Bard’s Tale had the same impact on my gaming preferences that Lord of the Rings had on my reading preferences. I still have all three Bard’s Tale games for my Apple II, too bad the disks don’t work and I don’t have anything to play them on.

The mute character is a bit fail for the game – give 2/3 voice choices and there are what 4 answers? Not horrific programming I’d think! That would be the only thing I find annoying so far (only about 2-3 hours in).

but now to DO:A. I will get it as xmas present. I am looking forward to it.

Baldur’s Gate rocked – IMO a lot more than Neverwinter Nights, I am too lazy to analyze why at the moment.
And if DA:O is only a bit like BG, it will entertain me for a long time for sure.

I think not voicing your character is intentional. They would have only a few voices anyways: Human Male/Female, Elf M/F, Dwarf M/F …
They leave it up to YOUR interpretation of your char to envision how he/she sounds, and this is quite smart IMO.

Still, I can understand your point. If there is a lot of dialogue and you actually hear a monologue of a NPC while your char says nothing at all, this is quite irritating.

DA:O success could also mean that nobody needs to re-invent the wheel to make a good game. Love for story and detail and a lot of work put into the content part of the game is what made Baldur’s Gate not only good but great.

I only got maybe an hour of time to play. So anxious to play more, I can’t even focus on work. Been a LONG time since I felt this way.

And why doesn’t someone re-release the Gold Box games!!?

I, too, was defined by the C64 era of CRPGs, and remembering back, it seems like Baldur’s Gate and IWD comprised the cliff of CRPGs; after those defining titles, there was basically nothing, as the platforms took up FPS’ and eventually MMOs. When you think of it, Bioware has pretty much supported the old-school CRPG genre single-handedly.

What really struck me about my limited time in DA was, as you said, the narrative and the life.

Story has been hard to support in MMOs where EVERYONE want’s to be the hero, so quest text ended up being a nuscience to a lot of players. DA brings it back around to the days where the action was an annoying interlude in the narrative.

Part of the remifications of having the story, then, is that the world feels more alive then even MMOs, where the NPCs are usually just standing stock-still, and the other players bunny-hopping around are hardly immersive.

I’m hoping that DA continues with the same story-first-combat-second mantra throughout.