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Last night the mystery project was revealedto be a new web series called Dragon Age: Redemption. That’s right, EA/Bioware have asked her to do to Dragon Age what she’s unofficially done to World of War craft. Make it cool and bring it to a different kind of audience. Details are a little thin on the ground but USA Today had the scoop and also did a nice little Gamer Profile on Day.

She has also blogged a little about the project, but no doubt the best place to get more info as it happens is to follow @FeliciaDay on twitter. She tweets a lot.

So info dump aside, what do I think? I think this is super cool. I’m not a huge Guild fan, but think that it’s pretty impressive that it’s been going for 4 whole seasons, and was bank rolled for the first season by fan donations. Day also then managed to keep total creative control when she signed a distribution deal with Microsoft. Also Felicia Day is a real gamer, she plays games, loves games and understands why the rest of us do. A quick quote from the USA Today article:

A life-long game player, Day is fully aware they have a poor track record when it comes to adaptation. “I am an organic gamer and I love games, and I particularly love this franchise,” she says. “I put every single effort into making this something that gamers will be proud of. Even though we were constrained a lot as a Web series, none of the people who were involved took that as a constraint. They took that as a challenge.”

So yeah, I look forward to seeing this when it comes out. I doubt it will be at the same time as Dragon Age 2, but hopefully not too long after.

• Start a new campaign set in a homebrew world. I’m currently working through my ideas and am hoping to start in late February or early March. Interestingly I finally checked out True20 to see if it would fit my ideas for a low magic world, with a not too heavy system and it’s great.
• Continue to get plenty of playing in. I can see one or two of my current games winding up at some stage soon and while one of those will be replaced with my own campaign I hope to fill the other with another longish term game.
• Get a PC. There are heaps of good CRPGs coming out this year and I’m sick of playing on the Xbox 360. I want a PC again, rather than using my TV.
• Talking of non table top games this year I’m looking forward to Dragon Age 2, The Witcher 2: Assasins of Kings, Mass Effect 3, Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and maybe even my first MMO, The Old Republic.
• I’m going to continue to LARP in one off parlour games.
• Write and run a small LARP (for about 15 people). My ideas at the moment are running towards a steampunk-esque Society of Explorers.

And I think that should keep me pretty busy. What about you? Any plans for this year?

• I spent the better part of 2010 writing, in collaboration with two others, a 66 person LARP called Al Shir-Ma. It’s set in an Arabian Night-esque world which borrows from Al-Qadim. It was done for the yearly KapCon gaming convention here in Wellington, and it’s first run through is happening next weekend. It’s been a really interesting experience and has I think made me a better scenario writer. But man, has it been a lot of work.
• I wrapped up my campaign, using the Green Ronin A Song of Ice and Fire rules, in a not hugely satisfiying way. By the end I’d kind of lost interest and time, and it all got a bit too railroady. It showed me that I really want to run long term games that leverage off character backgrounds and story rather than some over arching plot I’ve come up with. Means less work for me too.
• I ran Peril in King’s Landing a pre-written scenario for ASoIFRP. It’s one of the few times I’ve actually run a pre-written scenario and while I liked the low prep of it all, I found that I had the most fun when I was adding in new elements passed on player actions.
• I played a lot of Xbox 360. Notably Alpha Protocol, Fallout 3, Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 and Fallout New Vegas. Some of these games, like Mass Effect, I played through for a third time so I could carry my character into the new game. Yes I am that much of a geek.
• I played a lot of table top and LARP games. For the first time I played more than I GM’d and it was great.
• I discovered some great new table top games like Prime Time Adventures and Apocolypse World.

So from a gaming perspective 2010 was great. Though as the silence from June on might have told you, other stuff wasn’t. Now though it’s time to look forward to 2011!

IGN have a nice preview article, outlining some of the changes made to the follow up. They all sound great to me, especially the more Mass Effect-esque character acting and dialoge.

Also, here is some eye candy.

I’ve been pretty keen for this to come out since it was first announced last year. I liked Fallout 3, I mean it was no Fallout or Fallout 2 but it was a pretty solid game and I’ve recently been wanting to go back and have more of an explore.

But when it was announced that Obsidian would be developing this game under licence I was pretty stoked. Knights of the Old Republic 2 (despite the ending) was a great game and I’m also really looking forward to the long over due Alpha Protocol.

So I look forward to more news about this next part of the franchise, and the ability to zoom in for those messy and devastating headshots through V.A.T.S.

• Charles Stross writes on the issues to do with spaceships.
• Lev Grossman chooses his top 5 fantasy books of all time! (via i09.com)
• Something Awful dissects the art of Traveller.
• Paizo are having another of their RPG Superstar design competitions.

I think the internet is playing Dragon Age too…