Dragon Age II Interview

GameSpot has another one of those final thoughts/post-design interviews with Dragon Age II’s lead designer Mike Laidlaw, going blow by blow for for a hefty five pages.

GS: In terms of interacting with these companions or other characters in the game, how do you feel about the way the dialogue wheel came together and how it made things a little more clear and direct?

ML: I’m very happy with it. The wheel, as a whole, provides a couple of really cool advantages. It lets us hold more conversation options than we had available in Origins where we had a cap of six. We technically have a cap of 10, so you can get a nice, cleaner interface to ask questions for clarification. I love the investigate system. It also provides what I see as the prize behind every door insofar as when you read a line of Origins dialogue for comparison, you see everything you could potentially say. In your brain, you’ve done the totality of that conversation. Whereas looking and saying, “Oh, I know that’s going to be a smart-aleck line, but I don’t feel it’d be right to use it,” you’re left with that temptation or that urge to pick it because you can’t tell exactly what you’ll say. What I think is the key gain with the icons is that you do know it will be sarcastic, which allows you to make a much clearer choice about how you want to interact with characters. If it was going to be suave or if it was going to be diplomatic, you know at a glance rather than having some confusion around what might happen.

Text is always a pretty horrible medium for conveying sarcasm or sincerity. Being able to put a heart, as much as you could argue that you could tell, lets you say, “OK, I’m certain with this choice. I’m not making it blind.” That’s very important when you want to associate yourself with a character.

(…)

GS: The most noticeable change for combat is how much faster it is. Looking at the final product, do you feel the team was able to hit that sweet spot between being quick and reactive while still allowing for strategy and planning out moves ahead of time?

ML: I think it’s close. There’s some tuning to be done, but I’m much happier with the overall feel of the combat in Dragon Age II than I was with Origins. Origins brought some amazing team-based play into the fray, and I know that the systems driving the two games are identical in terms of which stats are checked and how the combat is calculated. But the overall feel that as a warrior I don’t have to gamely amble forward to begin my attack is something that creates a consistency between classes. If I have someone nearby who can launch fire from their hands and explode enemies, I don’t feel that just because I’m wearing plate-mail I should have to trudge forward to begin combat.

Obviously, there’s balance to be done. Certainly, we made some changes in terms of what I think of as the barrier to entry. Origins, especially on the PC, was very difficult unless you were already an RPG veteran. Now, that’s a more realistic [difficulty]. It’s something to continue to tune, and this is a first outing with something that has almost endless potential.

GS: When you made that change, did it feel like a big gamble at the time?

ML: I felt very confident about it. There are people who dislike that change, and that’s perfectly fine. That was not unknown because it’s a bit of a paradigm shift in that it moves some fundamentals in a different direction. But what it doesn’t do is sacrifice the overall goal for Dragon Age, which I’ve said before is the idea of teamwork being an important and key part of the franchise–having a party and not just a single character. Ultimately, I think the game controls better on all four platforms, but we knew it was something that would create some response. We knew at first blush people would look at it and say, “Oh god! What is that?” We saw that coming in some of our early demos, but the simple truth is that I’ve seen innumerable people say, “This is way better. There are some issues–things to be resolved overall with the game–but the combat is more fun to play.” To me, that’s really the goal.