Dragon Age: Origins Interview

The guys at UGO Games Blog had the chance to quiz BioWare president Greg Zeschuk about their Baldur’s Gate spiritual successor, Dragon Age: Origins.

UGO: What is the Dragon Age universe like? We’ve seen that it’s a very classic kind of fantasy setting, but what is the Blight? And what are the Arch-Demons? It seemed in your demo like that’s another name for a Dragon.

Zeschuk: (leading) I’m not sure what the arch-demons are just yet.

Well we created a whole new fiction for this game. And a large part of the effort of the team was in spending quite a bit of time in the pre-production phase, really fleshing out the back-story to the world. Really, the Darkspawn are the enemy you face in this game. They’re these mutated, freakish monsters that are humanoid, but not. They themselves fled to the dark side of the Blight and so you have to try and figure out the source of it, the cause of it, and of course, stop it. There are some references to the Arch-Demon and you have to figure out what that is.

The overall world is actually a very brutal, gritty sort of world. We call it the Dark World of Fantasy, which is different than classic High Fantasy–sashaying elves and happy hobbits. It’s a brutal world where you have very tough decisions and there’s all kinds of social commentary that is impacted by those choices you make.

UGO: Are we going to be traveling over an open landscape in Dragon Age? Or are we going to be moving from town to town kind of like in Mass Effect, where you really only move from cultural hub to cultural hub?

Zeschuk: We cut out that travel part. We tend to prefer the big exploration areas. There’s no real need to run from place to place in the game. Also, travel could potentially limit the distance you could theoretically cover. So we tend to have action areas which are very large. That’s one of the strengths of Dragon Age. We have some very big areas with a lot of data held in those. A lot of creatures, a lot of loot, items, things like that. But we actually [control] the travel between those areas.