BioWare has been going back to the drawing board on Dragon Age III for a while now. Dragon Age II, as you may recall, received a mixed critical reception at best— I sure didn't care for it though of course, not everyone hates the game including some thoughtful folks who work here.

Bioware wants you to know that They Are Listening To You, and want to hear every idea that you may have about the third installment. Seriously. Every single possible idea you may have.

At PAX Prime last year, they held a panel where they engaged the audience to find out what they wanted. At PAX East this year, they did the same thing. And starting this week, they've been doing it yet again on their official blog.

From a post on the 14th by BioWare's community manager Jessica Merizan:

Beginning today, we'll do a series of questions and discussions around Dragon Age. Consider this a conversation between fans, the community team, and the developers. Everyone at BioWare is incredibly excited about the future of the franchise but we're interested in what you have to say. Every month, we will discuss a topic or question about Dragon Age and game development. You will have one week to post your thoughts, desires, and hopes before we close the thread for review. Moderators and developers will pop into the thread to chat every now and again, so keep an eye out.

These questions and discussions are not only for future games, but other potential products like novels, animated features, pen and paper RPGs, and comics – all of which offer us opportunities to expand on parts of the world.

Merizan is sure to be clear that what they're making no promises with any of it, but that they're interested in engaging the very vocal community to make sure they know what people want as they make the game.

The question for May?

"What kinds of things would you like to discover and learn about the Dragon Age world?"

[Insert joke about wanting to discover why the second game was such a disappointment.]

This sounds like one part good community management and PR, one part genuine interest about what the fans want, and one part hoping to really listen and not have a repeat of The Ending Controversy That Shall Not Be Named.

I have to (somewhat jokingly) ask—in between all the conversing and feedback-wrangling BioWare is doing, I do hope that they have time to implement a few new ideas of their own!

Dragon Age; Question of the Month (Discovery and Learning!) [BioWare Forums via Rock, Paper Shotgun]

Video game retailer GameStop lets you trade in games for cash. You don't have to bring in the original packaging. So sometimes, when trying to re-sell those used games, GameStop will stick them in those generic, blank cases that look terribly ugly on your living room shelf.

But sometimes friendly employees make their own versions. This Dragon Age: Origins box, found in an EB Games over in Canada, was sent to Kotaku this morning. Almost as good as the original. Almost.

(Thanks, Brandon.)

Role-playing game Dragon Age is getting an anime. The flick will roar into Japanese theaters across the country.

Wait, why is there a Dragon Age anime? It's not a Japanese game, and while the title has a huge following in the West, it doesn't have the name recognition that home-grown role-playing games do in Japan.

As EA explains in a recent video, the game itself was inspired by Japanese prints and the films of Akira Kurosawa. Making an anime, instead of a Western cartoon, allows the filmmakers and game developers to explore more complex and adult themes.

Some of the country's most famous faces are lending their voices to the project. The movie will star Chiaki Kuriyama of Kill Bill fame as Cassandra Pentaghast, Shosuke Tanihara as Regalyan D'Marcall, and Gackt as Knight Commander. Gackt will also be providing the movie's theme song.

EA, BioWare, and Japanese animation distributor FUNimation originally teamed up, planning to release the project straight-to-DVD this year. Instead, as previously mentioned, it will be getting a theatrical release in Japan early next year.

映画「ドラゴンエイジ-ブラッドメイジの聖戦-」 [4Gamer]

That's right, Dragon Age is going multiplayer. The role-playing franchise is, according to an insider, going beyond singleplayer for the first time, and warriors won't simply face off against each other in combat.

Apparently, dragons will also be playable in Dragon Age multiplayer, giving players the chance to go head-to-head with foes in fire-breathing, swooping-through-the-air dragon form.

The insider wasn't sure if Dragon Age multiplayer was going to be part of a full, stand-alone title (ala Dragon Age 3) or available separately as a downloadable game. It is apparently being developed on DICE's Frostbite 2 game engine (used for Battlefield 3), and even early-on the game apparently looks stunning.

The multiplayer is supposedly an arena-based affair and features player versus environment (PvE) elements as well as player versus player (PvP), as well as humans fighting dragons. Details on what PvE battles entail are scant.

The first Dragon Age, Dragon Age: Origins, was a single-player role-playing game released in 2009. A sequel, Dragon Age II, was released earlier this year. It was also a single-player role-playing game.

Kotaku is following up with EA and will update this post should the company comment.

Commenter Supra5mge spends a great many hours squeezing ever ounce of enjoyment out of his role-playing games. How do your numbers compare to his? Show him up in today's Speak Up on Kotaku.

