Dragon Age Central

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In the world of Dragon Age, magic is dangerous and weird, magic users feared, and the consequences of great spells still being felt by a downtrodden and broken populace. Gone are the D&D cliches: the flick-of-a-wrist fireball, the saving throw. In comes inter-species tension, religious hatred, and good old fashioned betrayal.
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Dwarves live beneath society, literally and figuratively: those who choose to live above ground are treated like dirt, those who remain in their caverns are rarely seen.
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Fights, while still viewed from above, don’t rely on the usual crit rolls and queued spells of your favourite RPGs. It’s as much about tactical use of the environment as it as about the size of your sword.

Meanwhile, potions are simply excised from the game entirely, alongside healing spells. To get through a tricky fight, you’ll need to rely on your wits, not a backpack full of red bottles.
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BioWare lead writer David Gaider says "We’re not trying to tell a story about there being no right and wrong and how everything is grey. We do, however, want being good to be an achievable struggle. Even if all the world is against you, you will have love, and friends that stand by you."

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You start out by, as is tradition, selecting a certain race and a certain class - the latter giving the relatively broad canvasses of fighter, rogue and mage for you to build upon.

In each race, however, there are two options - rather than sticking with multiple endings, BioWare are now plumping for multiple beginnings as well
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Each origin tale is set to have two hours of gameplay devoted to it, having you run into shared characters who play a role in both tales - treating you differently according to your status in the world at large.
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Banter with living, breathing NPCs is a primary motion high on the agenda - with the dynamics of your own LOTR-style fellowship never too far away from the developers’ mindset. You’ll have up to three followers, each with their own ingrained personality and moral standpoints, and you’ll be able to alternately pander to them and piss them off as you see fit.

One example of how interaction will work is Shale - a character similar to KOTOR’s annihilistic droid HK47 - he’s a 9ft dwarven War Golem who you can inscribe with runes as the game progresses to power him up. Whether he ends up as a happy, opinionated member of society or remains an unthinking tool of destruction is up to you.
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Such behaviour has helped combat production no end. Viewed from an almost top-down perspective, you’ll bear witness to real-time meaty swipes, jumps, ducks, shield clashes and novel interactions with the environment (overturned tables, distraction tactics etc) - alongside the ability to pause the action, issue commands to your party and queue up spells and special attacks.
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BioWare are looking to add a third layer of communication to what is said and how it’s said; how characters look when they speak.
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Five people have spent four years fleshing out the details. Not programming or designing levels, just creating the world and writing its history.
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We want Dragon Age to feel like it has a history, rather than a few random fantasy elements thrown together.
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Your main character will be joined by up to three comrades. "All the characters have their own agenda," says Scott. "We’re very clear about what they want, and it’s not just straightforward good or evil. We’re going to be clear that when you act, there will be fallout."

Your hero will also be invested with an Origin Story. There’ll be two to choose from for each race - the example they give is a dwarf noble or commoner - and this choice entirely dictates your first couple of hours in-game, giving some texture and logic to your involvement in the main quest. It will be a recurring theme later in the game, too: there’ll be a nemesis specific to your Origin Story who’ll be back to haunt you throughout your adventure and if you, as a dwarf, ever venture back to the dwarven lands you came from, your history as well as your choices can impact the plot.

All the Origins lead to the same starting point for the overall plot after an hour or two, but their influence continues throughout the game, creating different subplots later on. For each race, there’s one traditional fantasy Origin, and one that’s "a lot more edgy". From three archetypes - fighter, rogue, mage - before long you’ll get a chance to specialise your main character’s class (and those of your party). Later in the game, yet another level of choice will enable you to mix and match abilities in a way old-fashioned D&D wouldn’t dream of.

Wondering about that name? Think ‘Bronze Age’ or ‘Iron Age’ - the game takes place in an era dominated by dragons and powerful magic. "Magic is a really big deal. If someone were to walk into a pub, point the finger, and you burst into flames, that would have real consequences in the world. There’d be all kinds of controls put on the use of magic." Scott’s point is that this world isn’t complacent about magic, death and destruction.
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Instead of people standing toe-to-toe and swinging repeatedly, they’re ducking and dodging and moving to attack.

They also wanted to get large-scale combat right - presumably because there’s likely to be dragons to fight. "We really want it to feel like the cave troll scene from The Fellowship of the Ring," explains Scott. "The key thing is that you’re not in control of one person, you’re in control of the whole battle. You’ve got the party guys running out, with one guy jumping up on the back and stabbing, the other guy ducking between the legs. Maybe one character distracts the dragon so another can sneak up behind it, while magic-users find cover and cast spells. Maybe your wizard turns over a table and shelters behind it. Or maybe you’re under attack from a wizard behind an overturned table, and you just blow that table away."
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"I was the first programmer on the Neverwinter Nights project," says Scott. "We expected a certain level of community involvement, but it’s gone beyond our wildest dreams. We’ll be including a similar level of support for custom content in Dragon Age. But the training wheels are off. You’ll be able to create a game as detailed as Dragon Age using our tools."
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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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• The story is dark-much darker than the usual BioWare fare-and influenced by "realistic" modern fantasy like George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones.
• The game uses an evolved "tactical real-time combat" style of Baldur’s Gate, only in 3D-you queue up orders for multiple party members, pause the game when you need to think, and your party members will be able to execute coordinated attacks.
• Large-scale creature combat will have your characters doing stuff like ducking between legs and jumping on backs of monsters
(dare we say dragons?).

