilst also improving on it.

Some will bemoan the lack of Dragon Age: Origins's cast of characters, though I found them mostly an uninteresting bunch. I did find it odd that arguably the least interesting, Oghren, is the only playable character to continue into this game. Other than that, the characters in Awakening are improvements. Justice, a spirit of law and order forced into the body of a dead human, feels like a character imported from Planescape: Torment with his moody musings on ideology and its rigidity providing some (moderately) intellectual food for thought. Anders, a persecuted and highly sarcastic mage, adds some colour and humour to the game. Nathaniel, the son of your enemy Rendon Howe from the first game, is an interesting addition as he starts out hating you and only over the course of many hours of adventuring learns the truth about his father and how he can escape his father's legacy to become his own man. Standard fare, perhaps, but well-handled.

Where Awakening scores its biggest points is in turning the darkspawn from a raging morass of fanatical monsters into more of a civilisation with different factions and leaders. The threat of one such hostile faction is kept front-and-centre in the game, with side-quests presented firmly as sidelines and not confusing matters. Dragon Age was rather unconvincing in how the darkspawn were a raging menace for the first 10 hours of the game and then put on hold for the next 40-odd hours whilst you dealt with Loghain and then suddenly the darkspawn were back as the main bad guys for the endgame, but Awakening maintains focus throughout. Awakening also abandons the somewhat cheesy 'campfire' mechanic from the first game to give you a permanent base of operations, Vigil's Keep. In between quests it's a good idea to repair to the Keep to offload loot and talk to the keep's inhabitants, who keep up a steady stream of news and provide new quests, and equipment to help in your adventure. You also have the ability to upgrade the Keep by repairing its walls, bringing in new merchants and reinforcing its soldiery. It's another nod for this franchise towards the excellent Baldur's Gate II (though you only have the choice of one base of operations) and this one works a lot better, especially when the endgame asks some really hard moral questions of the player.

On the downside, some of the UI oddities of Dragon Age: Origins remain intact. Characters knocked back from melee by spells or attacks will just stand there a few feet away from the fight until you order them directly back into it. The camera controls remain as mixed a bag as in the original game. Sometimes quests will be rendered un-completable without warning: for example, having recruited a new follower I was directed to return to Vigil's Keep to induct them into the ranks of the Grey Wardens. Yet upon returning to the Keep, whenever I talked to the seneschal to start the procedure, instead he'd demand an answer about an unrelated story event. Replying yes would instigate the end of the whole game, making it impossible to formally induct the new follower into the ranks.

Still, these problems aside Awakening achieves a lot of the promise left unfulfilled by Dragon Age: Origins and works as both an effective epilogue to that game and a bridge to the controversial Dragon Age II.

Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening (****½) is a significant improvement over the base game in terms of writing, structure and characters. The game is available now - in an 'Ultimate Edition' also including the original game - in the UK (PC, X-Box 360, PlayStation 3) and USA (PC, X-Box 360, PlayStation 3).

Dragon Age: Origins

The lands of Ferelden are threatened by a Blight, a horde of monstrous creatures known as darkspawn erupting from underground and destroying everything in sight. The Grey Wardens are charged with defending the land against the darkspawn. In alliance with the King of Ferelden, the Grey Wardens are assembling an army to face the Blight at Ostagar, but treachery awaits and it falls to the order's latest recruit to help save Ferelden.

Dragon Age: Origins is BioWare's reflective look at their own origin (so to speak). It's a big, broad, swords and sorcery epic meant to evoke memories of the Baldur's Gate series, where BioWare got started in RPGs. It's also in 3D, with streamlined controls, inventory management and in-engine cut-scenes. It's BioWare's attempt to blend their original, more hardcore RPGs with their later, stripped-back and more cinematic games like the Mass Effect series. It's a game that tries to balance the old with the new and does not quite succeed.

Which is not to say it doesn't have a go. The game is huge, taking upwards of 50 hours to complete. Cleverly, the game reorganises its opening two hour prologue based on your race and class: a dwaven noble starts in a separate location to a human mage, with a totally different cast of supporting characters, enemies and opening quests. The fact that you can replay the game several times and get a different opening, with the various versions not aligning until you reach Ostagar, is quite clever and rewards replaying the game. Indeed, the choices in these sections reverberate throughout the whole game, with your eventual return to your starting location allowing you to address unfinished business. It's the game's main selling point and is something that is handled very well, making it all the more bemusing that the concept was completely chucked out the window for the two sequels.

