Dragon Age Central

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[dan tudge] As a Grey Warden, Duncan is charged with defeating the blight and must recruit the bravest warriors, mages, and rogues into the ranks of the Grey Wardens in order to defeat this blight. How you meet him and how he recruits you is actually different in each origin story.

Duncan introduces you to another young Grey Warden recruit named Alistair. Alistair is both charming and easygoing and never seems to be short of amusing commentary. I think players will enjoy having him in their parties.

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Loghain is a war hero and the leader of the armies of Fereldan. He’s a very complex character with deep convictions. How you choose to interact with him will be up to you, but I will say that you’ll have to make some pretty important decisions involving Loghain that could create a turning point in the story.

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Wynne is a spirit healer from the Circle of Magi, focusing her magic on the ability to briefly summon protective and restorative spirits from the Fade. She has served the Circle for most of her life and is highly regarded within the circle. Players willing to get to know Wynne may eventually discover that Wynne is no ordinary mage.

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Sten is a warrior of the Qunari race and has been trained as a soldier since birth (the Qunari are always at war). He’s a very stoic and disciplined man with a strong code of honor, so how he treats others depends on whether or not they have his respect, which he doesn’t give easily.

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Morrigan can indeed be a powerful ally, and I think players will find her shape-shifting abilities a powerful asset in combat. She’s power-hungry and selfish, so having her in your party with other members who have more-benevolent agendas and moral codes can result in some "tense" party dynamics. You don’t have to have Morrigan in your party, but she does add an awesome dynamic to the player and party relationships.

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Morrigan’s relationship with her mother, Flemeth, isn’t exactly sunshine and rainbows. In fact, Flemeth raised Morrigan to hold the rest of mankind in contempt, hating them for their weaknesses, and taught her to value power above all else. Both women are incredibly strong-willed and are practically more aptly described as rivals rather than family. They each have such a lust for power that you may be shocked at the lengths they’ll go to in order to acquire it.

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The Mabari hounds imprint themselves onto one master and are known to be fiercely loyal to that person. They are also absolutely vicious in combat. If you do manage to get such a dog to join your party, you will find them to be extremely intelligent creatures who you can command to overwhelm the enemy, knocking them to the ground, pinning them down, and horribly mauling them.

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there are party members unique to your origin. Each origin story has its own cast of unique characters who may or may not show up later on in the story. In any case, every character will react differently to you depending on any number of factors, including your race, gender, origin story, party approval rating, and other choices you’ve made along the way.

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I will tell you that you’ll have a great selection of them to choose from. Each one will have their own unique abilities, behaviors, and personal agendas, so it’s completely up to you how you want to compose your party. You can pick them strategically, depending on the scenario you’re preparing for, but sometimes it’s just fun to mix characters just to see how they interact with each other.

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Genlocks and Hurlocks are some common types of darkspawn. Genlocks are the most numerous of the darkspawn and have short, stocky bodies. These guys are pretty tough and difficult to kill, especially since they have some resistance to elemental magic. Genlocks are good defenders, using fortification strategies, siege weapons, and traps whenever possible. Hurlocks are taller and more muscular, forming the strongest part of the darkspawn armies. They excel at two-handed weapons, especially the "alpha" Hurlocks that lead the charge.

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Party interaction is one of the best parts of Dragon Age: Origins, much like it was in Baldur’s Gate. The party approval system is something new we’re introducing in Dragon Age: Origins, and it influences how your party members react to your decisions and behave towards you. Each character has their own personal motivations and moral code, so if you do things they don’t like, they could leave your party, or even turn on you. On the other hand, if you gain favor with them, you could get special bonuses or certain other perks, which you’ll discover.

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Mike Laidlaw, lead designer on the game, writes a blog entry about the blight. Highlights follow.

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A Blight begins with massive numbers of darkspawn surging to the surface, creatures that carry a disease known as the taint. The taint is a poisonous corruption that not only damages living creatures, but spreads over the earth, twisting the land into a barren and disease-filled landscape.

Normally, the darkspawn are disorganized and fight with each other, rarely appearing on the surface except in raids and small invasions. However, a true Blight begins when the darkspawn find a leader who unites them into a great horde and unleashes them onto the surface in a wave of darkness and destruction. This leader comes in the form of a powerful and terrifying creature known as an Archdemon.

To end the Blight, you must find and destroy the Archdemon. Not an easy task, given the hordes of darkspawn under its command. You don’t have much time either, because with each passing day, the Blight grows. The earth itself will wither and die; the land is leeched of moisture, turning everything dry and brown. The sky fills with rolling, black clouds that block out the sun, making it easier for the darkspawn to surface. As this wasteland spreads, the corruption of the Blight spreads with it, diseasing all in its path.

