Dragon Age Central

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Most of Dragon Age’s production efforts till now have focused on creating powerful tools, but Greig says the content will come together quickly enough for a winter 2007/early 2008 release. The tools will be made public in some form, but don’t expect the ease of use of Neverwinter Nights’ construction kit.

"It’s going to take more time for the basic user to make levels," says level artist Andrew Farrell, demonstrating advanced techniques such as the ability to create overhangs in the terrain. "But there’s a lot more power, and the levels will be a lot better."
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A player character in ratty armor with a shield and sword comes across three ugly orcish things in the street. At first, the camera is behind the player’s shoulder--"Explore Mode," Greig calls it--but as the enemies take notice and move in to attack, the camera swings up to a nearly top-down, parkade-inspired perspective. Greig explains that you can issue commands to your party (four characters all told, at least for now) in real time, pause the action, and queue up spells and special attacks
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"We wanted to make sure that when you look at a fight, it’s not just swing, swing, swing...we want to make it look like these guys are actually fi ghting and reacting. And we’re making sure group combat is really cool--it’s not just two guys fighting; you can actually have synchronized attacks with the people around you, too."

"Instead of people standing toe-to-toe," adds Santos, "you’re actually seeing people duck and move and attack. Every time they get hit, you feel for them because they just got bashed in the head with something really heavy.
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"Remember the cave troll fight in The Fellowship of the Ring? That’s what our large creature combat is going to be like. You’ve got the party guys running out, one guy jumping up on the back and stabbing, the other guy ducking between the legs." Objects in the environment can be manipulated in your bid for tactical supremacy: Knock over a table to fire arrows or shoot fireballs from behind cover, but only where it makes sense--emergence be damned, in BioWare’s reckoning. "There will be a lot of ways of going through combat, and lots of different ways to interact with the environment...but our philosophy is that handcrafted is always better than random stuff."
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[e3 2004] "was our proof-of-concept test. [...] we knew it was early, but we wanted to make sure fans knew we were working on PC games, too.
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we went back to the drawing board and started working on the brand-new engine, the Eclipse engine that’s gonna be in Dragon Age."
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we hear George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series spill from more than one pair of lips, and the art direction takes a note from Frank Frazetta’s Conan paintings. Folks utter the word "dark" at least four dozen times; "mature," "realistic," and "sophisticated" aren’t far behind.

"'Dark heroic fantasy’ really captures what the world is all about," echoes Greig. "The grittiness, the horror elements, blood, dirt--it’s going to be a lot darker than anything we’ve done in the past. We still wanted to capture the high fantasy elements. There are heroes, villains, obviously dragons--it’s called Dragon Age, after all--but it’s more than just your standard ‘take fantasy elements and toss them together’ game. We wanted to make a living, breathing world that actually had a realistic feel to it. If people actually had magic, how would they react to it? If someone could walk into a room and point a finger and turn you into a fireball, this isn’t something anyone would take casually. If this were history, and we had these situations with magic and monsters and creatures, how would this work out?" Even the name of the game is meant to ground the fantasy in history--this is the Dragon Age, meant to stand in a line tucked amidst the Bronze Age, Steel Age, and Industrial Age.
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You’re literally going to decide the fate of nations, who’s becoming king, what nations are actually around after...what races are around. You’re going to have to make some hard choices in the game, but we want all the choices to be clear. The player’s gonna know if he does this, there’s a really horrific consequence. Decisions are gonna be hard...and sort of shocking."
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"We use a class-based system that has levels--we’re staying that close to our D&D roots. You start off with three basic classes, the wizard, fighter, and rogue, just to get you started. Very quickly, you get access to advanced classes, and even within those classes you get to customize abilities, stats, and talents--you buy points, build it up, and after a short while you’ll be able to pick even more advanced classes. If you want to have a fighter-type character with magic-like abilities, there’ll be a route you can take for that. If you want to be a barbarian berserker, you can do that, too...there’s a route for everyone so players can build their character the way they want. There’s a stupid number of class abilities and special abilities...I think it’s more than in any other BioWare game."
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"Say, for example, you want to be a dwarf--you’ll have different choices for what kind of setting in the dwarf environment you start in. So if you pick dwarf noble, then you’re part of the royal family in one of the dwarven cities, and that’s where we start you off. And you spend the first hour or two of the game interacting with that world. You get to learn all about the dwarves and the plots that are going on, and major things happen to you personally. We also introduce at that point a nemesis for you--not the main villain in the game, but someone who’s going to be dogging your footsteps throughout Dragon Age, and eventually you’ll have to come face-to-face and deal with him. Your nemesis will be different depending on your origin.

"One of the other options is a dwarf commoner--pick that, and you start off working the sort of dwarf underclass. The nobles have their honor, but you start off down in the gritty and real dwarf environment, and you have to struggle through the street stuff...you have to work to forge your place in the underworld of dwarf society. And it’s a completely different story-- you’ll run into some of the same characters [that] you would as the dwarf noble, but they’ll treat you and react to you differently."

Once you’ve played through your chosen origin, world events intersect, and you’ll find yourself pulled into the same plot as all the rest--with different twists and side quests based on your roots. "If you go back into the dwarf city, depending on whether you were a dwarf noble or a dwarf commoner or an elf or human from one of the other stories, the NPCs will completely react to you differently with different subplots and different stories that open up for you."

