BioWare Interviews

BioWare’s Greg Zeschuk fields questions about Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect 2, and more in new interviews on Eurogamer and Gameswelt.

From Eurogamer’s Q&A:

Eurogamer: Changing the subject, can you tell us a bit about how the user-generated content for Dragon Age will work?

Dr Greg Zeschuk: It’s only on the PC, obviously. There was actually a lot of work for us to do: we always planned it, but we hadn’t taken the steps, so halfway though development we were, “Oh yeah, we have to rip it out from our internal database. Okaaaaay, how do we do that?” Literally months were taken to rip the tools out of there. It’s generally the same tools we use. The key thing is that certain elements of the game aren’t made in the toolset – things like character models – and we’ll make sure that you can import that stuff if you want to go use Maya or 3D Max to make it, and we’ll do the same thing for animation. But beyond that, most of the stuff is there: laying out areas, prop placement.

There’s sort of a tile system – it’s hard to call them tile systems any more because it’s so much more advanced than Neverwinter Nights – as well as a terrain system, so you can do both smooth outdoor areas, and really complicated buildings and things. All the dialogue tools are there. For the acting stuff, you’ll have to use pre-set emotions, but a lot of that stuff is there.

We had actually toolset events at BioWare and mod guys that worked on Neverwinter came out and worked on the new tools, and one of the fans actually acted out a Shakespeare play. It wasn’t super killer, but it was really cool, because you can just see people taking this in really interesting directions. It’s only for PC, but we want to try and figure out if we can take that content over to console to play it.

And from a Google translated Gameswelt Q&A:

GW: Why did you decide to roleplay system design, and did not play Dungeons & Dragons on existing systems, or fall back?

GZ: We have a great deal with the D & D system worked, we know so well and are very happy with it. But after all this time we wanted to own something to make the legs. In addition, the D & D system a bit complicated when it comes to use in a game. It is always difficult, pen & paper rules to adapt a video game. There is an enormous amount of conditions that must be programmed when it is reasonably authentic to the rules will hold. We have therefore decided to create a separate, somewhat straightforward system design that better fits into a video game.