Dragon Age Central

Yet another gaming show [yags] interviews David Gaider [dg] at GenCon. There’s no significant new information here, but there is some insight into the development and writing process. Transcript follows.

[...intro...]

[yags] Hey it’s me again, from ‘yet another gaming show’, on the floor of GenCon Indionapolis, and now I’m sitting down with lead writer of ‘Dragon Age: Origins’, Mr. David Gaider. David, how’s it going?

[dg] Oh, it’s going all right, it’s a crazy show.

[yags] Now, is this your first GenCon, or are you...

[dg] My first GenCon, yes.

[yags] OK, we’re kinda talking as we’re getting to this area: you’ve been with Bioware for 9 years, various projects, this is your first real - for lack of a better word - big-boy project, you know, as the lead writer?

[dg] As the lead-writer, yeah. I’ve been one of the principle writers on previous projects. But this time I’ve a larger say in... helped create the setting, helped set the story and done a lot of the writing. And there’s been a lot of it, and this is our... in terms of content our largest project since BGII I think.

[yags] OK, what is the kind of process... like people I guess are familiar with the concept of writing a novel or writing a screenplay or something like that. How does the process differ in terms of writing a game, especially one as big a Dragon Age?

[dg] I guess the thing the thing about writing a novel or a play is that it’s very linear; I mean you know exactly where your characters are going to be, you know what they’re going to say, what they’re going to do, and you go from A to B to C to D. While it isn’t a challenge, it’s certainly a slightly different skill when you’re looking at game writing because you have to think of... well you don’t know necessarily who your protagonist is. At least in the Dragon Age... in Dragon Age there’s lot’s of customisation of your character, you’re going to have different races, different classes, different origins, so you have to think about... the character may be one of many different people, might have different motivations, and we also have to allow for different paths. It’s not... I mean sometimes you’re going to have different ways a quest can be done, be performed. Even narrowed down to the point... even in a dialogue you’re going to have different responses available to the player and so you’re going to... the dialogue has to be driven by the player. Yet no matter which route they take you have to make it sound like a regular dialogue in how it flows, right? So that in itself is a challenge that is, you know it’s a skill you have to acquire. In terms of building the story it’s the same thing. We have to look... we have to sort of imagine the... set down each different area, what’s going to happen in each area, the possible paths the story can flow in, without knowing necessarily which one the player’s going to take. Like sometimes we can put bottle-necks that they all pass, eventually tighten up to this one plot line. That helps prevent it from getting out of control, right? But you do too much of that you’re to remove the feeling that the player is control of his own destiny.

[yags] So what is the difference, I guess, in volume of just sheer words on a page between, like, a film script or a novel compared to a game like this?

[dg] Oh, you’re talking many magnitudes, I mean... there’s not only dialogue, right? You have descriptions of items, you have - in Mass Effect and Dragon Age - you have the Codex, you have books you can read inside the game, the game history that’s available, so I mean you have a lot of dialogue isn’t going to see for every path they don’t take. You’ve still got to write those paths, right? So... the more paths you have, that’s the more you’re going to have to write, but the less the player is necessarily going to see. At least in a single play-through. You’ve got to walk a line there, right? You don’t want to write too few paths, but you don’t want to go so crazy that, you know, you load yourself down with a million words of dialogue and the player, you know it’s only a 5 hour game, that would be ridiculous.

[yags] In this game, again, they’re doing the Bioware thing of multiple dialogue choices kind of following, not exactly a morality scale, but some sort of various types of responses. And you mentioned that in this one, other than... as opposed to Mass Effect, there isn’t, like, a power difference between your mood and what you do, but it does affect the story line.

[dg] In Star Wars for instance, as well as Mass Effect, there’s a gameplay mechanic to the morality, right? In Star Wars it was your light side and your dark side points, you had like a meter. Sort of the same deal in Mass Effect: you had your renegade and your paragon; they weren’t quite good and evil, but you still had in there a gameplay mechanic that tracked how much of a renegade or how much of a paragon you were. And that’s cool, but the thing that... once you make it a gameplay mechanic, you then have to put it in every dialogue and every quest whether it fits or not. Now that can work, I mean I thought it was kind of cool in ‘Knights of the Old Republic’, because that’s part of the world - it was about the dichotomy between good and evil. With Dragon Age we specifically decided to go with something that’s a little bit more mature, more adult, not tied to trying to fit a distinct good path, a distinct evil path everywhere. What we have is you’re able to act in a moral manner or immoral as appropriate. Sometimes being immoral means taking the short cut, and not worrying about how it affects other people. Sometimes the moral path is getting more... looking for more reward. But not always, that’s probably trying to shoehorn them in. Sometimes if you have a simple quest, I remember in previous games where we’ve tracked a line, sometimes you need to say, well, what’s the evil path here? I guess have the character hit up the person for money, you start to feel a little bit like a bully, right? But with Dragon Age we have the opportunity to be a little bit more selective of what the player does, so you have the opportunity then to allow the player to do things that are much logical and I find much effective in the end. Because you’ll end up with choices.. you’ll sit back and think "this seems like a good choice but... and this seems sort of like a evil choice but it has some good aspects..." so it’s not necessarily so clear. We even have some very hard choices, so doing what seems to be the morally the right thing, is often the hard route. That’s the one where you’ve got to go most out of your way and maybe get the least reward. Because sometimes being good means not worrying about what compensation you’ll get, and I think that’s appropriate.

[yags] [... transcript incomplete, will be completed later...]

Audio interview with Omaha Sternberg [os] interviewing Chris Priestly [cp] at PAX for igameradio. Transcript follows.

[... general pax discussion ...]

[os] I got a chance to see ‘Dragon Age: Origins’ by Bioware. Oh. My. God. I swear... all right, I called my husband after I saw the demo for this and he laughingly told me he had to clean the drool off his phone after he was done talking with me because I was so, so slathering over this game. Beautiful game. Now of course I’m a big RPG fan anyway, but it’s really an awesome RPG. It’s a spiritual successor of ‘Baldurs Gate’, not based on D&D like NeverWinter Nights was. The graphics and artwork are just stellar. I mean they’re very detailed and refined. If you’re taking a look at the grass and the trees and the castles and the walls and things like that, it’s not just grass, it’s individual blades that you feel like you’re walking past. And the castle walls, each one of them seems to be very very different.

The characters themselves are very different. You’re together with a group of people... you’ve got a group that you’re fighting with, and each member of your party you get to control, unlike what happened with NeverWinter Nights for example. You get to control everyone, you get to tell them how to fight, etc. etc. and... the combat, oh my God that was incredible. They were fighting at one point in time during the demo an Ogre, and I swear toward the end when they killed the Ogre, one of the fighters jumped up on top of the Ogre, slashed his neck and just drove the sword two-handed down into his head and it was an awesome, awesome act. Oh wow, it was like you were watching a movie, it was really good. And all of it was a demo of an actual build of the game. None of it was like trailer, or anything like that; all actual build.