Here is something I have wondered for awhile now. How many hours do most of you role-playing game players out there put in to a game? I know it can depend on the game for the most part. I am curious as to how my game time relates to others.

Here are a few examples:

I put ~65 hrs into the first Mass Effect and ~70 into Mass Effect 2 (with DLC ), single play-throughs.

95 hrs into Dragon Age: Origins and 89 hrs into Dragon Age II.

I average about 80 hrs or so in Japanese role-playing games.

I don't leave them paused for long periods of time or pass out while playing. I don't trophy hunt or anything similar. Is this a lot?

This dog is an entrant in a character costume contest being run by the people at BioWare, makers of Mass Effect, Knights of the Old Republic and other video games that include terrific characters. The dog, however, is cosplaying as a Mabari from the Dragon Age games.

Winner? Or simply just another breed of dog cosplayer?

All in a Day's Work [YouTube, via BioWare's Twitter feed]

Yesterday, I posted some screens from Cyanide Studio's upcoming PC strategy game A Game of Thrones: Genesis (one of those screens is above). Details about the game are few and far between, and the only video online is a gameplay-free teaser. At a casual glance, the game seemed cool enough—a Total War-style strategy game set in Westeros. Sounds neat!

But then I thought about it, and actually, it doesn't really sound all that neat. I read through the comments on the post, and saw that a lot of you guys felt similarly. We may not know a ton about A Game of Thrones: Genesis, but I know enough about A Song of Ice and Fire to sense that a strategy game runs the risk of missing out on many of the things that make George R.R. Martin's books (and the HBO series) so great.

I'm a little more than halfway through A Feast For Crows right now (and although it's no Storm of Swords, I'm warming to it). And of course, I've been thinking about what kind of game it could be since well before I'd even heard of Genesis. So, here are some thoughts. Fair warning, there'll be spoilers throughout, if you've yet to read the books.

For starters, let's just go ahead and name this game for A Song of Ice and Fire from here on out, yeah? Bad enough that the TV series (which I totally love) is named after the first book—a bit like calling the Lord of the Rings movies The Fellowship of the Ring.

I've been neck-deep in Westeros for the past several months, and if I had to imagine a game that captured the spirit of George R.R. Martin's stories, it probably wouldn't even involve that much combat. The battles in A Song of Ice and Fire feel almost entirely secondary, and ditto for the TV show. In the show's first season, most of the big battles occurred offscreen—but I actually liked that. "The action isn't the point," the show seemed to be saying. And really, it isn't.

Politics are such a huge part of these stories, and so a game based on A Song of Ice and Fire would have to involve political machinations. But it'd have to be more than just dry, Civilizationesque political debate and conflict—the politics of A Song of Ice and Fire are sordid and personal, generations-old familial grudges laced with dark, bloody betrayal. Similarly, many characters wind up doing their best with a crummy hand—Here in book 4, I even find myself feeling sorry for poor, increasingly psychotic Cercei, as she attempts to deal with an unraveling kingdom and her increasingly tenuous grasp on the Iron Throne. A complicated, difficult-to-win sim like Fate of the World could actually be kind of appropriate.

But let's back up and talk about betrayal for a second. One of the running themes of the books seems to be that no matter how someone thinks something's going to go down (or how they feel it "should" go down), it almost always goes down differently. If I had to name a single overarching theme of these books, I'd probably quote the Stones: "You can't always get what you want."

Fairness simply doesn't exist in Westeros. "I was promised a golden crown!" "I had the dying king sign this paper!" "We're sparing him and sending him to the wall!" "We took you in and raised you like one of us!" "We'll have a wedding and everything will be fine!" Etc., etc., etc. And so in order for a game to feel right in this world, it'll have to involve a whole lot of things going wrong.

So: Politics, Betrayal. Got it. And then there's the White Walkers. Lingering at the fringes, this dark, mysterious menace. Hmm… I guess we really did already kind of get A Song of Ice and Fire: The Video Game, didn't we? It was made by BioWare, and they called it Dragon Age: Origins.

I remember when that game came out, I heard from a lot of G.R.R. Martin fans grumbling that David Gaider's story had borrowed heavily from Martin's already famous series. Now that I've read the books, I wouldn't say they're all that similar—after all, Ice and Fire's Wights and Walkers are far less central and more ephemeral (so far) than the ubiquitous Darkspawn of the Dragon Age series. But Dragon Age did feel similar in a lot of broader ways, particularly in how it embraced morally grey areas and no-win scenarios, and how many of its most interesting moments occurred outside of combat. The betrayal at Ostagar, the Landsmeet, the Elven Alienage, the fate of Teyrn Loghain… it all had a very Song of Ice and Fire vibe.