As is traditional with BioWare games, your main character is fully customisable but the supporting cast are set in stone. You can accumulate up to ten companion characters throughout the course of the game and take three of them with you on missions. Your inactive party members hang out at a campsite you can periodically visit to exchange information, form friendships (and even romantic relationships) and improve everyone's equipment. The game has a reputation system for each character, and winning their trust will give you bonuses in combat and open up additional questlines. It's a nice idea but also one that's easy to neglect. The game also treats morally ambiguous sorceress Morrigan and sarcastic warrior Alistair as almost the secondary main characters, each with huge roles to play in the endgame, which is rather bizarre if you've just gone through 95% of the game favouring other characters instead. All of the companion characters are nicely-developed, though it's far from the strongest cast BioWare have produced for a game and some self-derivation can be detected: Shale is awesome, for example, but feels a little too reminiscent of Knights of the Old Republic's HK-47.

You spend the game doing what you usually do in a BioWare games: a broad variety of quests, varying from the mundane to the epic, and getting into lots of conversations and fights. A lot of fights: you seem to spend the overwhelming majority of the game in combat, and violence seems to be the solution to almost every problem in the game. There's a few quests based on diplomacy and dialogue, and a few fights can be avoided through intimidating or persuading the enemy, but otherwise be prepared to do a ton of fighting. Fortunately, the old 'hit space to pause' option is still present and correct, allowing you to assign orders to characters and take stock of the battle as it develops. A quickbar allows easy access to abilities, spells and weapons. Combat is generally satisfying, although health spells feel a little weak (at high level they restore so few hit-points it's almost not worth bothering with them). The biggest weakness is positioning: enemy units can clip or shove past your units with ease, making it impossible to create bottlenecks in corridors and engage the enemy with warriors whilst wizards and ranged fighters engage from afar. This seriously limits tactical options and can make fighting large numbers of tough enemies particularly difficult. Some abilities also feel overpowered: the enemy's ability to encase your characters in null-magic zones where healing magic simply does not work can result in total party wipe-outs all too easily.

In technical terms, the game is okay. Graphically it looks solid on PC (but a bit washed-out on consoles) and mods are available to improve textures further. The game is a bit flaky on multi-core PCs but runs fine if you assign it to run on just one core. Camera control is a bit of an issue: the PC version allows you to play the game from an overhead viewpoint (reminiscent of Neverwinter Nights except, bizarrely for a seven years-newer game, far less customisable) but you can't zoom out very far, and enemies often engage you from outside this viewing range. Switching to the over-the-shoulder view (which the consoles are limited to) is great for spotting distant enemies and engaging them at range, but is useless for melee. You can switch between them easily enough, but it feels a bit annoying you can't stay in the viewpoint you favour throughout the game. The overhead view also sometimes seems to get confused on whether it should be 'locked onto' your selected character or allowing you to free-roam.

The writing is a mixed bag. A lot of dialogue in the game is obvious, expositionary and risible, not helped by severely variable voice acting (Claudia Black is the standout as Morrigan). There are attempts at nuanced characterisation - key villain Loghain has his reasons for doing what he's doing, though he's such an unrepentant martinet that most players will feel zero sympathy for him - but they mostly fall flat. The game also makes a nod towards gritty realism through its political infighting and bloody combat, though the game goes completely over-the-top with your characters walking out of fights covered head-to-foot in gore. The political angle also doesn't work very well due to the politics being rather boring and it's difficult to care about Ferelden when you spend most of the game hearing about how isolationist and racist it is, riven by internal conflicts with few genuinely good people in positions of authority.

Despite the clunky writing, poor camera controls and focus on violence as the solution to just about everything, the game just about manages to keep its head above water. It's satisfyingly huge and the worldbuilding is derivative (a mash-up of standard fantasy tropes with more than a bit of inspiration from George R.R. Martin) but somewhat interesting. The differing opening sections of the game give some good replay value. Combat is solid if unspectacular. There's a germ of a really good game here, but there's also an overwhelming feeling of blandness and predictability that rears its head all too often.

Dragon Age: Origins (***½) is a very solid game from BioWare, although it's self-reflection on BioWare's past is rather pointless: the Baldur's Gate series is still extremely playable and frankly on almost every front bar the technical one are better games than Dragon Age. For those simply after a big, enjoyable fantasy RPG, Dragon Age certainly fits the bill. Its ambition is impressive and even in failing to fully achieve it, it's still very playable and worth a look. The game is available now - in an 'Ultimate Edition' also including its expansion Awakenings and several DLC episodes - in the UK (PC, X-Box 360, PlayStation 3) and USA (PC, X-Box 360, PlayStation 3).

Mass Effect 3: Leviathan and Omega

When Mass Effect 3 was released a year ago, it was known that the game would be expanded by the arrival of extra missions via DLC (downloadable content). Because the game's (highly controversial) ending made any more missions set after the game nonsensical, these DLC episodes take place earlier during the game's timeframe, and can be accessed via the save the game automatically generates when you finish it (to just before the assault on the Cerberus base).

