Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening Interview

Gamasutra had the opportunity to sit down with BioWare’s Fernando Melo and quiz the online producer about the success of Dragon Age: Origins, as well as its soon-to-be-released Awakening expansion pack.

Full expansions are less common in an era of compartmentalized DLC. What was the thinking behind the strategy?

Fernando Melo: The fans had a lot to do with it. The first thing we got requested as soon as we released our initial DLC was, “When is the full expansion coming out?”

We already had some thinking around it. The team has been working on Awakening for over a year, but the idea of releasing it as an actual boxed product came from a lot of what the fans were asking for.

So far we’ve released lots of different kinds of DLC; we’ll continue to do that, and each of them plays a part in what kinds of stories we want to reveal. Awakening allows us to really advance the knowledge of the world by a substantial amount. It’s not adding a chapter; it’s adding an entire new volume set, effectively.

The cool part is, because we spent man-years developing the background of Dragon Age, all of these pieces — no matter how small or how big — really reveal lots of little parts around it. They all play a role. Even the smallest item has some kind of lore, and in some cases foreshadows things that you’re going to see or characters you’ll meet.

That’s part of what makes it very special — at some point, these things will coalesce, and you’ll get a much bigger picture of what’s happening. Origins takes place in a small sliver of time and location in the world; Awakening fast-forwards that a few more months and is set in a slightly different place. All the DLC revolves around those pieces, but there’s going to be more coming for sure.