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The History of Dragon Age: Origins

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When it comes to Western role-playing games, few video game developers are as renowned as Bioware. The Edmonton-based studio’s catalogue is as celebrated as it is influential, with almost all of its titles representing the peaks of their genres in the eras they debuted. Baldur’s Gate brought computer RPGs back in vogue with its sublime, high-fantasy gameplay. Neverwinter NightsKnights masterfully adapted its tenets into a multiplayer-centric experience. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic saw the former games’ narrative finesse melded with the adventurism of the galaxy far, far away. And Mass Effect made all of this Bioware’s own – while taking it to the next level.

But being this renowned comes with a high heavy price. Today, gamers are well aware of the struggles the studio dealt with recently during the development of games like Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem. Yet the reality is that struggles like these have persisted throughout its entire history, with nearly every major production that Bioware has successfully completed representing a triumph in the face of massive adversity.

Dragon Age, Bioware’s much-beloved high-fantasy series, is perhaps most emblematic of this. While each of its mainline entries were made under vastly different circumstances from one another, they all suffered in their own, unique ways. Its third one’s design failed to fully come together until late in its production, and needed to be made in an incredibly unruly engine. Its second one’s development period was one of the most cramped its staff had ever experienced. And its first operated without a consistent team or set of tools for an immensely long – so much so, that many wondered if it was ever going to come out at all. This is the history of Dragon Age: Origins.
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The Rise and Fall of SOCOM (PS2/PSP/PS3)

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In the early days of the PlayStation 2, Zipper Interactive would debut a third-person shooter called SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs. Authentic, tactical, team-based, and online at a time where few other PlayStation titles were, SOCOM took the home console by storm. It gave Sony’s exclusives a more mature face, provided multiplayer-centric shooters a new standard to compete against, and helped single-handedly move the PlayStation 2’s network adapter and headset into gamers’ homes. The debut of SOCOM 2 the following year created an immediate classic, and confirmed SOCOM as a franchise that would be with PlayStation for years to come – even as unsavoury hackers attempted to ruin players’ enjoyment.

Yet try as SOCOM would, lightning never seemed to strike thrice in the eyes of the series faithful. SOCOM 3, Combined Assault, Confrontation, and many more would all proceed to be good, if not great games in their own right – but whether helmed by Zipper or Slant Six, SOCOM never found its third pillar on which it could rest. And just as it seemed as if the series finally might, SOCOM 4 would both trip over its design, and fall into a hole burrowed out of the PlayStation Network Outage of 2011.
SOCOM was shattered, Zipper was shuttered, and one by one, the entire series would go offline – though the hardcore would continue to find ways to keep the series’ flame alive.

This is the rise and fall of SOCOM.