Magic looks fabulous, they had a mage that they were showing in the demo - performing. When the magic was working... of course you had characters... you had to be careful about the magic you were doing because if you’re not careful and you send a fireball that blows up a particular area against your enemy, if part of your party is there they’re going to get hurt. The funniest things was - they really need to work out too, as far as the AI is concerned - the mage at one point during the battle had hit one of the enemy Dark Spawn, and so all this area around the Dark Spawn was all in flames and three members of the party of course they wanted to go and get the Dark Spawn, so of course they went right into the flames... yeah, that was really brilliant [editors note: when party ai is turned on, they’re intelligent enough not to run into flames]. [laughs]

The story is really deep, lot of political strife going on within the story world that makes it really intriguing. Maybe they need to work a little bit on things like, say, foreshadowing, which at one point during the demo it felt like we’d been hit with a club.

When I asked them about the Mac version, "no comment at this time". But let’s face it, this is Bioware. They’ve... most all of their games have had Mac ports, including the just announced ‘Jade Empire’ Mac port. So I would be very very surprised if ‘Dragon Age: Origins’ did not make it onto the Mac.

[... talks about other games at pax ...]

[os] I’m sitting with Chris Priestly from Bioware, and we are talking ‘Dragon Age: Origins’. I just got out of the demo for the game, and it was awesome. I am certainly looking forward to that. So, what caused you guys to create ‘Dragon Age: Origins’?

[cp] Well we really wanted to return to our roots. Bioware we’ve had a lot of great success recently with games like ‘Mass Effect’, ‘Jade Empire’, ‘Knights of the Old Republic’, which are sci-fi games. But really Bioware is built on fantasy games: we started with ‘Baldurs Gate’, ‘Baldurs Gate 2’, ‘NeverWinter Nights’, we had great success for many years; we still have people playing ‘NeverWinter Nights’, which is great 5 years down the road. And we have a lot of people at the company that, even though ‘Mass’ and ‘KotOR’ were great games, they really wanted to return to fantasy. So we have a lot of really skilled writers, a lot of really talented artists that work specifically for the fantasy medium, and so it’s really a chance for us to return to what we love best.

[os] And thus the name changed from ‘Dragon Age’ to ‘Dragon Age: Origins’.

[cp] Very much so. It’s kind of a play on words; part of it is a return to Bioware’s origin, back to the role-playing game. The other part is the origin story. When you start to play ‘Dragon Age: Origins’ you get to create the character that you want to play. Whether you’re a male or female, whether you come from nobility or are a commoner, the racial background like an elf or a human or whatever, the starting class - whether you’re a mage or a fighter... - again, lots of different choices in the game, customise your face and so forth. After you’ve created your character, you play what is called an origin story. The origin stories will be different based on the choices that you made. So a female elven fighter is going to be different than a human mage, and that sort of thing. Different origin stories for different characters, just to help establish the character and how you fit into the world of ‘Dragon Age: Origins’. Then after your origin story - it’s kind of like a prequel - and then it moves right into the gameplay itself.

[os] Now unlike previous games like ‘Baldurs Gate’ and ‘NeverWinter Nights’, there’s several different races in there like human and elf, but elves are second-class citizens.

[cp] Very much so. There’s all sorts of different levels of politics in the game: how the humans react to the dwarves, how the elves react to the humans, how everybody reacts to the Dark Spawn, which are the main villain. But there is all sorts of different levels in the game. People who play a commoner are going to have a different reaction to the people around them than the people who play nobility classes. It’s just sort of how the world sees you as your character, your racial background, your economic background, you’ll get different approaches. Even talking to the same character if you’re playing an elf will have different dialogue than if you’re playing as a human because their response to you will be based on the character you have created.

[os] So, quick summary of the story for the game, and what was the inspiration for it?

[cp] Sure, well, the story is basically, as I said, you start off creating your own character, your own origin story. After you’ve played through your origin story you become what is called a ‘Grey Warden’. A Grey Warden is a peace keeper in the Kingdom of Ferelden, where the game takes place. You work for the King, taking care of troubles that arise. And every few hundred years there’s this ancient evil race called the ‘Dark Spawn’ which live under the ground, driving through the tunnels deep below the earth... every few hundred years they rise to the surface, bursting forth, almost like locusts; they don’t really just want to conquer the Kingdom, they just want to destroy everything on the surface. And it’s your job as a Grey Warden to put an end to the Dark Spawn Blight. Now the story, as with any good fantasy role-playing game, has all kinds of different sub-plots and side-quests, different ways to play through the game again based on the choices you want to make, whether you’re playing a more kind and gentle character, maybe you’re playing a bit of a darker, more sinister character. There’s going to be different party people that you’ll encounter, some of whom may join your party, some of whom may not. If they’ve heard your reputation is particularly nasty, they might be too kind and too gentle to want to associate with you, and they’re not going to have anything to do with you. But lots of different side-quests, sub-plots, romances in the game, different ways to get to the end of the game... I don’t want to spoil the ending or anything like that... but there’s all sorts of different choices in the way the story can go.

As for the inspiration, I mean we’ve been working on it for 4 years at Bioware. Everything inspires us. I mean we have a very creative team at Bioware, but whether it’s Tolkein, whether it’s George R. R. Martin, whether it’s movies like ‘Conan the Barbarian’ - Dan Tudge the project director is a huge fan of the ‘Conan the Barbarian’ movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger - all the great fantasy elements, but really it still comes down to our own creative imaginations. We have a really creative group at Bioware, and they do a tremendous job.

[os] Now even though the Dark Spawn kind of reminds you of orcs or goblins, chaotic evil and things like that, it’s not D&D based.

[cp] No, it is our own creation; we’ve worked really hard to create a really rich in lore story, all kinds of deep history of the world, all that sort of thing. The people that have seen our demonstrations here at PAX, at E3, even our videos online, have said "Oh those Dark Spawn, yeah those are orcs, or goblins, they’re like all the other things!"... you’ve only seen the start of the Dark Spawn at those demonstrations; there’s a lot more to come still. You’ve seen some of the foot soldiers, but there’s a lot more still to come.

[os] Also you’d mentioned George R. R. Martin, and I have to say I’ve read his novels. He does have a tendency in his latest trilogy - which may be even longer than that, he loves to write - to get very... so in depth with everything, his world, that it becomes incredibly confusing. After a while you start to lose track. I stopped reading the second book half-way through because I lost track of who was who and stuff like that. Is this something that people would end up having happen in the game as they’re playing, they would start losing track of all the different characters that they would need to interact with?

