And the news from Bioware keeps on coming 🙂 Some of it is good, and some is not so exciting (for me at least)
They’ve released on their wiki site information about some of the new Mage spells which do sounds pretty darn cool! This is coupled with the announcement that one of the new specialization lines for mages is the Battlemage. But one of my concerns from my previous post was confirmed in that many of the Battlemage spells (which were showed in the videos) can in fact create friendly fire incidents and as such careful positioning will be required. Basically this line allows the mage to create a pulsating ring of various kinds of damage depending on the spell used. Certainly some cool stuff, but will be a bit tricky.
The Friday update also released info on Sigrun, and there’s a blog from one of the lead writer’s going into more detail on her story. Not a whole lot of new information but nice to fill out the back-story of this character. Also, I might have missed this somewhere else, but they talk about runes that can be added to weapons (I’m guessing a similar concept to how LOTRO does it for legendary items), which will be a nice way to further customize things.
And finally, the Awakening FAQ has been updated with information from Bioware’s new Community Facilitator. This is the “bad news” I was referring to at the top of this post. DLC items will not carry over into Awakenings, which means that content from an item perspective (one of the selling points) is a total waste. I still appreciated the storylines but it does strike me as a bit odd they resorted to this decision. However, at least the Warden’s Keep abilities will import, so that’s a good thing as I do like those 🙂 Oghren is confirmed to be the character joining us which does sadden me a bit but at least they do confirm there are cameos from the other characters that will follow the choices we made in Origins. They also imply (or it might be a straight admission depending how you read it) that we’ll only hear from Alistair and Wynne, which is also disappointing, although I can understand the decision as those are potentially the only ones who stick around.
Some other information throughout the FAQ, but those were the main items I saw.
For the most part, some good things coming but I am a bit bummed about the character choice and follow through of the storylines with the rest of the companions. We shall see as we get closer but things overall are looking good!