Massive Dragon Age: Origins Interview

After attending the latest Dragon Age: Origins press event, Cheat Code Central has combined all of the questions they fired at BioWare’s Mark Darrah, Mike Laidlaw, Ray Muzyka, and Greg Zeschuk into one massive interview. Some choice quotes:

CCC: With no pun intended, what was the origin of the Dragon Age project?

ML: It starts with a love of Dungeons & Dragons. I think most of the guys who were involved in BioWare’s founding were in the same AD&D game. So you have this real culture of that. BioWare very practically decided after working on the D&D license and working on Knights of the Old Republic that we wanted to take a crack at building our own IP. We had top-notch writers, great creative minds, so we said that we think we can do this. You’ll notice that the past few games – Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and now Dragon Age – are all unique IPs. We’re not opposed to licensed games – look at Star Wars: The Old Republic. Mass Effect was really an extension of the question “What would a BioWare version of Star Wars look like?” And Dragon Age was really where the heart was – let’s go back home to fantasy. Looking at the trend of darker fantasy, like George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice as an obvious example, it seemed like fantasy is growing up. And the gaming base is growing up. The Baldur’s Gate fans are now in their 30s with kids, including us. So we decided it was time to go back, time to make our own world, and out of that came Dragon Age.

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CCC: What are the challenges of creating a game like this for a gaming audience that’s significantly different than it was in the Baldur’s Gate era? We’re definitely in the era of shooters now.

ML: The shooters that do well are the shooters that have a story. You know, like in Call of Duty 4 – crawling out of the helicopter after being nuked. It was amazing. Being dragged into a limo and shot. Halo has Master Chief, a protagonist that everyone kind of feels like they know, they understand him because of the way people react to him. Gordon Freeman is like this silent, everyman character, yet almost the ultimate Messiah. There’s some amazing work done there. Shooters were a genre where people said “eh, they don’t really care about story in this,” and to be fair in multiplayer they don’t, but all the good ones have these really strong narratives. In think RPGs came to the party wearing the narrative hat already, so for us the challenge was making sure those shooter guys weren’t turned off by giant walls of text and huge expository kinds of things. We had to adopt a storytelling approach that was much more modern – putting people around you that comment, making you absorb the world through osmosis. It’s not about insuring that you learn this bit of history. You can go through huge chunks of Dragon Age without dealing with the Chantry, but by the time you get to the Urn of Sacred Ashes, you kind of know what the Chantry is about. It’s a passive process how you get the story.

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CCC: The development of the game predates BioWare’s joining of EA. What was that process like? How did they initially receive the game?

GZ: We’d actually pitched it to EA. When we were an independent developer they were one of the groups we pitched it to, so they were aware of it and they’d expressed interest in it. What we were able to show them is how far we’d progressed, and they’ve been wonderfully supportive of the game.

RM: We say “they” but we actually are EA as a collective. EA’s given us real support, like the creation of this new group, the RPG/MMO group is indicative of the type of support EA has for the kinds of games we’re building. Games with rich stories, progression and customization, exploration and all the things you’ve come to love about a BioWare RPG or a Mythic MMO. You can see that there’s a lot of support for it. There’s definitely a focus from EA now on the customers and the quality, which is something that John Riccitiello expresses a lot, and we really believe in that. It’s all about the fans; delivering good, quality games for the fans. That’s what keeps us in business, so you can’t break that trust.