[cp] No, we’re making very sure that, especially since it is our creation with a lot of new information for players, we’re making it a) very presentable, so people are going to be able to keep track very easily, characters are going to be very distinctive, so you’re going to be able to remember "Oh, I remember him, the important dwarf", for example, or "That person was the King", so it will be very clear in the game. In the end it kind of depends up to the individual player how much they get out of it. We get some people that rush through the game, they enjoy it, they move on. Other people want to experience everything, they’ll... what we call replayability. They’ll play the first time through they’ll be a human fighter, the next time they’ll be an elven mage, you know different character classes, different plots you encounter. There is a lot of story in the game, but really we’ve got an excellent story management system: journals, people you talk to it’s very sensible and logical how you’ll progress through the game. It’s pretty open-ended, people are going to have a lot of choices to... "Oh, should I go talk to the dwarves in their Kingdom now, or do I want to the city and explore, should I maybe go to the dungeon and do that sort of thing?". There’s going to be a ton of choice in the game, but it’s all going to be logically laid out and really easy to keep track of.

[os] And with your own creation, it’s also your own game engine too.

[cp] Exactly, this is a new game engine for us, it’s called ‘Eclipse’. It allows you to play the game really the way that you want. Some people, like myself actually... I play really a hack & slash sort of character, I really just pull up my sword, charge into battle and let the party AI take care of itself.

But a lot of people really enjoyed games like ‘Baldurs Gate’, ‘NeverWinter Nights’, where you had sort of a top-down tactical view. You can do that as well, you can pull the camera right back over the top, move it around the battle-field, figure out where your opponents are, where you want to assign powers, where you want to cast spells, that sort of thing. So it’s really going to be up to individual people how they want to play the game. But the engine is really powerful and the graphics are tremendous.

[os] And as with this new game engine, you also can control, like with ‘NeverWinter Nights’ [editors note: she means ‘baldurs gate’, not nwn], each member of your party and how they fight.

[cp] Absolutely. You’ll of course control your character and what you want to do with them. But one of the cool things is you are able to control all the party NPCs. You travel with as many as three at a time, but there’s a great deal of others that you’ll encounter, some will want to join you, some as I said may not. But those that aren’t necessarily with you at the time will wait for you at base camp. But you have complete over them as well, like what armour they’re wearing, what weapons they’ll use, what powers and abilities they’ll focus in. As you level up, they’ll level up as well; you have total control over them.

[os] You also mentioned the graphics, and they were just gorgeous. They were fabulous. First question is: does the graphical element of the game mean that you’re going to have high system requirements for people?

[cp] Well system requirements still aren’t tied down yet. For us the more people who can play the game it’s always the better for us. We’re still working on them, we want to try to have a really good scaling system so we can have low-end PCs play the game, as well as high-end PCs. Not much information available yet, we’re still working out the system requirements, but we should be able to tie those down a little closer to December this year.

[os] Also, what was the inspiration for the artwork in the game?

[cp] Wow, again, much like the earlier question about the writing, our artists are amazingly creative just by themselves. Tremendous... but all the great fantasy artists, whether its Brom, Hilderbrandt... you know, there’s a ton of great art out there, again, movies, television shows are inspiration, but we’re really just trying to capture the best fantasy elements. Me personally I can’t wait until our fans experience the Dwarven Kingdoms, which is called Orzammar. It’s tremendous, inspired by a great deal of sources, but again it’s our own creativity.

[os] Now this game is also not going to be rated ‘T’, it’s going to end up being rated ‘M’ because along with all the attention to detail is the attention to detail during battle.

[cp] Yeah, we don’t have a rating yet, but we are definitely looking at a more mature game, a little more violent this time, some kind of adult situations, I think is the term they use on television. It is definitely for a more mature audience. I think probably a mature rating is likely. Different ratings boards, different systems. It is a darker and grittier gameplay. You’ve seen the demonstration and what we call death blows in the game. Which will differ from your characters and abilities, the powers and weapons that you use, but things like decapitations, we killed an Ogre earlier by leaping up onto its chest, stabbing it through the neck and then piercing it through the head. So it’s definitely a little more mature this time around.

[os] So, also, I cover the Mac industry, and I know Mac lovers they’ve had ‘Baldurs Gate’, they’ve had ‘Baldurs Gate 2’, they’ve had ‘NeverWinter Nights’ and ‘NeverWinter Nights 2’, and I know that they will love to be able to see this game on the Mac. So the question would be, how well would this be able to get ported to the Mac with this new game engine?

[cp] Well, we’ll see. It is a PC game first. The franchise for ‘Dragon Age’ is huge, there’s possibilities of consoles, Mac versions, Linux versions down the road. All that sort of thing’s entirely possible. Bioware recently released a Mac version of ‘Jade Empire’, we definitely love our Mac community; we’ll see what happens down the road. But first and foremost it’s a PC game.

[os] Of, terrific. Well thank you very much Chris for talking to me.

[cp] Thanks very much for having us.

[... general pax stuff ...]

Shawn "Certis" Andrich [sa] interviewed David Gaider [dg], lead writer, at GenCon this year for ‘Gamers with Jobs’. Transcript follows.

[sa] I’m sitting here with David Gaider, the lead writer on ‘Dragon Age’ for Bioware and also one of the principle writers for ‘Baldurs Gate 2’. Thank you very much for joining us.

[dg] Thank you.

[sa] So we just came out of the presentation for Dragon Age...

[dg] Right.

[sa] ... and it looks amazing. I’ve got say - it’s not an interview if I don’t toss a little bit of salad - the dialogue flowed very nicely. It felt very natural, and that should really get across characters and the attitudes.

[dg] We’re taking a couple of things we learned from Mass Effect, which is basically the acting element, seeing the character up-close, see the nuances of emotion, and also things like the one dialogue we showed where you’re not just talking to a face that’s standing still; sometimes you will be walking through a town and talking to them as you’re moving. The only thing we didn’t do that Mass Effect did - we aren’t doing any voice over for the player character. The idea was that Dragon Age is a lot more about customisation of your own character. In Mass Effect you were playing Shepard, he was a military man - if the voice was sort of a gruff military man or a woman, that’s fine. Here you have choice of gender, of class, choice of race... we didn’t want to put a voice in the player’s head. Also we aren’t doing the thing... in Mass Effect we did a thing where you had the intent of your dialogue choice, as opposed to the exact wording. And that was sort of to give it a more cinematic flow: you could read it quickly, you could choose it quickly, you ended up with one flow of the conversation. Here we’re going back to the more traditional - you see the exact dialogue choice you’re making, exactly what you’re going to be doing.

[sa] So are we looking at... is it still going to be similar to Mass Effect - number one is always the ‘can do’ answer, number 2 is neutral... or is it a bigger mix?

[dg] No. In past games we’ve done the good choice, evil choice, whether it’s light-side/dark-side for KotOR or Paragon/Renegade for Mass Effect. It’s a little bit different, but essentially the dichotomy idea. Here we’re going for what we consider to be a darker, more mature story style where you have a lot of choices where what is good and what is evil is not necessarily going to be immediately apparent. Sometimes you’ll have very difficult choices, and say there’s a really... this is the moral path, obviously, but that one’s going to be a lot harder, you’re going to go more out of your way. Sometimes being good the reward is going to be "Oh, thank you so much for helping", sometimes taking the immoral path sometimes could just be... I’m going to do what is the quickest and most efficient way to get through this, and not worry about how it affects other people. And then deal with the consequences of those choices appropriately.