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Duncan, leader of Ferelden’s Grey Wardens, will be your mentor and provide you with the tools you’ll need to fight this spreading corruption. Further, you’ll meet a number of interesting characters along the way that may join your party. Each have unique abilities and personal agendas which may or may not align with yours, or each other’s.

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David Gaider, lead writer on the game, has written a three part blog in which he discusses the writing process of his upcoming novel ‘Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne‘. Dragon Age-relevant quotes follow.

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One of my tech designers commented to me the other day that a character I wrote was really sarcastic.

“She’s supposed to be sexy,” he said, “but really she’s just sarcastic. Everything she says is pure sarcasm. Was that on purpose?”

“Maybe,” I said dubiously

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But Dragon Age was my baby. I was the one who first formed the world. With direction, sure, but beyond that it was my vision. My footprints are everywhere. I’ve watched it grow, cringed as other hands touched it and tweaked it and sometimes I was even amazed as something I’d barely considered had life breathed into it and became something better than I’d ever hoped it could be.

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this story needed to introduce the Dragon Age setting. It needed to touch on all the important points, as most readers would be completely unfamiliar with any of them.

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I had to list the elements I needed to touch on. Religion. Elves. Dwarves. Darkspawn. Magic. Ferelden.

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I decided on a prequel. We had identified years ago that there was an excellent untold story to be found in the Ferelden rebellion against Orlais. It’s referred to many times in the course of the game, but there was a lot more that could be said about it. It was a great tale.

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With the highlighting it became obvious that every character in my book was constantly spitting, glaring and clenching their teeth. They exchanged looks, glared, growled and even snarled – sometimes multiple times on the same page.

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Hi. I’m Dan Tudge, the Executive Producer and Project Director on Dragon Age: Origins. Welcome to my first blog entry for IGN.

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Over the next few months, I’m going to give you a crash course about the game and I’ll begin today by introducing you to the Grey Wardens, a secretive brotherhood that spans the ages.

Throughout the history of Thedas, there have been multiple Blights: events of incredible evil when hordes of darkspawn rose up from beneath the surface and spread across the world, slaughtering and enslaving anything in their path. With each Blight, the civilized world was brought to the brink of complete destruction, and it is only thanks to the Grey Wardens that the darkspawn were defeated and driven back underground.

The Grey Wardens are an ancient order of fearsome elite warriors, made up of only the most physically and mentally superior of all civilized races. Their sole purpose: to destroy all darkspawn and drive back the Blight. They are the last line of defense against a Blight, and are said to possess the unique ability to sense the presence of darkspawn, and have a greater knowledge than anyone else in Thedas of tactics used to combat these twisted creatures. The Grey Wardens were once a large and magnificent organization, the sight of them arriving in glorious numbers wherever darkspawn threatened was truly a sight to behold. They were revered by the people, and the nations of humanity once gladly supported them with food, equipment and a steady stream of recruits.

But it has been four hundred years since the last Blight, and many now think the Grey Wardens to be irrelevant and obsolete. Their numbers have dwindled to near extinction, and although they are now seen to be only a relic of a once great and proud league of heroes, the few remaining Grey Wardens still keep up their training and maintain a watchful eye for signs of another Blight.

They now believe another Blight is at hand. Fearing that their numbers are too few to defend Thedas once more, they will turn to you for help. When you create your character in Dragon Age: Origins, your choice of Origin Story will determine how you are recruited into the Grey Wardens, and your personal motivations for joining them. To become a Grey Warden is to be endowed with great power and responsibility, to battle the deadliest threats imaginable, and to free a nation from the Blight.

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I’ll leave you this week with the mantra of the Grey Wardens.

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Grey Warden’s Motto
"In war, victory
In peace, vigilance
In death, sacrifice"

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[dan tudge] Fans who loved the rich story, interesting characters, and tactical combat in the deep fantasy setting of Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights will love what we’re doing in Dragon Age: Origins. We’re capturing the same great spirit of story, exploration, tactical combat, and character progression that we delivered in those previous titles and bringing it to a dark, heroic fantasy setting. We’ve taken a lot of what we learned from creating Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights to make Dragon Age: Origins even better, so fans can expect a lot of what they enjoyed about those games, but with next-gen improvements.

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BioWare has always focused on delivering deep, story-driven experiences, where your actions and choices have meaningful consequences. We’re taking that even deeper with Dragon Age: Origins by introducing a new feature called "origin stories." You start the game by choosing and then playing through the origin story of your choice. You start off in a unique place in the gameworld, which sets up the way you become a Grey Warden and flavors the rest of the game in terms of your motivations, how you perceive the world, and how the world perceives you. Your choices will open up different story branches, dialogue options, affect how other characters treat you, and change the state of the Dragon Age world by the end of the game. Compared to our previous titles, the story and scope of Dragon Age: Origins is the most ambitious of any BioWare game yet.

