In an rpg? Probably none, but Dragon Age simply carried the same standard Bioware style to a fantasy setting, with the same canned approach. There was no moving bit of acting, just a branching storyline of choice without much emotion. There was nothing groundbreaking.
I dunno. I think Dragon Age: Origins actually
was pretty special in this regard. And it most certainly was
not standard Bioware style, if what you mean by that is something like Mass Effect. The conversation trees were of greater complexity by many factors, and the results of those also accordingly more complex. To the point that when I did finally get around to playing Mass Effect, these much-lauded elements of choice were a profound disappointment (the simple binary-scale Paragon/Renegade thing is mindlessly simple in comparison).
Certainly, it could have been implemented in such a way that it impacted the story more heavily, but I think there was a very significant way in which DA:O adapted the concept of the "Player Character" so that it expanded to include the Party, rather than simply adding a bunch of more-or-less stock goons to your squad (or, at the very least, allowed a degree of
player defined/determined empathy with those goons that was previously a very rare beast.
I'm also wary of the lionisation of particular games on specious/exaggerated grounds (Mass Effect...), but I think there were definitely ways in which DA:O was qualitatively different from almost everything in its context that, when I read Philly's quote above, I just don't even know what he's talking about.
In other news, this guy is bullshit. I think. At least I like crafting in games.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/11/23/dragon-age-inquisition-and-the-problem-with-roleplaying-games/
...and I actually agree with this guy almost all of the time. Right down to the weird Dark Souls obsession. Just last week I went on a binge of reading about 20 of his articles one after the other. I'm a "casual" gamer, at best, but I do think it probably comes down to what I want to get out of games and, more importantly, the way I engage - on a "meta" level - with those things while I play. And this is all, of course, something subjective, and something that changes over time. As an example, I recently had a hankering for some MMO action. So I signed back into WoW. Then I tried Rift. And Aion. And after a while realised that I actually just fucking HATE MMOs. Everything about the way the game itself is structured, the story-reward system, everything, is utterly uninteresting to me. Which it certainly wasn't 5 years ago.