[sa] We’re not looking at a one-or-two, light-or-dark kind of...

[dg] We’re not tracking any kind of point value of how good or evil you are; what we are doing is it affects your reputation in the world, has consequences for your choices... most especially you have followers - we have very extensive dialogue for followers, kind of like in ‘Baldurs Gate 2’, where there was an extensive series of dialogues you could have. We track friendships you could have with your party members. We track romances. Also, if you’re making game descriptions they don’t agree with you can make enemies out of them - if you get to the point where they say "No, I do not believe in what you’re doing here, if you don’t change your mind I will fight you, I will stop you from doing that". The idea is that your reputation with your followers... they’re sort of a mirror as to what sort of decisions you’re making.

[sa] Are we looking at a more ‘Baldurs Gate 2’ template for that, or more ‘Knights of the Old Republic’ where - because I just replayed that recently - and they will stop you, and it will say "so-and-so seems to have something to say" - is it going to be kind of like that, or is it more going to be in the context of what you’re doing?

[dg] We have a mix where you can speak to them, and they will have your dialogue. Sometimes what they have to say is important enough that they will interrupt you and initiate dialogue. And occasionally - we’re not sure exactly how... in Mass Effect we had characters that went "[cough-cough]" when they had something to say: we hear that sometimes people didn’t quite hear that, especially when they had the sound turned low... so we’re working on exactly how we’re going to have that. But if they have dialogue we’ll have to have some way to indicate it. But sometimes they will definitely initiate dialogue with you, they will pipe in on conversations. When you make decisions, if they disagree with they might actually stop and say "Hey hey, what are you doing?". If you’re very persuasive - you could have a guy who says "Why are you killing that person?", you’re like "Hey hey, it’s alright, we have to do this, it’s important"... "Oh, ok, I guess that sounds reasonable" - if you’re persuasive. So you can be an evil charismatic person if you want and do things that even your good parry members you sort of have to talk them into it, they end up sort of "Oh, all right... I guess".

[sa] Let’s look a little bit more at the context of the world. One of the most interesting things about this game that has me excited is that this is a completely new world that you guys have built from the ground up. I visited Bioware three years ago and even then Dragon Age was behind closed doors being worked on. What is the approach? How much writing and content are we looking at compared to when you’re working on a D&D-based Baldurs Gate?

[dg] Well that’s sort of two separate questions. Are you talking about in terms of how long will it take to play the game?

[sa] Well actually I’m looking at it more in terms of how long did it take to even establish what the game is going to be as far as the world?

[dg] There was a good year, initially, that was spent - primarily by me but also the artists - putting together our vision of the world. We didn’t just do the area where the game takes place; we have sort of a larger... Thedas is the world... the continent [editor’s note: ‘thedas’ was originally a forum term meaning ‘the dragon age setting’, but is now the official name of the continent the first game takes place on] I guess is a better way to put it... where all this history takes place. We had a good notion of what the whole world was before we even actually said "Ok, I think in this entire world this first game, this first story, we’re going to do ‘here’". And then we seeded stories onto places and we thought "ah, they’re interesting, maybe we’ll go there, maybe in the future we’ll set that up and leave it for other people - maybe the community - if they want to do stories there". So these other places are interesting enough that one could look at it and go "Huh, I could think of a good reason to go there". There’s so much information. Even to this day - I did all that writing - to this day my writers will come up and say "So it says this in the wake", and I’m like "Really?!"... "Like, well you wrote it!", and I’m like "Yeah, but that was 4 years ago now". So there’s a lot, a lot of information. A lot of it is in the Codex. I think my hope is that when players are in the game, much like with Mass Effect, that you get - for those people that are interested in reading about it and experience it - they’ll get this impression that there is this larger history at work there. They’re going to be able to learn about things that maybe don’t directly impact what they’re doing now, but still you can sort of see that, and you really get a sense of "wow, there was a lot of thought put into that, and more than I’ve just seen on the surface".

[sa] As you get further along in development now - obviously the game is in full swing, it’s coming along very quickly - when you’re actually in the early stages are you writing toward gameplay situations the designers are looking for, or are they fitting in within the story that you’re establishing, or is it more of a kind of back-and-forth? Like for example, from the demo for example, the character needs to go up and light the beacon. So are you telling the story of a battle clashes and the player needs to light a beacon and this is going on, and then the designers build the levels and work toward that, or are they kind of saying to you "here’s kind of what"...

[dg] Oh, which mistress are we serving?

[sa] Yeah, what comes first?

[dg] It changes. Sometimes you can say... we set up an area, this is the story that’s going to happen. Then we put it together, we have a prototype where we run through and we’re like "Wow, that’s boring, we need to run up a tower and light a beacon, or something". No, that particular area it was set up, it was that way form the get-go. But sometimes we sit down, we set up a story, and it’s good and exciting that we don’t need to worry about game play as much. The idea is you sort of want to have a mix of action and you want to have a mix of story. Sometimes I know when I would work on an area I’d have this part, oh, there’s all this dialogue and stuff that happens here, and then for the tech designers I’d just sort of put "Insert fun here". But you know, at Bioware we have that whole part of our design team; that’s what they specialise in and they go in and there’s a couple of guys - Georg Zoeller, Yerone - that’s just two of our tech designers but they’re fantastic. I say "insert fun" and to me I giggle because I mean... but they come back the next day and they have this elaborate area with fun combats and OK, you know, that’s why they have their jobs.

[sa] That’s awesome. So you mentioned earlier consequence and your actions. In the demo there’s a prisoner in a cell and you can get him some food, be very nice, you can kill him, take a key...

[dg] We used that particular demo just because it was very quick, it was one-off. I would say that was a simpler interaction, it was meant to just be ambient. It would be very simple to look at that dialogue and go "well there’s an example of strict good and evil right there". I don’t think that’s really indicative. I think they decided to show that as a way "this is how dialogue affects"... a good way to show our consequences. Normally throughout the dialogues we focus on taking actions that are logical. You know, the quick immoral road vs. the lengthier moral road.

[sa] So the intention, then, is to be a lot deeper than that.

[dg] Oh yeah.

[sa] Now is there a point... like I’ve always found that when I’m playing games like this: you talk to somebody, you go through a lot of options and stuff... if something goes wrong you simply say "bye" and then go talk to them again and you take another crack. Are there times where you’re really going to be able to talk yourself into a corner with somebody?

[dg] Ummm... talk yourself into a corner?... We wouldn’t want to get to the point where you felt like he had more things to say and you talked to them and they’re just like "No, you’ve used up all the conversation options with me". But it depends. I know that there are times when, if you make an NPC angry he might say "I don’t want to talk to you anymore". You may have just closed that off completely. We don’t tend to do that on the critical path, because you always have to have an ability to move forward, but I mean we definitely want consequences. The one thing I did want to avoid personally is the idea that if you go out being the immoral person that does what he needs to to get the job done, so to speak, that you end up closing off quests for yourself. I think that... all the times in the past we’ve had it so that here you have good choices, evil choices, but the good choices were just as rewarding and you probably got more quests out of it than you did being evil. So I think the idea is to present two legitimate choices that offer different things. I think sometimes people - especially the ones who play... who intentionally are being moral players like the Paladin-type - they are OK, a lot, with just getting the people... getting their companions being... you know, think they’re awesome, and they’re getting gratitude, and not necessarily that, you know, someone offers them a reward and they’re like "Oh, no, I wouldn’t think of it!" and they get the reward anyway. No, that person says "Oh, great, I’ll keep my reward then".