• Even though Dragon Age isn’t a D&D game, per se, BioWare is sticking close to those roots with the class and rules systems.
• The game uses a "modified" version of the Mass Effect conversation system we’re all so keen on.
• Depending on the type of character you choose, the game offers multiple different "origin stories"-meaning the first few hours of the game will be totally different depending on which character archetype you choose.
• The game’s actually coming out in late 2007 or early 2008.

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Dragon Age is an open-ended RPG which features a top down party-based "combat mode" and a third person camera exploration mode. The game contains both single player and multiplayer campaigns. BioWare states that the storyline in Dragon Age will change the game’s opening chapter and thus the subsequent missions and quests that are available to the player. Like many modern RPGs, the player’s actions will affect how the game develops. Players can choose to either liberate hapless peasants from the oppressive rule of malevolent dictators, or they can enslave the people themselves and spend the game fending off and quashing rebellions. The developers are going to such lengths to create an original world that they’ve even enlisted the help of a linguist to create a language and a backstory that predates the player’s adventure by five thousand years.
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Warfare in Dragon Age will take place in real-time and will feature party-based combat and is based on a proprietary set of rules created by BioWare. You will be able to choose traditional races (elves, dwarves, humans, etc.) and customize your character’s sex, class, abilities, magic and weaponry.
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Dragon Age is being built using a new 3D graphics engine, which lends the game a look that’s reminiscent of Knights of the Old Republic but with much more detail both in the characters and in the environments.
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some of the interpretations of conventional creatures, like ogres, trolls, and the undead, are certainly being depicted in a distinctive manner in this game
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The first gameplay sequence we saw featured a massive, Lord of the Rings-style battle zone as the setting. Two characters, a surly barbarian who was dual-wielding swords and a female magic user, were the focus of the action here, and they were guided across a castle’s parapets as war raged below.
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With Dragon Age, BioWare is seeking to combine the dramatic, fully 3D look of a game like Knights of the Old Republic with the more-sophisticated, party-based combat of its classic Baldur’s Gate games. Basically, while you’re running around and exploring, the game will default to a third-person perspective similar to KOTOR, but when combat occurs, gameplay will shift to an isometric, tactical view similar to Baldur’s Gate.
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In combat, they’ll be able to pause at any time while managing the fight tactically, or they can zoom in for a KOTOR-style third-person perspective, directing any of the party members, while allowing the optionally artificially intelligent party members to hold their own.

Like KOTOR, Dragon Age will feature full speech, which is great. Unlike KOTOR, though, Dragon Age’s characters will do a lot more emoting. The level of detail in the characters’ faces allows them to serve as "virtual actors," to use BioWare’s term for it.
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We were told that the game’s story will be serious in tone and will involve a lot of political intrigue, conspiracy, and so on.
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Greg Zeschuk calls the game "a spiritual successor to all of our recent games," and goes on to add that Dragon Age "melds the fun of party interaction from Baldur’s Gate, the community and multiplayer aspect of Neverwinter Nights and the tactical combat of Knights of the Old Republic."
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The usual fantasy races like the orcs, dwarves and elves will not be present in their original form, though certain variations of those will be included in the game. BioWare says that they’re reluctant to make a break from some of the more conventional concepts of Tolkien-inspired lore as they’re afraid such a move might alienate many of their devoted fans.
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they’ve hired linguistics PhD students to develop specific languages and dialects for the game.
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you’ll be able to pause the action at any time during combat to issue specific orders to your party members (you’ll probably have 4-6 party members available to you), while the actual fighting goes on in real-time. Another welcome change in terms of combat is that, once you enter the fray, the camera will switch to an overhead view from the default third-person perspective, therefore offering a chance to better asses the field of battle and use more strategy than you would by observing the battle from up close. Another nice thing about the combat is the more streamlined option of having to take over just one character while the rest of your party members call their own shots.
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Dragon Age will be powered by a completely new proprietary 3D technology that will allow full 3D camera movement. This doesn’t just translate into better looking scenes though, as it actually has a lot of influence on the gameplay. The full 3D representation of the game world now allows for vertical movement and actual depth.
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the new 3D technology is that it will boost something like 2 million polygons per model (probably when you completely zoom in on them) and that the character animations were done with motion capture to make their movement and acrobatics look incredibly smooth and true to life.
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"This is a spiritual successor to all or our recent games," said BioWare cofounder Greg Zeschuk. "This melds the fun of party interaction from Baldur’s Gate, the community and multiplayer aspect of Neverwinter Nights and the tactical combat of Knights of the Old Republic. We wanted to take all of that and put it together in a new game that was our own."
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The game will use BioWare’s new terrain technology to create a tremendous feeling of height and depth in the game, allowing players to traverse heights seamlessly without loading screens.

All the animation and lighting is dynamic, while all of the acting is done with motion capture. Each character is rendered in millions of polygons, allowing the player to zoom in as close as they want.

What makes the combat system unique is that the game can be played in the over-the-shoulder mode of Knights of the Old Republic or in the tactical overhead mode of Baldur’s Gate. The player can toggle back and forth in whatever way feels comfortable. The game also utilizes the "combat pause," which allows players to plan strategy while the action is frozen.
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Zeschuk said they are aiming for an immersive experience that will keep the player in the game for plenty of hours, although maybe not as long as Baldur’s Gate or Baldur’s Gate 2. "It may be a bit shorter, but it will be a wider experience and the immersion will be better," he said.

"Everyone loves a tremendous story, and we are using this new setting to help tell it. We’ve even hired more and better writers. This is going to be a living world that players will want to explore to get familiar with the people and the characters."
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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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