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You can choose which type of hero or antihero you want to be, meaning that it won’t always be clear which decisions are "good" and which are "evil." You’ll face a lot of tough moral decisions along the way, and sometimes you may have to make seemingly evil decisions for the greater good. The choices in Dragon Age: Origins are not always black and white, but rather, shades of gray. The important thing to remember is that every choice you make will have a consequence. For example, there is a "party approval" system where members of your party may disagree with certain choices you make. If you keep making decisions that they don’t like, they may get angry with you, or even leave your party.

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Dragon Age: Origins uses a party-based tactical combat system that is really a next-gen evolution of "pause and play." The action is fast and happens in real time, so if you like to just get in there and hack-and-slash your way through your enemies, you can do that, but you will quickly learn that you will need to think much more tactically if you want to survive. With the pause-and-play system, you can pause the action, issue a string of robust commands to your party members, and then jump right back into the action. You’ll have full control of each party member, so you’ll have a lot of different abilities and attacks at your disposal, including magic and spell combos. You have a lot of control over the camera, too. You can zoom out to a tactical view so you can see all your enemies and direct your party, and you can zoom in so you’re right in the thick of the action. That’s where you’ll want to be when you land a punishing death blow!

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Character progression has always been a core pillar of every BioWare game. In Dragon Age: Origins you will choose your player’s race, gender, class, customized appearance, special abilities, and of course your origin. Players will develop their skills, talents, and spells to support their style of play. Do you want to create a healing mage, a dual-weapon-wielding rogue, or a sword-and-shield tank? As their characters advance, players can also choose a class specialization that will unlock advanced talents and spells.

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The party-approval system plays a big role in the dynamic between you and your party members. Make decisions they agree with, and they’ll follow and support you. Make decisions they despise, they may turn on you. Each character has a very unique personality making them enjoyable to interact with. However, it is their interaction with each other that I find most entertaining. There are romances you can choose to pursue or not, and you can also forge strong alliances, friendships, or even betray those around you, with different consequences for your actions. Don’t forget that your choice of origin story also heavily influences the relationships you’ll have throughout the game.

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You can have up to four members in your active party (including yourself), but you’ll be able to swap out members of your party for others throughout the game. Each character not only has their own unique set of skills and abilities, but they also have their own unique personalities and behaviors, which may or may not complement your style of play. You’ll meet a lot of different characters along the way, so there will be plenty of opportunities to try out different compositions of party members, each with their own unique advantages or disadvantages. It makes for a lot of great replayability, too. And for those who want, you can play the entire game in tactical view just like Baldur’s Gate.

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We’ll be announcing more details of the Dragon Age Toolset very soon, but for now I’ll tell you that we can’t wait for the community to get their hands on the new toolset. We really wanted to empower our fans with the ability to create their own next-gen adventures within the Dragon Age universe, so they can expect a lot of great things they can do with scripting, cinematics, objects, and so on. And of course, we at BioWare will provide lots of support on our community site. We do have some very cool plans for downloadable content, but we’ll be talking more about that later.

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A big difference between Dragon Age: Origins and our previous fantasy games is that Dragon Age is our own original dark-fantasy universe. It’s a completely new world that BioWare designed from the ground up, with its own deep history and lore, so fans will see things that they haven’t seen before in other fantasy games. It’s also the darkest and grittiest game we’ve ever made. It’s intended for a mature audience, so if you’re looking for a fun, sophisticated game with a page-turning story set in a huge dark-fantasy universe, this is the one for you. It’s BioWare fantasy role-playing at its finest, and you may even be shocked by some of the things you’ll see...!

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[david gaider] There was a huge amount of writing for this game, the most I think I’ve done since Baldur’s Gate. The characters talk amongst themselves, they talk to you, they comment on the world as you travel. The idea is that these are full-blown companions, there’s an epic plot to follow ... I hate to use the word epic, but it’s there. It feels that way because it’s so big! I had the largest hand in creating the world to begin with, and so I have a lot of emotional stake in the game.

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A long time ago mages used to rule the land. They reached a point where they basically decided to open a gateway into heaven and usurp the rule of the gods. I should say, as an aside, that this is what the priests of the world say, this is their line ... anyway, the mages stepped out into heaven and – since Man is an imperfect creature – they tainted the place and turned it into a place called "The Black City." They tainted themselves in the process, and became the first Darkspawn. The Maker threw them down from Heaven to Earth, to suffer for their crimes. The Darkspawn couldn’t stand the light and burrowed down into the earth to get away from it.