[sa] Or you say like... you do the evil thing and he’s like "Oh, that’s really mean... so anyway, go to the tree and get that fruit for me..."

[dg] I mean it depends. There are characters that need you badly enough that even if you were kind of a sinister person, they might have to overlook that. But I mean we’re trying to have as reactive a dialogue as possible. The thing we’re focusing on more, perhaps, is recognising the choices the player makes. You have origin stories, you have your race, you have your class. Having the opportunity to have that recognised in dialogue... if you’re a mage - mages are sort of mistrusted in this world - there’s a few places where, say some robbers come out and you say "Why, you could rob me, but I’m a mage", and they’re like "Ok then, we’ll just, ummm, back away slowly... don’t turn us into toads", that sort of thing.

[sa] Now as far as the origin and how that’s going to impact things. Are we looking at a similar impact to what we saw in Mass Effect which I felt like added a lot of flavour? Or are we looking at more... something that will impact the game flow?

[dg] Mass Effect you were choosing, on character creation, sort of where your character came from? That did affect the story, it came up a couple of times. The origin stories we have - I think we’re going to talk more about them in the future as to what exactly they are - but the idea is that they are the beginning of the game. You have a unique beginning - an entire chapter - a place in the world where you start that’s different for each origin story, that affects the game from that point on. If you are, say, a commoner that comes from the poor quarter of the city, and you start of the game there, and that determines how you enter the overall story. During the course of the story if you go back to that part of the city you would expect that people there would recognise you, you’d be able to meet your family members, you would get dialogue specific to your origin, and that’s exactly what we’ve got. The idea is that for you to see all the content in the game - between the origin stories, between the followers and the romances and stuff - you would need to play the game several times. We’re ok with having someone playing and going along thinking... and you’re playing and playing for a while and "wow, this seems really specific, really specific to me being a dwarf... I wonder what would happen if I started over and played an elf? Would it be different?". The answer is "Yes, it would be different".

[sa] That’s great. You mentioned ‘critical path’ earlier, which I think is a really great way to talk about the plot. Like Mass Effect I would argue had a very critical path: Mass Effect was, you start pretty linear, and you get out of the Citadel and you can choose where you go first, but ultimately it’s driving you in a very strong narrative direction.

[dg] Bioware always does story-driven games. The very extreme opposite end is a game like Oblivion - sort of a sand-box game, where you’ve got a wide open world. I think that’s the kind of game that gives you a really good feel of a massive world. But sort of at the expense of having a more driven experience. Some players like that and they sort of go "what story?" and they wander around and do side quests and stuff and that’s cool too. But I think Bioware’s always done... we’re gonna, sure, limit the size of the world a little bit... but the idea is to give you a stronger narrative. I think in terms of Dragon Age specifically, we’re going back to sort of the medium between Baldurs Gate and, say, Mass Effect, where you have... there’s a point in Baldurs Gate [2] where you come out of Irenicus’ dungeon and suddenly it opened up. You had a wide open world, but it wasn’t like you could wonder around for miles of terrain; you had lots of areas you could go to. That’s the idea, again, that you have these large areas to go to, lots of side quests, you wanna lose yourself in the world a little bit that’s great, but the idea is to keep a little bit more focussed on what’s happening. Because, I mean, you have this massive event going on... going off and doing something for months and months that has nothing to do with the main plot, it isn’t really logical, as much as some players would enjoy it. We do want to keep the players more focussed on this, which allows us to give them a...

[sa] So maybe a little bit of the openness a PC gamer might expect, but maybe a little less than what you see in Baldurs Gate 2, which is fairly extreme as far as what you guys have done.

[dg] Yeah, we’ve done a lot content - this is a big game, one of the biggest we’ve attempted in a while... Baldurs Gate 2, kind of in a class of its own? Still, however, we’re talking about an extensive game. I can’t really say how long it’s going to be just yet until we get closer, but we’re talking about a lot of gameplay hours. The followers you’ve got, the idea is you’re going to be able to interact with them over a long period. Once you’re done you’re going to feel like you’ve had the long haul, the epic sort of journey to get the ending, and I think that’s what’s important.

[sa] Are we looking at a similar structure to Mass Effect, where you could just pound through it
and finish that game and get a really good story experience?

[dg] Yeah, but you could do the same to BG2 as well, you know, we had our testers that could get through in just a few hours if they wanted to. That was with a sword that killed things instantly. But, the idea is they knew exactly what you needed to do, and you can do that. I mean I [?] to this day; we said "oh here’s Mass Effect which is about 30 or 40 hours of gameplay", but you have people who say "oh, what? I did that in 15 easy!", so it varies for the person. Some people are going to barrel through. For the person that wants to do all the romances and follower quests and side quests and wander and hit every nook and cranny, there’s going to be a lot here for them to chew on.

[sa] Because this is a new IP, did you come in with any preconceived notions, any influences, any worlds like that? This is obviously... it’s a bit... ‘darker and grittier’ keeps coming up and I wish I had another word to describe it, but...

[dg] I wish we did too.

[sa] ... it’s definitely a bit more adult mature; it’s definitely got a bit more of an edge.

[dg] I’ve said this to other people before. While I wouldn’t want to say that this authors style was like... "yeah, let’s do that" - we’re not trying to copy it - but as far as an inspiration for how to fantasy a little bit differently, George R. R. Martin was a great example, for me personally, picking up the book, and having had a... I think at that point I’d had a little bit of exhaustion on sort of fantasy in general - high fantasy was always sort of the norm - and suddenly here’s ‘Game of Thrones’, had a world that... sometimes he gets a little dark, even too dark for me... But, here he had a world that is so much focussed on the civil war, the politics, characters that you loved could die; he wasn’t afraid to just jab you with the knife and twist it around a little, and you’re like "earth", throw the book across the room and sort of say "Oh I hate him so much".

[sa] I actually did that a couple of times, there’s a few points...

