Dragon Age Central

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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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"Dragon Age has been in development for a while," said Muzyka. "Part of that is BioWare’s attention to quality and detail and making this rich universe that you want to be part of. Dragon Age is in BioWare’s sweet spot; it’s the ultimate fantasy-adventure. It’s going to appeal to the fans of Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights and it’s sort of the next generation of that…We haven’t talked about it recently because we’re just building up to something hopefully in the near future…I was just playing it last week and it’s pretty damn cool."
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But we’re certainly taking the things we’ve learnt from digital actors and emotionally compelling narrative [in mass effect], things like that, and we’re trying to apply that back to Dragon Age.”
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"Dragon Age you can picture fitting back into the more core BioWare experience," said Zeschuk. "it’s fun for us to get back to fantasy, there’s a huge amount of passion for that." The game will take on a dark, brooding atmosphere, they say, yet remain a heroic experience. "We’ll certainly have humor, but the world is a pretty heavy world. I don’t think it’s a direct social commentary, but there’s a lot of strife…it feels very mature. It’s not like a kids fantasy where there’s dancing elves. It’s for adults." They promised more information will start to roll out soon.
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"...we have big plans afoot at BioWare for post-release and episodic content for upcoming cool BioWare games like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Jade Empire: Special Edition and other upcoming BioWare titles, both on console and PC", BioWare CEO Ray Muzyka divulged
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The studio heads went on to give a vague but optimistic update on Dragon Age
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"With Dragon Age--the first iteration of it, anyway--we’re focusing on making it the most ambitious PC RPG we’ve ever done at BioWare," said Muzyka. However, just because it’s not a current 360 project doesn’t mean it won’t be so in the future. "It’s a franchise we own, so there will be other versions that will be on other platforms," Muzyka said
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RM: Like Dragon Age! We are taking the features of Neverwinter [nights], including online multiplayer and content creation, with the kind of single-player story arc from Baldur’s Gate, and combining those together.
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RM: There might be some of each. For instance, with Dragon Age--the first iteration of it, anyway--we’re focusing on making it the most ambitious PC RPG we’ve ever done at BioWare. It’s a franchise we own, so there will be other versions that will be on other platforms. And there are other titles that are designed for a console. We certainly want to support our PC audience in the future too. We’ve got both a console community and a PC community, and we recognize there’s overlap between them, but we also recognize that there are design preferences that are different between the two. The interesting thing is that with next generation, [hardware platforms] are evolving together, but they’re also staying separate, so we want to make sure we accommodate both audiences and make games that are going to be seen as platform-defining games, no matter what platform they’re on.
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GS: But it’s safe to say that Dragon Age will have a toolset that players will make modifications [to], as well as other content, long after the game has shipped.

RM: That’s one of our goals, yes. It is the spiritual successor to both Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights, so it’s got to have some of the best features of both.
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[rm:] We’re still developing our own engine technology for other BioWare titles like Jade Empire and Dragon Age, and we also have some very impressive next-gen technology of our own in development right now as well -- the BioWare Eclipse Engine. The team working on that engine is really talented as are all the other BioWare teams working on advanced technology for games like Jade Empire and Dragon Age, plus others. At BioWare we have five internal product teams and we’re also working with a number of external developers who have licensed our own advanced RPG engine technology -- like the BioWare Aurora Engine or the BioWare Odyssey Engine -- for their own titles.
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Dragon Age is looking amazing as well -- it’s the spiritual successor to BioWare’s own Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights, a PC fantasy RPG set in a brand new world full of magic, noble quests, and of course the occasional dragon or two!
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Dragon Age will run on BioWare-made engines
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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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