They began a search for the Old Gods, essentially. Long before the wizards, people used to worship dragons as deities, but the Maker shackled them under the earth supposedly to sleep for all time. The Darkspawn search for these Old Gods, and when they find them they extend the taint to the dragons. The dragons are transformed into an archdemon, and when one rises from below the Darkspawn come with it as sort of a blight. They’re almost like locusts in that way. When a blight occurs they come to the surface and spread, corrupting it as they go.
Humanity realizes they have to defend themselves against these things, and that’s sort of what’s going on as the game starts.

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We’ve taken a few things like the digital actors to add to the game. We like that. We like that when you talk to somebody you see their emotions on their face, there’s much more nuance. The uncanny valley is always a problem, right? I think we’re getting over that now, with the animations doing the nuance of eye movement. It’s much easier to empathize with that kind of character.

Where we differ with Mass Effect is that it did have a much more cinematic style. It gave voice to your character, for one, which was appropriate for the game. You were Commander Shephard, a military man or woman, and you had a voice that was really appropriate for that character. In Dragon Age we’re focusing much more on character customization. You have a choice of gender, of race, one voice wouldn’t cut it.

There’s so much writing that if we had just one option for each gender/race combination it would be so much voice recording we’d need to include like two more DVDs. There’s the physical limitations, then, and then there’s also the fact that players give their own voice to characters they create. We said to ourselves, "the worst thing that could happen would be to have a voice that doesn’t match up to the one inside your head."

Mass Effect also had the dialogue system where they just gave the intent of the choice as opposed to the full wording. The idea is that you can pick your dialogue option before the character stopped talking, and have a cinematic flow to the conversation. We’ve gone back to our Baldur’s Gate–style discussions with Dragon Age, where you see exactly what kind of choice you’re making. The idea there is that the player has to have full control over the voice in his head.

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Dragon Age is a huge game, much like Baldur’s Gate. I don’t know that we’d ever make a game as big as Baldur’s Gate again, though. That game was just ridiculously huge. That said, there is something to making a game that is substantial like that. The word "epic" is thrown around like there’s no tomorrow, but in some ways epic does fit with the scope of the game’s story. It’s a long story that takes your character through this large arc. It’s appropriate for what we’re doing.

It is also similar to Baldur’s Gate insofar as how much we focus on character. You have all your party members, and I would say almost a third of the writing that’s been done is just for the members themselves. The amount of talking they do may in fact be sort of endless. I think for a lot of players that’s really important. To this day in any given forum, people will still bring up characters from Baldur’s Gate. Some of them are quite beloved. I would like to think as a writer that Dragon Age is the next step from there. Not to knock the Baldur’s Gate characters, but these are the characters you’ll be interacting with at length for a long period of time ... they’re important to the story.

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There is one series of books that is required reading for any Dragon Age fan. It’s not to say we copied him, but it’s required reading for what it represented when I was thinking about the game. I sort of got tired of the same old fantasy-style stories. I read The Belgariad and Wheel of Time back to back, right? And they both started the same way, with a "chosen one" with a boy in a remote village who is carried away just as his village is destroyed ... they both started the same way. They’re both decent series, but they’re very high fantasy titles.

Then I picked up a series of books by George R.R. Martin called A Song of Ice and Fire. It’s a low magic world there, and ours is a bit higher. Dragon Age is lower than the normal fantasy world, though, because magic is sort of rare and mages are very distrusted. As I described how Darkspawn came to be, people kind of have a bad opinion about them as a group.

For me, it was the tonal shift that really changed for me personally. It was such a dark story, and sometimes I think he may get too dark ... but it was focused on politics and civil war, dark and gritty, and there was the possibility that characters you loved might die. I went from being kind of "meh" on fantasy in general to really excited because of these books. We didn’t go out to copy his works, but that sort of shift, that darkness, that seriousness are all elements we’ve embraced for our game. That’s the tone of Dragon Age.

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[david gaider] So, it’s good to build your own world because you feel a sense of ownership. It’s also tough, because when we show the first bit of Dragon Age, you can’t show everything at once and people see the fantasy setting and say "Oh, this is typical fantasy," but it’s not, it’s really not. Sure, we use elves, dwarves and other archetypes because if you don’t, you run the risk of alienating the people who really like fantasy.

Then, when you start using those archetypes, everyone pegs you as generic. When you start developing your own world, it takes time to get below the surface. We took the basic fantasy characters and have put our own spin on them as well.

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Sure, I’d love to explain the Dark Spawn. The main story is about the Blight, which is caused by the Dark Spawn. They erupt from the surface of the world like locusts. If they’re not stopped, they’ll corrupt the world and make it unlivable. The organization known as the Grey Wardens were formed to stop the Blight, and that’s what you start out as.