[dg] I think I know exactly what points you’re talking about. Now, for the world specifically, the... Throne of Ice and Fire? Song of Ice and Fire? Song of Fire and Ice... Ice and Fire... [the george r. r. martin book] it’s a little bit low magic. We have some low magic elements, I don’t think we go that low. Magic in Thedas is rarer, mages are distrusted for many good reasons. I should talk about the dark spawn. The dark spawn are sort of the... you look at them and think they’re sort of like Lord of the Rings rocs, right? And in that respect they are sort of the evil horde. The idea is there is so much more behind it. The reason why mages are so distrusted is that the Chantry - the church of the realm - teaches that a long time ago when mages ruled over Thedas they became powerful enough and proud enough they decided, you know we’re going to open up a gateway into Heaven. We’re going to usurp the Maker’s throne - the Maker being the sort of God as far as the Chantry is concerned. And they did. They opened up this gateway, and according to what the Chantry teaches, they stepped into Heaven... but mankind is a corrupt, sinful creature; he took a step into Heaven and he corrupted it with his own sin, he darkened it and turned it into the Black City, and that corruption got turned back in on themselves and they became... these mages got transformed into the first dark spawn and the Maker said "How dare you!", threw them back to earth, and they were the first dark spawn. They sort of repelled from the light, they went underground, they multiplied, and back then in ancient times they worshipped dragons, these are referred to as Old Gods, and the Chantry teaches that the Maker punished them for being false Gods and imprisoned them beneath the earth so these dark spawn, they search for these Old Gods, and when they find them they spread this corruption to them and the dragon wakes and rises as an Arch Demon. And when that happens the dark spawn rise with it and they’re like locusts: they spill out onto the surface and their goal is just to consume, to destroy everything. So it’s led by a dragon and that’s who these creatures are; they’re sort of like the sin of man given flesh. So, yes, they are orcs, but they’re not. So that’s why mages are so distrusted: look at what pride can do to mankind. This is where thinking you have enough power that you are a God, this is... by having that power you have doomed us. And of course the story in Dragon Age, this first story, is dealing with the fact that a blight has started again and it is your job to try and deal with it.

[sa] It must be tough trying to build a unique fantasy environment because when the first trailer came out, that first pre-E3 footage came out, there was a lot of "it’s just Lord of the Rings", you know, and it must be tough to find that balance. You mention Martin who’s a very good example of taking fantasy and doing something different with it. How much time did you go through, you know, orks, corks and sorks before you really got to a point where you felt like you had something unique?

[dg] Well, we didn’t want to... there is up to a point where you want to use the archetypes, right? They’re there. I think if we didn’t have, say, dwarves and elves... I mean there are certainly fantasy worlds that don’t have those, and essue the standards of fantasy more. That’s fine, I think we very much wanted to use some of the archetypes, so we have, say, elves and dwarves and when you look at them there are things about them that you would expect to see: elves have pointy ears, the dwarves are short and live under ground. And at the same time we want to put our own particular twist on it. Our elves are quite different. Our dwarves are a little more what you’d expect, but we take them in a place that I don’t think that they’ve gone in fantasy before. We do have, like I said, we have our ‘orcs’, so to speak, but we do something different with them as well. So, yeah... it kind of makes us cringe a little bit because when you show it on the surface, if you were to just look at an elf and a dwarf, you wouldn’t know right off the bat what we do that’s different. If you look at a dark spawn, sure on the surface its going to look like it might be more generic fantasy, but I think we’re confident that if we put it out there and people start playing it see the depth that there is actually there, they’re going to know that we haven’t just put out something that we haven’t thought about at all, right? That’s the hope.

[sa] Have you played or heard much about ‘The Witcher’?

[dg] I have played ‘The Witcher’, yes.

[sa] ... which came with the NeverWinter, the Aurora engine, kinda?

[dg] We can say, sure we’re doing a dark mature game, we can’t say not by any means are we the first person to do that. But I think we’re putting out own particular spin on it. Witcher did it. Witcher is great, I think it’s actually based on a Polish novel.

[sa] I’ve actually read the first translated Polish novel a little while ago. Not bad. Very game like actually.

[dg] Really? I really enjoyed the game myself, it’s very cool, I like what they did with their elves and their world. Very dark and gritty again, so that’s cool. Dragon Age is different... but then you could do the same thing too; if you showed The Witcher to someone - other than the fact that they have Geralt, I think was really their focus character - you could, if you were just showing a quick trailer of that, someone could say "errr, that looks fantasy as well", right?

[sa] Now ‘The Witcher’, as you know, did a lot with consequence and choices... that was like their primary focus. They would give you these flashbacks, tell you the consequences of your actions. Are you looking to go quite that far, or is it more important to tell the story with some variation, rather than say "because this guy is dead, this and this didn’t happen and it’s completely different"?

[dg] One thing that they got to do because they had a specific character is that they could delve a lot more into that character’s history and his motivations without... as a player you could make certain choices about what Geralt did, but who Geralt was wasn’t up to you, right? So in that respect we allow the player to customise his character more, we have the origin stories, there to provide the motivation for why they’re in this story, so I’d say yes and no. We go a lot more into the sort of struggle, the blight, as being this really important event, in great detail. But there’s also this idea that what the player does has an affect on how that plays out. There’s some parts of the game that... well I don’t even know if they’re going to go out the way they are right now, because there’s so many choices that have such far reaching effects afterwards, that it ends up becoming very complicated. I was just writing sort of our end part of the game, our epilogue, which... we decided instead of having a cut-off right at the climax, you sort of have a playable denumout... and I was writing through that and there’s so many variations on how things could sort of turn out, which is cool, but it’s so complicated. It blows your mind sometimes.

[sa] You listen to the guys working - like Bethesda - on Fallout 3, and they’re saying "Oh... 500 endings!"... are we looking at a multiple ending situation here?

[dg] Yes... yes.

[sa] Not 500?

[dg] I mean...

[sa] 400?

[dg] What do you mean by 500 endings though?

[sa] I don’t know!

[da] Little nuances of endings? Sure, with the denumounts I’ve been writing there’s all sorts of variations on how you affected these various areas in the world that you visit. I mean that’s one of the things we try to focus on in terms of how you affected the world, how you affected your followers, what you sort of did. I mean the overall story, sure, you’ve got to deal with the Blight, it’s a heroic story, so the idea is that you are fighting the Blight, but really the story to players is what they get to do personally, how... when dealing with the Kingdom, how do their choices affect who ended up on the throne, or whatever - just as an example, those are the things that the player cares about, right? Whether they were sinister and got to influence events, or are they a hero and how are they treated as a hero, those sorts of things. So yeah, in that respect we’ve got endings galore. In terms of larger, like, the decisions having major major variations? Yes, we’ve got more than one there as well.

[sa] Yeah, so ‘Knights of the Old Republic’, another fine example, had two endings basically. So, and I felt like with those two endings... I didn’t feel like I had a unique impact on the world. Whereas in ‘The Witcher’, as weird and arbitrary as the endings could get - all these criss-crossing things - I felt like my actions at least did have some impact on what I was leaving behind me.

[dg] It’s hard for me to talk at length about without getting into details, which I can’t, but I think we put a lot more attention on the ending and how the player affects the world, sort of... to give the player a lot more chance to see the variations. Even sometimes, like even small decisions you make, say you help... I’ll throw out one small example here: there is this one sword you can find that belonged to this family. You can keep it for yourself; because the idea is you initially... you could borrow it and say "oh, I’ll give it back". But if you do give it back, because the one small boy that you give it back to who was with the family because his parents have died... if you give it back to him, he takes it and he’s like "wow, you used this, this is awesome!". If you did give it back to him, what effect that has is, say, on the end, maybe he goes and becomes a great adventurer, sort of inspired by your deeds, right? This, just as sort of an example of something that could happen.

