In various places around Gamespot, including a series of great predictions by nocoolnamejim, I've seen a lot of love for Bioware's upcoming Mass Effect. I'm not surprised - the game looks truly awesome, has a great sci fi setting, an innovative conversaton system, and hey it's being done by freaking BIOWARE! I won't deny that I myself am getting excited about it - it has got me seriously conidering the purchase of an Xbox 360, just so I don't have to wait like I did for KOTOR (and from a guy who has played through maybe nine or ten console games in his life, mostly mooched from friends, that's a pretty big deal).

But there's another game out there that isn't getting as much attention around Gamespot, from what I've seen. And admittedly, It's farther out than Mass Effect (I believe the release date was tentativley the winter 2007 or spring 2008, I think that has been pushed back to later 2008), but it deserves more than four threads in its forum anyway. This game is called Dragon Age, and it is also being developed by freaking BIOWARE! It's first destination, is, however, the PC- one reason why I'm excited about it. The other big reason might be that the words "spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate" have been spoken.

Like Mass Effect, this game will take place in a setting created totally by Bioware, and work has been going into it for several years. Described as a "dark heroic fantasy" (with an emphasis on dark), the game wil feature an innovative origins system, with different game beginnings depending on your characters race and character type. I'm not going to list all the cool info on the game here, but be sure to check out this MASSIVE preview over at 1UP (from Games for Windows Magazine), that really shows how much there is to be excited about. You should also check out the screens they have there, which give a much better idea of the game than the five shotsGamespot has, all of which look much worse than what is shown there ( I think Gamespot's are from an E3 concept demo from way, way back).

If that's still not enough to satisfy your curiousity, this thread over at Bioware gathers together a lot of what has been said by devs over on the boards there (thanks to konrad_arflane for posting it in the Dragon Age forums here).

Hopefully this game'll get a bit more buzz as the year moves on (and hopefully Bioware will release more about it!), but I just wanted to pur some info about it out there.

(@ nocoolnamejim: hope that sort of answered your wuestions about it)