On the surface, the Dark Spawn would kind of resemble orcs, as they’re an evil horde. However, there’s a little bit more to them. There’s the story that’s told in the world by the Chantry, which is sort of the church, and the story goes that a long time ago the mages ruled. In fact, they became so powerful and proud that they opened a gateway to heaven to usurp the Maker’s throne. The Maker would be their god, of sorts. Well, they did it and stepped into heaven but because of their sin, heaven was tainted and turned the Golden City (what heaven is called) into the Black City. The corruption also affected them and twisted them into the first Dark Spawn. The Maker says, "How dare you?" and throws them back to earth. Because of their corruption, they’re repelled by light, so they burrow down into the earth where the dwarves live. There, they multiplied.

The Dark Spawn worshipped dragons, which are now known as the Old Gods. The Maker imprisoned the dragons for lying to mankind about being the real god. So, the Dark Spawn search for their gods and when they find one, their corruption spreads to it and makes it into an Arch Demon. It then bursts from the ground and they come pouring out with it. That’s what begins a Blight.

In the game, it has been a long time since the last Blight, and that was one soundly defeated. Humanity then decided that the Dark Spawn were defeated. This leads to the dwindling numbers of Grey Wardens. When the game starts, a new Arch Demon has arisen and started a new Blight. The Grey Wardens are then called upon to do what they’re poorly equipped to do.

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There are a few big decisions that you have to make towards the middle of the game that change things quite a bit. In fact, those are really hard to write because once those things are in place so you have to account for them through the rest of the game. To that end, there have been places where we’ve been tempted to take things out because it would be easier on us. [...] but we decided to keep them in because we love those parts. We love the way this works and how there’s more freedom. For endings, we have big endings and small endings.

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The Dragon Age origin stories have entire chapters devoted to them. It also determines where I start. If I’m a poor person from the human city and I grew up in the ghetto -- if I go back to that area, I’ll meet people who will remember me and I’ll get an experience unique to my character because that’s where I’m from.

If you’re a dwarf and you come from where the dwarves live, and you go back, you’ll get unique dialogue and they’ll know you. The important thing isn’t how many choices you give. You can give a million choices. The important thing is that those choices are recognized during play. Like, if you have an origin story that makes you a noble -- if someone knows your noble, they’ll treat you differently. Or if you’re a race that is looked down on, people can sometimes behave differently towards you, even in a racist manner.

Players like feeling that the experience is more tailored to them and that they’re not just getting some cookie-cutter story. With origin stories, I’m hoping that someone plays as a dwarf and says, "This really feels like it’s made for a dwarf. What happens if I play as an elf?" It’ll feel the same way for the elf. That’s the idea.

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when you’re Level 1, it’s not like you’re a nobody. Not everyone has a level and class. That makes you special in this world. Most people don’t have a class of their own. That makes you a hero. You’re special and that’s why you’re recognized as being someone with skill, but we aren’t looking at godlike power.

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I think the plan is to have a little bit of scaling depending on the area, but there’s a top limit and bottom limit. [...] We’ve been playing with this idea of "gateway" encounters. So that when you’re on your way to an area, you might run into a group of monsters and those monsters would be indicative of what you’ll face. That way you can decide to go forward or not.

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For Dragon Age it’s just single-player. We had planned it early on. We wanted to create a second campaign for multiplayer, and I think that taught us some lessons. The more you spread out your focus, the more you run a risk of making some of the other pillars of the game not as strong as they should be.

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[crispy gamer] Are you still building the world at this point?

[david gaider] No, it’s basically built.

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[david gaider] Part of the thing about BioWare having its own property, however, was that it was going to have free reign to put out something that was intended for adults right from the start.

Not that you want to go crazy, necessarily. It’s not like we have naked people running around beating each other with bloody arm stumps while eating children. Though now that I think of it, wouldn’t that be awesome? It’s just nice to have the option, and I think that exercising that option made Dragon Age possible.

We’ve made a world where bad things happen even to beautiful people, where things don’t always get restored to goodness and light once the adventure is over. Personally, I like that a lot more. In High Fantasy settings it always seems like heroes are more of less commonplace. Magic is everywhere and an adventurer is always just around the corner. In a darker world, a hero not only rare but needed. That makes them special right there, even without being anointed as such by gods or prophecies.

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One of my favorite things about the world is the way we’ve handled the religion. Many fans expected us to go with the obligatory pantheon of gods, just as in D&D, but we haven’t done that. In Dragon Age, the humans have a single dominant religion that is also monotheistic. The Chantry believes in the Maker, a god that once ruled from the heavenly Golden City and watched over all of His Creation until mankind’s own arrogance and pride drove Him away and made Him turn his back on those he made.