(Side note: "Origins" and "Genesis" are basically the same word, which is interesting.)

But then, Dragon Age: Origins still wasn't quite a proper Song of Ice and Fire game, despite drawing clear inspiration from the books. And in truth, Martin's world is so rich, so storied, that it would be almost impossible to include everything in any single game. Perhaps an adventure set during the much-fabled Age of Heroes? An action-RPG following the exploits of Brienne of Tarth and Podrick Payne? Castle management in the Red Keep? A tower-defense game set on The Wall?

I suppose Cyanide's real problem is that there are so many great ways to approach a Song of Ice and Fire game that their decision to make a fantasy strategy game feels a little uninspired. But then again, who knows? I've reached out to try to learn more, and for all we know they could very well be working a lot of great things into the finished product. Or hey, maybe someone will just go and make one like the glorious 16-bit version they posted at College Humor.

In the meantime, all we can do is wonder. I feel like I've only scratched the surface here—what do you think would make for the best Song of Ice and Fire game?

BioWare makes fans feel funny about every dollar they spent on downloadable content with the Dragon Age: Origins Ultimate Edition, which bundles everything Dragon Age together for one low price.

How much have you spent on Dragon Age: Origins and its downloadable content? BioWare says the whole shebang, including Awakenings, is worth $114. Players who held out on purchasing the game and its downloadable content are in for a real treat next month, when that $114 becomes $59.99 in the Dragon Age: Origins Ultimate Edition for the PlayStation 3, PC, and Xbox 360.

It's enough to make one want to wait and see if they do this for Dragon Age 2 before investing one's money, isn't it? No, of course it isn't, and we'll be kicking ourselves this time next year as well. We're not a very patient group.

The Dragon Age: Origins Ultimate Edition will be released on October 26.

"Never follow me," said the dark witch Morrigan as she disappeared towards the end of Dragon Age: Origins. Adventurers never were very good at listening.

In the final downloadable content for Dragon Age: Origins, players are tasked with tracking down the abrasive sorceress and learning her true motivation for siding with the Grey Wardens. It's been a year since she was last seen, and curiosity has finally gotten the better of us. Where has she gone? What is she doing? Is she thinking of us? These questions and more drive our hero and two new companions on an adventure that will take them to the far reaches of Ferelden.

Of course just because they're far reaches doesn't mean we haven't reached them before.

Loved

New Faces: For the brief time you know them, new characters Ariane and Finn are charming companions, something fresh and new in Witch Hunt's stew of regurgitated content.

Hated

Old Places: The enemy population may have been mixed up a bit, but the locations you visit in Witch Hunt are places you've been before. There's really not much new to see here.

Fast Paces: From start to finish, Witch Hunt only lasted an hour and fifteen minutes. That's including several defeats and restarts. That's pretty pathetic.

Witch Hunt would be bad enough if it presented us with an hour of new gameplay, but having players wandering through areas they already explored for 60 minutes to deliver an ending that could just as easily have been released as a free teaser trailer bridging the gap between Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II is an insult to players who've invested so much time and energy to playing through this epic tale.

Dragon Age: Origins Witch Hunt was developed by BioWare and published by Electronic Arts on September 7. Retails for $6.99 USD or 560 Microsoft points. A download code for the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Played through entire story on normal difficulty.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

BioWare ties off a major plot thread in preparation for the coming of Dragon Age 2 with Witch Hunt, the climactic ending to the Origins storyline where players will finally uncover the secrets held by Morrigan, the incredibly under-dressed witch.

"Never follow me." With these words, Morrigan vanished into the shadows. Her plans and her whereabouts have remained a mystery... until now. But whether you seek answers, revenge, or reconciliation with your lost love, you may find more than you bargained for

.Journey back into the southern wilderness nearly a year after the fall of the Archdemon to discover what happened to the dark witch Morrigan following her final moments in the original Dragon Age: Origins campaign. Due out September 7 for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3, Witch Hunt promises to tie up Morrigan's loose end once and for all.

Without dropping too many spoilers for those who've yet to play the original game, I'm a little worried that the Morrigan we find might *cough* take after her mother, if you know what I mean.

And if you don't, go play the game and find out, and get your $7 ready for September 7 to bring this baby to a close.

Witch Hunt DLC Page [BioWare - Thanks Tomat!]