A huge part of the fun of participating in any sort of serial story is chatting about the story with your peers and friends as it progresses.  And as I make my way through the story of Dragon Age, I constantly find myself wanting to chat about the story and my characters.  But I’m extremely sensitive to spoilers.  I’m enjoying this game immensely, and want none of it spoiled for myself, and certainly don’t want to spoil it for anyone else.  So here are the parameters of this discussion:

I’ve progressed in the game to and through the village of Lothering, and am now in the first “world camp”.  If those words are unfamiliar to you, and you don’t want anything spoiled, then proceed no further with this post.  Just promise you’ll come back when they do make sense to you.  And if you’ve progressed past this point in the game, this should provide a clean breaking point for which you to talk about the game, and not discuss anything past this point – out of respect for my wishes to not have anything spoiled.  Also, even though I have only done the Mage’s origins story, I don’t mind mentioning of other origins stories.  Considering the breadth of this game, the origin story seems to be only a small portion of the grand scheme. 

So, to be clear: If you are worried about spoilers, then do not proceed past this point unless you’ve at least got to and through the village of Lothering, and don’t mind discussion of the origins stories.  If you have got past this point, and are ready to chat about the game, then read on!

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You may or may not recall, but in a previous post I talked about a concept that Paul Barnett made me aware of – and that is that every game designer (and gamer) over the age of thirty has their Golden Age of gaming.  It was that time of their lives when computer games or video game were who we were.  And those games that we played shaped forever our perceptions about what we loved in games, and the kinds of games we were passionate about.  The defined, to a large extent, what we considered fun.   For myself, my Golden Age, which I remember with misty-tinged full-bloom recollections, occurred at about a time when what we back then referred to as the CRPGs were at their height.  So my fondest computer games were the Ultima series, the Gold Box series of SSI games, the Eye of the Beholder games by Westwood, and of course Joe Ybarra’s classic Bards Tale games.  Eventually, these games came to include Baldur’s Gate & Icewind Dale, and my mind still balks at the thought of the dozens upon dozens of hours I spent hunkered down in front of a computer screen in the cold hours of predawn navigating my individually created and hand-picked crew of six through the deepest caverns of a land that never existed.

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