Thing is, there is no proof that the Maker exists. He does not give spells to His priests, never makes personal appearances or directly intervenes in worldly affairs... yet people believe in Him. They see His hand in events and believe with all their heart that mankind must redeem themselves to regain His favor. Why? Because they have Faith. Faith is real in Dragon Age -- you can’t have it if gods are walking around and providing proof wherever they go. They have faith without proof, just as in our own world, and that makes it feel all the more real. The Chantry is complex and represents something you could actually see yourself believing in rather than being some name you put on your character sheet that supposedly you provide token worship for.

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[dan tudge] The actual Origins stories are actually your first two hours of gameplay, where you actually play your origins. And the choices that you make within your origin stories really change the lens on the way you perceive the world and the way the world perceives you. What’s unique there is not just selecting your class, your character - although you are doing all of that, but you’re actually playing your origins, playing the birth of your character. Honestly, rather than just selecting your character class, you’re actually role-playing your character right from the very beginning and creating that character.

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I was playing one of our origins stories and I actually had a situation where I had a very, very close friend within my origin... And to become a Grey Warden I had to make a difficult choice and had to leave my friend behind to what I felt was certain death. Playing through the game several hours later, I was actually doing a dungeon crawl underneath the city and I came across a prison area, and one of the individuals in one of the prison cells was my friend that I left behind, and I was actually elated because I had the opportunity to actually save him. Now I had picked any other origins he would have been some non-discreet player, but to me he was my friend. So it’s a very subtle thing but very emotionally compelling.

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We’re based entirely on our own rule-set. We spent a lot of time developing the Dragon Age universe, and really the rule-set within the universe, the fiction within the universe, the characters, the people that inhabit it, the creatures... Dragon Age: Origins is really just the beginning, the first entertainment that we can put in the universe. We’ve got a lot of great plans for the universe.

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this is very much an experience for our core users, and really it’s not going to be a short, little game. We don’t have an exact length, but this is something that has been built for core fantasy RPG gamers, so we’re going to give them a lengthy experience.

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If we’re using our past games as an example, then obviously the Baldur’s Gate games were extremely long, but with the level of next-gen content those days are almost unachievable now. But we’re certainly trying to really use Baldur’s Gate and make Dragon Age: Origins a spirtual successor.

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A large chunk of our story is dedicated to the interplay between the characters in your party; that will be a very big component. Dragon Age: Origins is also the biggest story we’ve ever created.

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Some of the moral choices you need to make, there’s a lot of choices that really aren’t right or wrong, but they’re hard, they’re hard to make. And you don’t come away thinking I role-played that as a good character, or I role-played that as a bad character, it comes across as a deep choice. And that really reflects the world and that sacrifice that needs to be made in order for the better good or for your better evil. The choices all the way through are a really good example of the darkness, the grittiness.

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Yes. Dragon Age: Origins will be coming to consoles in the near future, yes.

And with regards to the tool-set: obviously we’re leading with PC and we believe Dragon Age: Origins is a really strong PC title and we really want to give the PC the love that it needs. Definitely we will be having a Dragon Age toolset that will be available to the community, to anyone who wishes to build their own adventures within the Dragon Age universe.

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We believe, especially with the PC, that community is a huge part of what we’re doing online in Dragon Age: Origins, and the Dragon Age universe as a whole. We’ve a lot of plans to not only bring the users into the community through the tool-set, but also through a lot of initiatives we’re taking within online activity: downloadable content, both pre-release and post-release; free content, paid-for content; online achievements. There’s going to be a lot of community and online involvement outside of just the tool-set. But the tool-set will obviously be a very big part as well.

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The combat is one of the key features in Baldur’s Gate, and that’s probably one of the most defining things in [dragon age]. The tactical, party-based combat where you have a group of characters that you control and you arrange them in the battlefield. You can pause on and off.
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Well we created a whole new fiction for this game. And a large part of the effort of the team was in spending quite a bit of time in the pre-production phase, really fleshing out the back-story to the world. Really, the Darkspawn are the enemy you face in this game. They’re these mutated, freakish monsters that are humanoid, but not. They themselves fled to the dark side of the Blight and so you have to try and figure out the source of it, the cause of it, and of course, stop it. There are some references to the Arch-Demon and you have to figure out what that is...

