Dragon Age Central

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 ...]