The first of the two story-driven DLCs to appear so far is Leviathan. This episode picks up on a dangling plot thread from Mass Effect 2, where it was revealed that a Reaper named the Leviathan of Dis had been destroyed by an unknown force of tremendous power. In the DLC Commander Shepard is contacted by a scientist who has discovered what killed Leviathan, but is killed himself before he can impart that knowledge. Shepard has to follow the scientist's trail of research to discover the location of Leviathan's killer, and whether it can be employed to help in the war against the Reapers.

Gameplay-wise, Leviathan is split into two distinct sections. The first section is set in the scientist's lab and sees Shepard investigating artifacts and computer logs to piece together a fuller picture of what happened. Several excursions via the Normandy to alien planets follow, with traditional combat missions (and one creepy mission dealing with a base full of indoctrinated scientists) leading to the discovery of more clues. The DLC concludes with an underwater showdown between Shepard and Leviathan's enemy, which is a bit cheesy and mainly seems to serve as a bit of retconned foreshadowing for the end of Mass Effect 3 proper (and as such may be enjoyed more by people playing through the game for the first time with all the DLC pre-installed).

Leviathan is, from a gameplay perspective, lightweight but from a lore and story POV, a bit more interesting than expected. There's some major backstory revelations about the Reapers and some very good character-building for EDI, who gets to play a big role in the investigation sections.

The more eagerly-awaited of the two DLCs was Omega, which picks up on another plot thread left dangling from Mass Effect 3 proper. In that game it was revealed that Cerberus had taken control of Omega, the 'hive of scum and villainy' that you spent some time on in Mass Effect 2. Omega's crimelord boss, Aria T'Loak, was unimpressed by this move and spent most of Mass Effect 3 trying to build up a coalition of forces to retake Omega. In the DLC she succeeds, and employs Shepard (and just Shepard; none of the rest of the Normandy crew can take part) to help out.

Omega is a long series of combat missions, undertaken with Aria T'Loak and a new character called Nyreen Kandros, the first female turian encountered in the series. The absence of most of the regular Mass Effect cast and the inability to choose your own squad for the combat missions is grating, but the game is able to turn this to its advantage by focusing on the characters of Aria and Nyreen and developing a complex backstory between them. The DLC is interesting in that it's one of the few chunks of the Mass Effect universe where Shepard is more of an observer of events rather than the crucible around which they revolve, and is more interesting for that. The DLC also features a better-than-average villain in the form of General Petrovsky, a Cerberus officer who is unusually sensible and logical for a bad guy. Arguably the DLC's real triumph is in allowing Aria (one of the most unrepentantly amoral characters in the whole series) to soften a little under Shepard's influence without destroying the character, and doing so through some via good characterisation related to the new character of Nyreen. It's a subtle element that's rather under-developed given the combat-oriented nature of the DLC, but one that gives the episode more depth that it first appears.

Both DLCs (***½ each) are playable, fun and feature some lore and background revelations that enhance the enjoyment of the Mass Effect universe. However, they are also rather short (2-3 hours each) and the degree to which players smarting from the mishandling of the ending of Mass Effect 3 proper will want to play them is debatable. They are available now on the X-Box 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.

DRAGON AGE III will be a next-gen title

It's been claimed that Dragon Age III has been upgraded from a PS3/X-Box 360 title and will instead launch on the next-generation versions of both consoles. A date of (financial year) 2014 is given, tentatively giving credence to reports that the new consoles will launch before the end of 2013 and Dragon Age III may be a launch title for them.

Not entirely surprising news, especially given the rumours that BioWare may make Dragon Age III much more open and freeform than any of their previous titles (and more like Bethesda's RPGs).

BioWare confirm a new MASS EFFECT game and a new IP

The co-founders of BioWare, Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka, today announced that they are retiring from the company they set up almost twenty years ago. Whilst that in itself has sparked a storm of debate online about why they are leaving - some fans citing the arguably declining quality of their games since BioWare was taken over by Electronic Arts - even more interesting is a statement by Aaryn Flynn, the head of the company's Edmonton and Montreal studios.

Flynn, in a clearly calming-the-waters move, reveals that BioWare are currently actively developing three projects. One of these is the recently-confirmed Dragon Age III: Inquisition, which looks set to launch in late 2013.

Secondly, he confirms that the Mass Effect team is, as expected, working on the long-awaited Omega DLC, which will round off the trilogy's last remaining major unfinished storyline. However, he also unexpectedly confirmed that the team is also starting work on a new, full game set in that universe. Based on previous tidbits, it appears that this new game might be a prequel set centuries or even millennia before the existing trilogy. If true, this will fascinatingly open up the possibility of a game featuring no human characters at all (as the trilogy is itself set only thirty years after humans make contact with the Citadel races).

Finally, he also reveals that BioWare are developing a whole new IP and ficitional universe, based on all-new tech. I'd wager that this game is probably in the earliest stages of development and may be aimed at the next generation of consoles.