"We’ve basically covered all the major fantasy archetypes," says Greig. "Each race has a classic, traditional origin story, and then we’ve got one that’s a lot more edgy. We’re finding in testing that the unusual ones are the ones that people like the most."
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"Every character will have access to the full set of NPCs," says Greig. "They’ll treat you differently depending on the origin story, and when you get them is dependent on origin story too." Characters follow behind you in Explore Mode, and BioWare is strongly pushing the idea of party banter.
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"These are living, breathing characters...all the NPCs that join you have different agendas. If you say, ‘I’ll side with this faction,' that’ll obviously please some of your party members, but others will say, ‘I can’t believe you just did that.'" [...] Greig hints that NPCs might even go so far as refuse to fight if they feel you’re way out of line.
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every major area you enter has a "base camp" with activities that change depending on location, and selecting the appropriate NPC for the location will be important. "When you go into the city, it’s probably not the best idea to bring the 9- foot-tall war golem with you," says Greig, pointing to a character modeler’s monitor where a large rock creature is on display--an imposing, runecovered "dwarven war golem" named Shale. "This is one of the NPCs that joins you.... The dwarves used to make these guys for their wars, but the art of creating them has been lost. But you run into one of these guys and he gets to join up with the party--and as the prime mover of the world, you have influence over how this guy turns out. You can explore his past and get into the details to make him a living, breathing person--as far as dwarven war golems go--or you can turn him into a blind follower who’ll basically kill at your every whim." [...] "You’ll also be able to upgrade him--carve new dwarven runes into him to gain new powers. You’ll be able to customize every one of the party members in some way."
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"The art philosophy is ‘fantasy painting come to life,'" says Greig, invoking Frazetta once again. "It’s dark. It’s gritty...it’s all about dirt and texture detail." Over by the in-game wall, he points out "the best barrels you’ll see in a videogame...running on a high-end PC, you’ll see the level of detail...[we’re definitely thinking about] DirectX 10 and beyond."

A giant disfigured blue demon plays bouncer at the door. "The artists went a little bit overboard with him," says Greig. "You can actually see a reflection of the room in his eyes. They also actually went down and did scrollwork on the [treasure] chests," he says, zooming in ultra-close to reveal detailed elvish runes on thin strips of metal. "One of the reasons for this test was to figure out how much is too much."
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Dragon Age uses a modified version of the Mass Effect conversation system, much lauded at last year’s E3, in which characters’ facial expressions speak at least a hundred words, lips synch convincingly to speech
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"Back in Baldur’s Gate, if a character needed to be angry, the writers had to write angry words. Then we got to voice acting, and so the words themselves didn’t have to be angry; you could just have the actors read in an angry voice. Now we actually have a lot more options--you can say an angry word, you can have an angry voice, or you can have the character just sitting there glowering."

"A level of storytelling fidelity with digital actors that we’ve never really had before," says Gilmour. "That’s what I’d say ‘next generation’ really is."
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As Joint-CEO Ray Muzyka told us, "Dragon Age is the spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate."
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it will be filled with Dwarf-like, Elf-like and Halfling-like races
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Ray explained that BioWare wanted to try something a little different, but still wanted it to be familiar to fantasy RPG players. Although nothing is finalized at this point, Dragon Age will feature archetypal races and classes (you know, fighters, clerics, mages and the like)
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We did see one completely new race that will be in the game, though. Although they don’t have a name as of yet, or at least BioWare wasn’t saying what the name was, the characters sport horns on their heads and look rather lizard (or perhaps dragon) like.
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BioWare even has a few linguistics PhD students developing entirely new languages for Dragon Age. When asked about the significance of the title, BioWare told us that, like the Stone Age and Iron Age, they wanted to indicate that the game takes place in a time where dragons are prevalent.
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You’ll also be able to hire henchmen during the game, and BioWare promises you’ll run into some characters with a lot of personality, like Minsc from Baldur’s Gate.
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Our actual demo of the game opened up with a camera fly over of a massive battlefield. Reminiscent of the huge battle scenes from the Lord of the Rings movies, there were tens of thousands of units battling it out down below us as our two heroes, a barbarian mercenary and a priestess-like character walked across a bridge high overhead. For this part of the demo, we were zoomed out to a wide overhead view similar to Baldur’s Gate. Since the game uses a new fully 3D engine, they’re going to use a lot of elevation perspectives such as this in the game, where something may be happening on one level while you’re at a completely different elevation, and you’ll be able to travel both vertically as well as horizontally.

The next part of the demo featured the pair of adventurers deep in a dungeon. To show off the close-quarters, we opted for a tighter third-person view similar to Knights of the Old Republic. This allowed us to get right into the action and see the characters up close. Not only do the character models look impressive, but they’re also very reactive to the environment. We saw examples of eye tracking and our beefy mercenary turn into a scared little baby when he was startled by a flock of birds as he rounded the corner.
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Like the Baldur’s Gate combat system, Dragon Age will feature real-time combat with a pause feature to let you get more tactical with your choices. The game also features full motion-captured animation, giving the characters some very realistic looking moves during combat.

Although they weren’t saying much about the multiplayer side of the game today, Ray did tell us to expect all the level of community and multiplayer support that we saw with Neverwinter Nights. You can expect a separate multiplayer campaign with a similar story, but no cutscenes to slow down the action.
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