Dragon Age Central

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When we [decide on] platforms, we’re also very particular about doing a good job on them. Some people just spam every platform under the sun and put generic versions of their game on every one, and they’re all just okay. We’re dedicated to making sure every version we do for every single platform is really, really good.
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during BioWare president Greg Zeschuk’s demonstration of Dragon Age: Origins, the executive revealed that the game would arrive on consoles in addition to the PC. Unfortunately, the developer would only say that the titles would arrive "in the future," and Zelschuk did not elaborate on whether the title would surface on all platforms simultaneously.
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EA expects to release the game as part of its current fiscal year, which ends March 31, 2009.
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Zeschuk referred to the game as a "spiritual successor" to Bioware’s lauded Baldur’s Gate series
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Described as a dark fantasy game that will let players form their own personal origin story
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We know the game is coming to the PC first, and Zeschuk said, on consoles "in the future."
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"Origins" refers to the character development system [...] asically, the choices you make early in the game -- the "origins" -- develop your character in a new way not seen before in a BioWare game, and these decisions affect both how your character can play the game, and how the game plays out for you. The rules set is distinct to Dragon Age, and you’ll have several character classes and traits to customize.
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Though the third-person, over-the-shoulder perspective resembles more recent games like "Mass Effect and enables you to zoom in for a close view of the action, you can also pull the camera back and manage your game from the more traditional, and tactical, top-down view. It’s from this perspective, with the highlighted circles under your party members, that the game begins to look remarkably like a modern-day Baldur’s Gate
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Managing your party uses the classic BioWare pausable combat, where you stop action to queue up attacks. The party AI also allows for you to have multiple battles at once. We saw two party members in one room fighting off a beast while two others carried out another fight elsewhere. Parties will have a maximum of four players -- two fewer than the six possible in "Baldur’s Gate II" , which Zeschuk says is a compromise that enables them to achieve maximum "graphic fidelity" while also giving players enough "chess pieces" to move around the board. It’s not, however, a result of the game design being dumbed down -- an understandable fear held by many PC enthusiasts, given BioWare’s recent focus on console games. "It’s a balance point," says Zeschuk. "You don’t want to get overly detailed. In playtesting, we found that four was a nice number. You can mix it up with different characters but it’s still easy enough to control, [yet] still detailed enough that people felt what they were doing was meaningful." Zeschuk also points out that by streamlining the number of characters players control, the team was able to focus on making other aspects of the game more epic: bigger enemies -- a room-filling ogre was shown during the demo -- as well as larger battles with dozens of combatants
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The dialogue system also hearkens back to games of yore. In stark contrast to Mass Effect’s highly interactive and well-acted dialogue, here your character is mute. Other characters speak, and you select your responses from a classic tree, but you never hear your character’s voice. "It’s an interesting issue," says Zeschuk, when asked about the seeming backward step away from Mass Effect’s more immersive and cinematic dialogue experience. "We’re very dynamic with the dialogue choices and who you are, and there’s a lot of variety in who you can be in the game," he says. With all these choices, managing the various dialogue possibilities for the main character turned out to be overwhelming, and likely impossible to fully voice. It wasn’t a decision taken lightly. "We went through a whole process involving a ton of people in the studio, and thought a lot about it, and at the end of the day [leaving out the voice acting for your character] fit the type of the game we were making. This is that classic, return-to-the-roots flavor."
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Graphically, the game looks incredibly detailed, right down to the blood that appears on your party members’ armor after a fierce battle.
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We saw a mage drop a grease spell across the floor of a room, which then was lit up by the group’s flaming weapons, causing a stunning conflagration that engulfed the enemies. In another spot, one party member paralyzed the baddies while his cohorts picked them off one by one. It’s these tactical opportunities and multitudes of different combat possibilities that gave classic RPGs such depth and replayability, and Dragon Age looks to be a truly worthy of the tradition.
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"But we really do cater very carefully to the platform we build [it] for. We’re thinking about it, and something’s probably going to happen, but quite clearly, [dragon age] is a PC game."

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Dragon Age can be played two ways. For most of the demonstration, it had a Mass Effect or Knights of the Old Republic style of camera, where you watch from third-person as your character runs around the level. Conversations happen in Mass Effect style, with cinematic angles and cuts. However, the game features what is called a pause-and-play feature for combat, which lets you pause the game at any time and give orders to your squad. You can also pull the camera back to top-down point of view similar to that of Baldur’s Gate. Zeschuk told us that you could play the game entirely from that angle, as well.

The game is set in a world where an elite society of warriors known as the Grey Wardens battle the Blight, an evil infestation that appears to be the side-effect of the presence of an arch demon. The level that was demonstrated had the player character accompany Duncan, a mentor and friend, to help him and his army battle the Blight. Duncan is young and eager for battle and glory [editors note: the writer has character names mixed up]. The conversation system looked similar to other BioWare games in that you have multiple options, so you can basically respond in friendly, neutral, or rude manner. BioWare showed off some of the possible actions that can change the story. For instance, in one town there’s a prisoner in a cage. He explains he has a key to a magical chest that he will give you if you get him food. You can do so and he’ll give you the key, or you can just knife him and take it from his body. Your decision will have consequences later.

BioWare also wanted to show off the combat system and the scalable battles. The recent trailer that has an army of monsters rushing toward a human army is basically taken from the game, and it’s an in-engine cutscene. However, your goal is to not participate in that battle but to light a bonfire atop a tower to summon reinforcements. However, the gunlocks (the gremlin-like enemies) have taken the tower, so you must battle your way to the top.

At the base of the tower is a guard who warns you about the situation and you can recruit him to come along to help or have stay behind. You might use him as cannon fodder, and he’s not a story NPC. The tower itself is swarming with enemies, and the demo runner had a four-man party with a female elf magic user for some extra firepower. (By the way, character creation will let you create a male or female character with the wide range of customization options.)

The combat system looks like a close-up Baldur’s Gate style of combat, as you can pause the game at any time, give orders, and then unpause the game and watch the action unfold. What’s important is using tactics. In this case, a shield bash to stun an opponent and then toggling assault, which orders up four rapid sword strikes. Magic effects the environment, so the heroes rushed into a trap with the floor covered in grease and the enemy lit it with fire. The elf magic user used a blizzard spell to extinguish the blaze. It’s important to use teamwork and coordinate attacks, so you’ll use pause-and-play quite a bit, just like in Baldur’s Gate.

The end of the demo had the heroes storming the top of the tower, where a huge ogre awaited. This guy has special attacks of his own, like grabbing stone blocks and hurling them, charging them, grabbing them, and more. He’s a tough foe, so you need to use different tactics and spells. But if you can kill him, you can finish him off with a cinematic kill move that involves leaping atop his falling body and jamming your two-handed sword into his skull.

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Meanwhile, Zeschuk said that BioWare was developing the game on the PC, playing the game on the PC, and designing the game for the PC, though the company does plan on delivering Dragon Age to consoles sometime the road.

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this game represents a return to BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate roots. The name also represents the heightened role that your individual character’s origin is going to play in the way he or she sees the world and how the world responds to them. Though Dragon Age is a new IP and a PC exclusive, Greg revealed that he hopes it becomes a running franchise and even finds its way to the consoles.
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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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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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