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[...intro...]
[yags] Hey it’s me again, from ‘yet another gaming show’, on the floor of GenCon Indionapolis, and now I’m sitting down with lead writer of ‘Dragon Age: Origins’, Mr. David Gaider. David, how’s it going?
[dg] Oh, it’s going all right, it’s a crazy show.
[yags] Now, is this your first GenCon, or are you...
[dg] My first GenCon, yes.
[yags] OK, we’re kinda talking as we’re getting to this area: you’ve been with Bioware for 9 years, various projects, this is your first real - for lack of a better word - big-boy project, you know, as the lead writer?
[dg] As the lead-writer, yeah. I’ve been one of the principle writers on previous projects. But this time I’ve a larger say in... helped create the setting, helped set the story and done a lot of the writing. And there’s been a lot of it, and this is our... in terms of content our largest project since BGII I think.
[yags] OK, what is the kind of process... like people I guess are familiar with the concept of writing a novel or writing a screenplay or something like that. How does the process differ in terms of writing a game, especially one as big a Dragon Age?
[dg] I guess the thing the thing about writing a novel or a play is that it’s very linear; I mean you know exactly where your characters are going to be, you know what they’re going to say, what they’re going to do, and you go from A to B to C to D. While it isn’t a challenge, it’s certainly a slightly different skill when you’re looking at game writing because you have to think of... well you don’t know necessarily who your protagonist is. At least in the Dragon Age... in Dragon Age there’s lot’s of customisation of your character, you’re going to have different races, different classes, different origins, so you have to think about... the character may be one of many different people, might have different motivations, and we also have to allow for different paths. It’s not... I mean sometimes you’re going to have different ways a quest can be done, be performed. Even narrowed down to the point... even in a dialogue you’re going to have different responses available to the player and so you’re going to... the dialogue has to be driven by the player. Yet no matter which route they take you have to make it sound like a regular dialogue in how it flows, right? So that in itself is a challenge that is, you know it’s a skill you have to acquire. In terms of building the story it’s the same thing. We have to look... we have to sort of imagine the... set down each different area, what’s going to happen in each area, the possible paths the story can flow in, without knowing necessarily which one the player’s going to take. Like sometimes we can put bottle-necks that they all pass, eventually tighten up to this one plot line. That helps prevent it from getting out of control, right? But you do too much of that you’re to remove the feeling that the player is control of his own destiny.
[yags] So what is the difference, I guess, in volume of just sheer words on a page between, like, a film script or a novel compared to a game like this?
[dg] Oh, you’re talking many magnitudes, I mean... there’s not only dialogue, right? You have descriptions of items, you have - in Mass Effect and Dragon Age - you have the Codex, you have books you can read inside the game, the game history that’s available, so I mean you have a lot of dialogue isn’t going to see for every path they don’t take. You’ve still got to write those paths, right? So... the more paths you have, that’s the more you’re going to have to write, but the less the player is necessarily going to see. At least in a single play-through. You’ve got to walk a line there, right? You don’t want to write too few paths, but you don’t want to go so crazy that, you know, you load yourself down with a million words of dialogue and the player, you know it’s only a 5 hour game, that would be ridiculous.
[yags] In this game, again, they’re doing the Bioware thing of multiple dialogue choices kind of following, not exactly a morality scale, but some sort of various types of responses. And you mentioned that in this one, other than... as opposed to Mass Effect, there isn’t, like, a power difference between your mood and what you do, but it does affect the story line.
[dg] In Star Wars for instance, as well as Mass Effect, there’s a gameplay mechanic to the morality, right? In Star Wars it was your light side and your dark side points, you had like a meter. Sort of the same deal in Mass Effect: you had your renegade and your paragon; they weren’t quite good and evil, but you still had in there a gameplay mechanic that tracked how much of a renegade or how much of a paragon you were. And that’s cool, but the thing that... once you make it a gameplay mechanic, you then have to put it in every dialogue and every quest whether it fits or not. Now that can work, I mean I thought it was kind of cool in ‘Knights of the Old Republic’, because that’s part of the world - it was about the dichotomy between good and evil. With Dragon Age we specifically decided to go with something that’s a little bit more mature, more adult, not tied to trying to fit a distinct good path, a distinct evil path everywhere. What we have is you’re able to act in a moral manner or immoral as appropriate. Sometimes being immoral means taking the short cut, and not worrying about how it affects other people. Sometimes the moral path is getting more... looking for more reward. But not always, that’s probably trying to shoehorn them in. Sometimes if you have a simple quest, I remember in previous games where we’ve tracked a line, sometimes you need to say, well, what’s the evil path here? I guess have the character hit up the person for money, you start to feel a little bit like a bully, right? But with Dragon Age we have the opportunity to be a little bit more selective of what the player does, so you have the opportunity then to allow the player to do things that are much logical and I find much effective in the end. Because you’ll end up with choices.. you’ll sit back and think "this seems like a good choice but... and this seems sort of like a evil choice but it has some good aspects..." so it’s not necessarily so clear. We even have some very hard choices, so doing what seems to be the morally the right thing, is often the hard route. That’s the one where you’ve got to go most out of your way and maybe get the least reward. Because sometimes being good means not worrying about what compensation you’ll get, and I think that’s appropriate.
[yags] [... transcript incomplete, will be completed later...]