Dragon Age: Origins Audio Interview

Tor.com, a website dedicated to science fiction and fantasy writing, has uploaded an interview they did with Dragon Age: Origins lead writer David Gaider during GenCon Indy. The interview is entirely in audio format, but they did take the time to transcribe some of it:

As gaming technology improves, and certainly the visual elements get more and more expansive, have you ever been limited in how expansive you can make a multi-branch narrative due to the lack of storage space on a game disc?

DG: It’s not so much about storage space, as it is about the costs to create content. If you think back to the Baldur’s Gate series, it had reached a point where that sort of 2D art had reached a point where we could create lots of content fairly cheaply. And then we entered the 3D era, and suddenly it was much more problematic, but now we’re slowly reaching the point where the technology exists where we can start to think about maybe making areas or cinematics more cheaply than we were, or at the very least where using them allows us to have access to more storytelling tools rather than less. You can see some of that already, in some of the open world stuff that’s out there, like Oblivion, for instance. For its time, it looked excellent, and it felt like there was this entire world. I think for the people that really loved Oblivion, that was the part that they fell in love with.

If you look at something like Mass Effect, the sheer cinematic quality alone, the fact they took that level of cinematics and incorporated it into the gameplay, and in the game the dialogues were so sharp, that’s wonderful. If we can just take that process and keep refining it, we’re going to end up with something really special down the line. In terms of being part of the overall genre, making better RPGs, making better stories, from my perspective as a writer, that’s the ultimate goal. I’m in this to tell better stories, to tell bigger stories, to tell the kinds of stories that the fans will remember 10-20 years down the line. Where I don’t want to get to is the point where they rent the game, it’s really short, and they play it and forget about it a month later. That’s not what I make RPGs to do.