[sa] Now, this game’s not done, obviously, it’s impossible to even speculate really on what’s coming. What would be next. But obviously when you put the name ‘Origins’ in there, you’re kind of leaving yourself open, so I do have to ask: do you have any concepts in mind, just looking in the future, just about like kind of thinking about how would you be interweaving different games, would you be looking at separate adventures completely, in different parts of the world? Because you mentioned you guys picked one area.

[dg] Yeah, we seeded areas. I think we have looked at areas and said "you know, we could go in this direction", and then of course someone else would say "well we could do this other thing completely"... we left things open for us. The Blight is not the only thing that Thedas has to throw at you. That was sort of the idea. As to where we will go? The idea... we called it ‘Origins’... it’s supposed to be a beginning, it’s not just this one story, the idea is that this is a world that we’re opening up, that we’re going to do things with. We’ve got some plans for downloadable content down the line. Where we will go from then I do not know.

[sa] So as a player, if I’m getting into the Codex stuff, am I going to see maybe hints of where things could go, or like hints of different parts of the world where things are happening that I’ll never see in the game itself?

[dg] I’m sure you will see things that... when our plans come out later you’ll think "Oh, I wonder if they were planning it all along?"... doubtful. [laughter] No, I mean like I said there are those seeds that are there, right? So we’ll throw them out as a possibility, and if we ended up running with them later, it will be because we planned that all along. [laughter]

[sa] Smart. Now you mentioned you have a wiki, obviously an internal wiki you guys are using to develop, I know you guys are huge on that...

[dg] We have to have people who’s sole job it is just to know what’s on the wiki.

[sa] What are we looking at as far as... you’ve obviously got some stuff on the website already. Some little "here’s this character, that character". How much of that kind of wiki are you going to open up to the player base once they get into it and kind of start looking into doing things like world building themselves.

[dg] Well some of it we’re going to talk about before release; that’s yet to be talked about by the company as to how they’re going to roll that out. In terms of how much are we going to talk about in the game? As much as possible. We’ve got a lot written, and I think we’re just going to keep on writing and keep on writing. Because we have books and things you can find in game. If a player wants to they can sit there and they can read all sorts of facts or....

[sa] I’m a sucker for reading books in games.

[dg] So your gameplay may be significantly longer. The idea is we’re going to do as much as we possibly can. It’s there, it means a lot to us personally, the world is real to us, so we’re going to try and extend as much of that to the players as we possibly can.

[sa] Are we going to see any kind of novel, similar to what we saw with Mass Effect? I’m a sucker for those too.

[dg] I don’t know. Hasn’t been talked about yet. That’d be nice.

[sa] Finally, just to give our audience a sense of how big this is, what are we looking at in terms of how much you’ve written for this compared to say something like Baldurs Gate 2?

[dg] Oh, hmmm... I... Judging word count is hard. Like I said, in terms of content, I think it’s our largest game since Baldurs Gate 2. But even then a lot could change between... we’ve still got another eight months to go. I wouldn’t want to pin it down. Like I said, it is really large... I wouldn’t want to be more specific than that. That’s dangerous territory.

[sa] Finally, the last interview cop-out question, is there anything that you haven’t been asked
for something you want to get out there? That you’re like, "why hasn’t anyone asked about this yet?".

[dg] I already got in the whole origin of the dark spawn. I always want to say that because everyone time someone said "Oh they’re just Tolkien rocs", oh it kills me!... No, I think we covered everything... I want to talk about the followers. Man do I want to. But I can’t. That’s where I... weirdly enough I have acquired this reputation as Bioware’s romance guy, I don’t know how that happened.

[sa] Well Baldurs Gate 2, that was a big one. It seemed like in Baldurs Gate it was kinda...

[dg] Well that’s where we started it. When we did it for Baldurs Gate we kinda... it was sort of... let’s try doing this whole romance bit with the followers and we just sort of... back then it really wasn’t anything we knew how to do. We kind of played with it... let’s try a different couple ways to do it. And it was really popular. Some players could probably take it or leave it, but the ones who really like it, they really like it. So we kind of have kept up with it and we’ve sort of gone the next step here with regards to romances anyways. So...

[sa] More so than Mass Effect do you think?

[dg] Mass Effect’s a different kind of game, it’s more cinematic, whereas here we’re talking about... it requires you to sort of... you have to want the romance, you sort of have to not just talk to them, you have to earn it a little bit. To get approval from them, to do their quests, build it up with them. But exactly what we’re going to be doing, that’s something we’ll talk about in the future. But the followers are such a big focus of this game, like the amount of... compared to Baldurs Gate 2, one thing that was great about that was that when you travel with your followers they felt so real because they talk to each other, they talk to you, chimed in on your dialogues, you know, and inserted their opinions... to give you a cheer of approval of something. We’re going for that. They comment on the world. If you pass by a statue in the world they’re like "Hey, that’s a nice statue". I think that is important in terms of making them feel alive. So yeah we have this whole world, but the followers are such a big part of it. I think there are a lot of players that, this is why they play these games. They still talk about the Baldurs gate followers to this day, endlessly in fact. [laughter] But I mean, good. I loved writing that stuff, so it’s good to go back to that again.

[sa] Are we looking at similar situations say in Never winter Nights, Neverwinter Nights maybe even more specifically, for example, where you’ve got followers that kind of go hang out at the inn, you kinda make your choices as to who you got with us in your party?

[dg] Yes. Have we talked about that yet? I... dunno. We have a camp. When you recruit people they go into the camp, then the camps are moved with you around the world. So you’re taking a certain number of people with you in your party. So unlike, say, Baldurs Gate where if you didn’t take someone with you they stayed wherever they were, here you can recruit them, we’re not... the difference is, you mentioned Neverwinter Nights 2, our followers, I think all but 1, are purely optional. You don’t have to take them with you unless you want, we don’t force them on you: "here, here’s a follower". We don’t force them on you so you have to want to have them with you, and then the idea is there is a pool you draw from as you...

[sa] So kind of like Wrex in Mass Effect, where you could just, a lot of characters in Mass Effect, you could just blow them off.

[dg] Right.

[sa] Great, well, I really appreciate your time, I don’t think I’m going to get much out of you right now, so Dragon Age is currently due in March?

[dg] First quarter next year.

[sa] And obviously you’re going to take as much time as you need to get it right?

[dg] That is the idea.

[sa] It wouldn’t be a Bioware game if there wasn’t at least one delay.

