Speaking of which, the toolset itself allows individuals and teams to create and distribute their own scenarios utilizing the Dragon Age engine. It’s clearly an evolution of the aforementioned Neverwinter Nights model. There’s no doubt from the presentation we witnessed that the toolset is incredibly powerful, much more powerful than that in Neverwinter. A dedicated individual or group could produce amazing content with these tools. At the same time, it does seem that only the extremely dedicated will be able to produce any content at all. It’s not so much that these tools are incredibly complex, and we did get a look at a very thorough wiki manual that should be able to help anyone get comfortable with them, it’s that they’re very deep and detailed. Any effort to put together a quality module is sure to require a committed effort with painstaking attention to detail and one can’t help but wonder how many people will be able to prove themselves as up to the challenge.

There’s also the question of how easy a sell these tools will be to aspiring module creators. In some ways it was surely easier to sell people on the idea of a module-based game when you had a D&D licensed product, like Neverwinter Nights. D&D is built on the notion of the player and the dungeon master, so there was a certain logic to the idea that Neverwinter was a game for both crowds. Whether or not Bioware can hook those same people on a completely new IP is a legitimate question that will only be answered over the coming months and years.

In the here and now there’s no reason whatsoever to think that Dragon Age: Origins will be anything less than a critical darling. Whether or not it will get sales to match is anybody’s guess, but if history has taught us anything it’s that there are two things you should never do: 1) Get involved in a land war in Asia and 2) Doubt Bioware’s ability to sell quality, intricate role-playing games to the masses.

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