The overall world is actually a very brutal, gritty sort of world. We call it the Dark World of Fantasy, which is different than classic High Fantasy--sashaying elves and happy hobbits. It’s a brutal world where you have very tough decisions and there’s all kinds of social commentary that is impacted by those choices you make.
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There’s no real need to run from place to place in the game. Also, travel could potentially limit the distance you could theoretically cover. So we tend to have action areas which are very large. That’s one of the strengths of Dragon Age. We have some very big areas with a lot of data held in those. A lot of creatures, a lot of loot, items, things like that...
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by the time Dragon Age starts [the grey wardens] are almost antiquated. It’s that classic situation of being stuck in the old days. They’re just sitting around and no one’s really sure what they do. One of the interesting things in the game is discovering more about them.
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[greg zeschuk] The idea really came from the work we did o the original Baldur’s Gate and this is almost a spiritual successor to that game to “Neverwinter Nights.” When we finished on the “Neverwinter Nights” series, we said, “Let’s take the things we’ve learned, the knowledge in creating all those great games, and make our own fantasy world — with some twists. We call it dark heroic fantasy, where the old sort of high fantasy with elves happily sashaying across the countryside and happy Hobbits — the world of “Dragon Age” is effectively the reverse of that. It’s brutal. It’s harsh. Really gritty, very realistic and filled with surprising situations that you see don’t see high fantasy characters in.

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The reference point of the “Lord of the Rings” films as probably the pre-eminent visual representation of fantasy and what those big battles would be like certainly played a role in what we built. I think a lot of what it comes from, funny enough, is what we did in tiny pixels back in the “Baldur’s Gate” days. When you pull it back to what we have now with all the technology — animations and mo-cap — it just looks that way. That’s the surprising outcome of just creating a game based on [its] principles.

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Origins is a return to BioWare’s roots. But also, the origin stories are personal individualized experiences players get to start the game. Doing something in that origin story [determines] in large part what you’re trying to do in the world. There is a story arc that everyone goes through, but it is personalized and quite different depending on how you go through the origin.

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When we looked at “Dragon Age” we sat back and thought we wanted the player to reflect their own inner voice. This was a very conscious decision. [...] There’s a lot of choices in this game about how you portray yourself and how you experience it. We wanted players to have an additional sense of — even though I’m picking a line — I’m the one saying it in my head.

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Typically for a lot of our games, particularly “Mass Effect” and “Dragon Age,” we do a lot of face-work because you’re coming in close and you see the face. It’s astounding how much time is put into that. The surfacing and the detailing you see on the armor, a lot of that has to do with the materials systems. They’re a really big thing that’s happened this generation that didn’t really exist before. It used to be very simplistic.

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I think there are elements, but it’s not an out front thing. They [made up languages] are used.

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On the system specs side, we haven’t finalized specs. The engine is quite robust and is able to scale down. That was one of our focuses, particularly because we have tactical combat with four people and up to 20 enemies. We’re trying to make sure it can crunch down. I don’t think system specs are going to be a big challenge for it.

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Any time we undertake something we have a goal of creating franchises… PC for now is what we’re focusing on, but there is a console future for the franchise.

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[greg zeschuk] We’re focusing on PC first. We’ve said we’re going to be looking at consoles, thinking about the plans there. We’re not in any big rush; we want to make sure we make the right platform decision.

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When you pull back, look at the whole battlefield, take your four characters, arrange them against the enemy... Fighting 20 guys, figuring how you’re going to lay them out. Are you going to protect your mage? How are they going to defend themselves? It has a sense of urgency, even though you can pause at any time. It’s still exciting.

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[ep] BioWare is famous for its moral choices throughout its games. With Dragon Age, you have Martyr, Tyrant and Hero alignments. Can you tell us a little more about those?

[gz] Those aren’t specifically the archetypes you can be, as much as they’re indicative of the types of actions you have to undertake. Once again, we’re coming in with a good system of alignment and how people see you in the world. What’s interesting is that we tie back into the origin stories. We’re not going into detail about these; we’ll talk a bit more about them later in the year. But at the beginning of the game you go through a personalized experience that kinda gives you a lens on the world. It also affects how the world sees you. You tie that together with your alignment and the decisions you make. Many decisions you make throughout the game are influenced by what happens at the beginning. It personalizes the whole thing more.

The Hero, Tyrant, Martyr concept has a lot to do with the big epic feel to the choices you make. If you think of the analogy with Lord of the Rings, you’re sitting in Mount Doom, do you throw the ring in or not? Those are the kinds of epic decisions that we want try to reflect in this game.

[ep] Taking that analogy, whether I throw the ring in or not makes a big difference to the plot. How divergent is the story in Dragon Age because of my choices? Whole new areas, different battles?

[gz] There’s a moderate change. If I play off the example of Mount Doom and the ring, I imagine if you kept the ring, Sauron would reign and the world would be destroyed! So probably not that big. The choices you do make affect armies, kings... We thought of ways of [adding] a very epic feel to the decisions you make, so you actually do change the world. As far as new content associated with that, there’s always some degree of this, but it’s not enormous. It doesn’t turn off half the world, or turn on another half.