[da] Oh God. [laughter] Half my carrier now has been spent on this game. I would like to move on to something new. [laughter] I would like to deliver this puppy... I want to get it out there and... we’ve sort of reached this point... when you’re on development there comes a point where everything gets chaotic and things are happening all over the place, and you’re kind of like [confused sound]... we have no control, oh, it’s chaos, and then all of a sudden, boom, it starts to come together. And you’re like, wow, this is really good. And we’re sort of reaching that point now, and that makes you sort of excited, because you’re like "wow", when the players get a hold of this they’re really going to like it. You hope. We went thought the same thing with BG2; a lot of people would go "what?!", but there was even a point in BG2 where we were like "wow, this game sucks so badly!"... but then there comes this point where it’s like "all I want to do now is put it in their hands", and have it be good enough that they... the really sucky part would be, and I know it happens with games that... nothing Bioware has done [laughter]... but sometimes you know for one reason or another a developer is going to put out a game where they haven’t been able to do what they intended. Sometimes you see games that have so much potential but it isn’t realised. Fortunately Bioware has always taken the time to put the work into the game that it needs. I think we’re known for having a lot of polish. And I think that’s good because that means that when we put out Dragon Age, it is going to be in a state that is going to be enjoyable. People are going to see what we intended. I think that’s important.

[sa] I’m really looking forward to it. For me, it’s number one on my list.

[dg] Awesome.

[sa] Thank you very much for joining us.

Chris Fields [cf] interviews Dan Tudge [dt]. Transcript follows:

[cf] We’re really fortunate here today to have one of the busiest people here at Bioware available for a podcast here today. Maybe you can tell us a little of who you are and what you do here at Bioware?

[dt] My name is Dan Tudge and I am the project director and executive producer on the Dragon Age franchise. Today I’m going to talking about Dragon Age: Origins.

[cf] Which is the next great game coming out for Bioware. Maybe you can explain a little bit about what a project director is, and what your responsibilities are here at Bioware?

[dt] Yeah, basically I am the guy in charge, responsible for the entire project. I work with the great team, and manage them to completion.

[cf] Uh, well, let’s get right into it. Can you tell the people listening a little bit about what Dragon Age is and what it its all about?

[dt] Well Dragon Age is really Bioware’s return to its roots. It’s a dark, heroic fantasy; something we’ve been working a long time on and are very proud of.

[cf] And it brings us right into kind of the next question: why has it taken so long to get ready? This project has been in development for many many years now. I’m really happy that we’re finally starting to talk about it because I know how cool it looks, but what has taken this long?

[dt] Bioware has always been known for its high quality standards. We have always taken the time that it needs to make that we exceed the fans expectations.

[cf] Recently it was said in the press that Dragon Age is a game about Dragons. Is this true?

[dt] Well, the name ‘Dragon Age’ literally means the time frame in which dragons existed. But dragons do play a role in the game; we’re not really going to talk about that right now.

[cf] Yeah, let’s not give away game secrets just yet, but, yeah, that’s great. So, it is dragons, you will see some dragons in Dragon Age, but, you know, let’s move onto another question here. Another comment that was made: Ray Muzyka himself said that Dragon Age is the spiritual successor to Baldurs Gate. What does that really mean?

[dt] Well as I mentioned earlier it’s really a return to our roots for us; in fact a large part of the team was the Baldurs Gate development team. So there’s really a lot of roots within the team as well as within the IP. Critics and fans have long held Baldurs Gate as one of their favourite RPGs and it’s certainly one of my favourites. And it was both critically and commercially successful. What we mean with Dragon Age being the spiritual successor is that the game is set in a fantasy setting and we’re taking a lot of what we’ve learned from Baldurs Gate and our other titles and will deliver everything that the fans expect.

[cf] You mentioned already that Dragon Age is sort of a dark fantasy. What exactly makes Dragon Age dark?

[dt] We refer to it as dark heroic fantasy, so there’s heroic elements as well as dark elements. What this means is it’s very gritty, bloody... I use the word ‘carnage’ quite often... it’s epic with very mature themes. It still has some high-fantasy elements: there’s heroes, villains, magic... but we’re not really pulling any punches with Dragon Age: it is definitely mature and it is definitely dark and gritty and, as I said earlier, ‘carnage’ - a lot of carnage.

[cf] Speaking a little bit - you say it’s more an adult game, a little more blood and gore - does that mean there’s still going to be the fantasy elements that people like for Bioware games: things such as romances, that sort of things?

[dt] Well one of the staples of Bioware stories has always been a romance plot, which you can choose to pursue or not. You’ll find that there’s a potential love interest that you can choose to develop a relationship with, but we really don’t want to give away any spoilers here, so I think we’ll leave it at that.

[cf] You mentioned that this is kind of a return to Bioware’s role-playing game roots, the fantasy roots. Does that mean its a turn-based role-playing game?

[dt] Dragon Age is really... not really turn based - we call it pause-and-play tactical. And really what you get is to pause the action at any time, zoom in on the action, issue commands for combat, issue spells, talents, abilities... and really control the battle field - either from the tactical view or right in close on the action.

[cf] It’s been said that Dragon Age is really going to be a fantastic single-player role-playing game experience; why will it not feature a multi-player aspect?

[dt] When designing Dragon Age we really wanted to focus on a story-driven single-player experience. I really left multi-player as a feature that actually hindered the development of that experience. Origins stories, for instance, are a big example of a feature that really we only needed to include in a single-player version, where you can actually choose and then play the origins of your character. Again, driving towards a deep story-driven experience.

[cf] Dragon Age has a lot of very classic RPG elements: a fantastic story, combat, gameplay, all that sort of thing. What is the plan to make it appeal to a really broad audience?

[dt] Dragon Age features a lot of really classic RPG elements that I really think our core audience will really latch onto and enjoy. But the experience is very cinematic - it’s very large and epic - and I think really that the main stream users will find the visuals very compelling, they’ll find the story very compelling, and as well the treatment of the game as a whole.

[cf] What was the inspiration for Dragon Age? Was it more ‘Lord of the Rings’, or was it more ‘Baldurs Gate’?

[dt] Well we’re certainly huge fans of Lord of the Rings. I mean I don’t think you can be a fantasy junky and not be a fan of Lord of the Rings. Basically there’s a lot of IP that we’ve drawn upon for inspiration. Baldurs Gate is certainly a big piece of it. But really it’s a new and exciting direction for us that really is our own.

[cf] Let’s talk a little bit about Dragon Age and its potential future. Is it going to be a series of games like Neverwinter Nights was?

[dt] Dragon Age is really a universe in which all kinds of great entertainment can exist. ‘Dragon Age: Origins’ is really just the beginning.

[cf] The key question that I know a lot of fans are going to have: when is Dragon Age going to be released?

[dt] Currently we’re aiming to have ‘Dragon Age: Origins’ out this fiscal year; more details will be coming soon.

[cf] And, I guess that kinda leads into the last question. I know you’re really busy and heading off into E3 where we’re going to be showing Dragon Age. When are we going to be learning more about Dragon Age?

[dt] Well there’s going to be a whole lot more coming on ‘Dragon Age: Origins’ in the next few months: stay tuned for lots of announcements. But really we’ve got a lot of exciting things to talk about from now until release.

[cf] Thanks very much Dan!

[dt] Thank you.