Ta-Nehisi Coates gets me excited about Dragon Age

I've been a bit meh on Bioware's new game Dragon Age despite being a big fan of the company.  I think there's two main drivers:

1. I'm basically sick of conventional western fantasy as a setting.
2. The marketing has been pretty low key so it hasn't caught my attention aside from some Penny Arcade comics.

I'm really enjoying Avatar: The Last Airbender right now, so I won't go so far as to say I've entirely soured on fantasy, but at this point I tend to see it as a net negative as a setting.  There's just so much that's either been done to death or is problematic.  I prefer settings that deal with issues that we are presently wrestling with or that are unfamiliar.  This is why I want to figure out ways to do more modern settings in DnD.  DnD does fantasy well and has some settings that do work for me such as Eberron, Planescape, maybe Spelljammers, our current tabletop game campaign settings.

Anyhow, Coates has one of the best communities for discussing my cultural interests that I've ever seen.  I tend to get along well with people that are drawn to his writing and he also puts in the work to maintain it.  If you want a place to talk about some of these issues, I really recommend it. I don't actually usually hang out on gaming site boards (with the exception of Brainy Gamer), but if you want to talk about the cultural aspects rather than the mechanical aspects I can't recommend his comment threads highly enough.

Anyways, here's the bit that got me excited about Dragon-Age:

As a fan of Bioware, I've been waiting on Dragon's Age for a long-time now, and it really doesn't disappoint. It reminds me a lot of Oblivion, but better. I think Oblivion offers more options, in terms of customizing, but the game was just too big for me. It felt really lonely, and combat felt non-intuitive. The thing about Dragon's Age is you can actually see people doing cool shit--like ripostes etc.

My one beef with the game is the gore--it's way too much.. But the gore actually makes the game look less mature. It makes it feel like it was built for twelve year olds who want to feel like their doing something forbidden...

Back on story, It felt right to play the descendants of slaves (What can I say? Even when I'm role-playing, I'm hood.), so I picked an elf. I don't want to say too much about the game, but the sequence where you have to storm the castle and save your betrothed is really intense. I'll have more to say as I get further in. But for right now, color me impressed.

Comments

[Matt]

Any chance of a gore setting in the game's options menus? I heard Left 4 Dead 2 does this but haven't confirmed for myself.

[Greg Sanders]

Based on the comments, it sounds like there's an option to turn off the gore that gets stuck to your character (blood stains and the like) but there's not a way to moderate blood fountains.