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Dragon Age will be played as a single player game, even with the stuff you create with the tools.

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Greg Zeschuk: There are two things we’re doing with Dragon Age. We won’t talk too deep on either, but one is we’re going to make the toolset available. That’s part of the plan, which will be interesting. It’s not exactly a distribution method, but it’s certainly a communication method. We looked at the Sporepedia and the Creature Creator and said "holy cow!" You give the fans something to occupy themselves with, and they go nuts. So, that’s one thing.

The second thing -- and we’re not going to be going too much into this -- but an ongoing relationship with the consumer is also important. It’s not so much about the distribution method of the game itself, but what happens after. Like downloadable content. We’re going to be doing a lot of stuff that, over time, people will see that Dragon Age: Origins is almost like the game that never ends. We’ll just keep building it. It’s exciting for us because we’ve always wanted that. We think particularly in the fantasy space, there’s a real good audience that just wants to keep playing. At the end a game, it’s like "I want to keep building my character!" So we’re going to do a lot of cool stuff to let that happen.

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GameSpy: What exactly will players be able to create with the Dragon Age toolset?

Greg Zeschuk: That’s one thing we can’t go into detail on yet. Unfortunately, I can’t answer it apart from "stuff can be created."

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GameSpy: You guys gave the game that subtitle "Origin." Are you suggesting that it’s the first part of an ongoing story, or a prequel to something else entirely?

Greg Zeschuk: I would say both. We’re trying to signal pretty strongly that this will be enduring. I know for us, we tend to, every time we go out, we swing for the fence, really have that franchise-creating possibility out the gate. It’s also just the clarity around us returning to our origins. All things play a part in the name. We’ve used the Dragon Age name for a while, but we felt that adding "Origins" to it would give better depth to what we’re trying to say.

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The way we’re structured at BioWare, we tend to have teams that have different types of interests. The Mass Effect groups are into sci-fi, and the folks on Dragon Age are the ones that are very passionate about high fantasy. We call it "dark heroic fantasy" because we tend to equate high fantasy with the less gritty, less impactful, dancing elves, laughing hobbits kind of world. More whimsical. Dragon Age is not whimsical. It’s brutal, it’s tough. Heroes are heroes, and they’re larger than life, and the dangers are gigantic. It’s also an "M" [for mature] game, it’s a hard "M" game where the writing and the combat, and all those things together create a very impactful experience. It’s almost like the opposite of whimsical fantasy.

Which I think there’s a demand for. There’s a desire for things like "300," the sort of "punch in the gut" impact. That sort of experience is what we’re trying to create.

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We’re very particular about products and platforms. We really do want to match what the ideal and optimal platform is for any given game. For us, it just seemed to make a lot of sense to go back to the PC as a key part of this. We’re thinking about consoles in the future. There will be something at some point, we’ll see how it all goes. But the real gist is that, the experience we’re trying to create, with the tools and the downloadables... obviously there are downloadables elsewhere, but nowhere are downloadables as free and easy as the PC, nowhere is it easier to share what’s created than the PC. All these things just make a lot of sense. It just seemed to fit there.

When we [decide on] platforms, we’re also very particular about doing a good job on them. Some people just spam every platform under the sun and put generic versions of their game on every one, and they’re all just okay. We’re dedicated to making sure every version we do for every single platform is really, really good.
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[... for sonic chronicles: the dark brotherhood] we’re using a version of the dialogue tool that was developed for Dragon Age, where it’s able to deal with more traditional style of storytelling.

Now, Dragon Age has since layered on something like what Mass Effect has, in order to tell a much more cinematic story
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One of the games we’re planning a lot of post-release content for as well is Dragon Age. We haven’t announced any details about that lately, but it’s the kind of game that people just love, that sweet spot of BioWare games, the aspirational fantasy, the spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate, kind of the next-gen interpretation of it. We’re really going to want to stay in that universe a long time. It’s taken literally years of design time building this universe that feels coherent, kind of like the top of a mountain poking above the clouds. It feels like it’s got weight, it feels like it’s got a lot of depth to it, it feels like if you build something, it’s going to hold, it’s a strong foundation. That’s the kind of time we invested in it, and because we do that, we can build all kinds of small structures coming out of that foundation, and they feel like they resonate, they feel like they’re not just held together.
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Dragon Age is going to appeal to the fans who love Baldur’s Gate. It’s the next-gen interpretation of that. It’s really a rich fantasy universe.
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It’s an interpretation of the archetypal fantasy, the aspirational fantasy universe.
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