Why I'm worried about Dragon Age Dreadwolf—and the Tiamat-sized RPG Baldur's Gate 3 looming over it is just the start

pcgamer.com:

As a huge fan of the Dragon Age series, I'm seriously worried about the impending reveal of Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, which is reported to be getting an official unveiling this summer. This worry stems not just from everything we know so far about its development, but also from my own selfish, personal history with the series, which has been incredibly important to me and, to this day in 2024, I hold great affection for. Oh, and then there's the huge Tiamat-sized dragon in the room, too, but we'll get to that shortly.

We all have landmark gaming experiences. Those moment-in-time, formative gaming events that not only shape or reaffirm our gaming tastes, but linger with us long after the dust has settled on their days in the sun. The games of our lives, so to speak.

For me, one of those all-timers was Dragon Age: Origins. It was a fantasy RPG of such immense game-changing scope and class that PC Gamer described it as «mythical» in its 2009 review, calling it the «RPG of the decade» and awarding it one of the highest scores we've ever doled out, a hot as dragon's breath 94%.

Thanks to the exceptional audio-visual fidelity, buckets of cinematic flair, and—most importantly of all in cementing it as a game of my life—vividly real characters (Morrigan, Alistair, Leliana and more) and mature storytelling, the experience of first playing it remains with me to this day. It was epic in every sense of the word and I, like millions of other PC gamers, had never seen anything like it.

And we didn't see anything like it again for almost 14 years, not until Larian Studios dropped its own landmark game-changer, the peerless Baldur's Gate 3, which did exactly what Dragon Age: Origins had done back in 2009, taking the craft of fantasy RPG to an entirely new level of quality, immersion and reactivity, one far in advance of anything else available today.

Yes, sure, we got more Dragon Age in the years between the two releases, but never again did we get a game that matched Origin's