The only time you’ll have trouble with her is if you get into killing civilians and that sort of nasty business.Įxamples: Wynne (Dragon Age), Jolee Bindo (KOTOR), David Anderson (Mass Effect) She’s a free spirit and and isn’t above the occasional theft. The innocent pilgrim is young, usually pretty, idealistic, and energetic. He does it for laughs! If you need someone to snap out a couple of witty one-liners while mowing down foes, the Berzerker is your man.Įxamples: Leliana (Dragon Age), Dawn Star (Jade Empire), Mission Vao (KOTOR), and Tali’Zorah nar Rayya (Mass Effect) Unlike the Remorseless Killer, the Berzerker doesn’t just go around killing people for some misguided cause. Still, he can’t help it so it’s best not to dwell on the past anyway.Įxamples: HK-47 (KOTOR), Black Whirlwind (Jade Empire), Urdnot Wrex (Mass Effect), Oghren and Shale (Dragon Age) Most of the time his awful deeds served the greater good.

His grim, scorched-earth, genocidal, baby-killing job. The product of a warrior culture, the Remorseless Killer is just doing his job. Think about how similar your companions are from game to game:Įxamples: Sten (Dragon Age), Canderous Ordo (KOTOR), Sagacious Zu (Jade Empire) Once you get to know these games, you can recognize what NPC archetype you’re talking to within a minute or two of meeting them. Some take place in the Star Wars universe, some in a high fantasy setting, some in a space-faring future, but the same elements, characters, themes, and plot devices appear again and again. If you’ve played the BioWare games from the last decade, you may have noticed some really strong similarities between them. I complain about their non-branching dialog trees and their odd mechanics, but the truth is that I love these games. But I always appreciate it when they try.

It’s incredibly hard – perhaps even impossible – to make a game that’s genuinely open and rich in story. They make games with a large cast, a player-generated protagonist, a non-linear world, and lots of interactive dialog. Oblivion and Morrowind and such.Ģ) Linear JRPG games like Final Fantasy, which have a fixed railroad plot but heaps of story and lots of (non-interactive) character development and dialog.īut developer BioWare always seems to be going for the best of both of these worlds. Most RPGs end up jammed into one of two broad categories:ġ) Open-ended sandbox games which are usually a little thin on story and characters but make up for it with lots of freedom, choices, exploration, and moral quandaries.

Jade empire sagacious zu