Dragon Age: Origin Q&A Feature

Dubbed the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate is certainly an easy way to heap the pressure and expectations surrounding BioWare's Dragon Age: Origin.  Striking out on their own without the comfort of a Dungeons & Dragons ruleset this time around, Dragon Age begins with the origin of each of the six different character combinations featured in the game, which serves as a prelude as to how the player sees the world and how the world sees the player.

TVG sat down with lead designer Mike Laidlaw to discover more about the game.

Dragon Age: Origins is the spiritual successor to other BioWare titles?

Yes, that's absolutely correct, Baldur's Gate 1 and Baldur's Gate 2, and to a lesser extent Neverwinter Nights as well.  But when we think about the Baldur's Gate series... Origins is really a double-entendre, it's kind of the origins of BioWare. 

Baldur's Gate 1 was a defining landmark game for us, before that we had Shattered Steel, which was big giant robots fighting - people don't tend to remember that one as much as the giant epic fantasy about you being the son of the god murder [Bhaal], shocking. 

It's kind of like our pedigree, it was a conscious decision to say, 'you know what would be really awesome, what if we could make our own intellectual property, our own world and try our take on it', and that's what Dragon Age is all about.

In terms of story, are we going to say anything that happened in those previous games or references coming into Dragon Age?

You might find a couple of things where you're, 'is that an easter egg?'  There are a couple of tiny little things, but in terms of 'is it the same world?', then no they're completely distinct.  Those two games were Forgotten Realms games so they were based on that IP, whereas this is our own, so we don't want to cross that line too much. 

What you will find that will be similar is the feel, that kind of ephemeral 'what is that'.  But the sense of you being an agent of change in a world tittering on the brink, I think Dragon Age actually hits that note more strongly than even the Baldur's Gate games.  It really gives the player a degree of agency, where it's like 'you make choices, the game will react to them; good luck I hope you make the right ones'.  The thing is, none of them are really wrong, some of them maybe just wrong for you, they're very challenging.  Ideally in my mind you've got villains that you can see their point, 'oh I know why you did that, it still makes you a dick, but I know why you did it'.

What do you think are the key Dragon Age gameplay elements that will imprint it on the BioWare fold?

I think the maturity of the story is really going to make it stand out.  Certainly Mass Effect was a very mature game, very serious, classic space fantasy; but at the same time Dragon Age throws you some really challenging moments that we believe will leave people scratching their heads and going 'wow man I did not expect that'. 

The other big thing is we built a world that while it's got a load of the fantasy tropes, ideally what it's full of is archetypes but not the cliché, not the overused, over relied upon stuff like 'oh we've got elves and they live in trees, and they all sing songs and dress up in gossamer.'  That's cool right? I mean Tolkien rocked that thing, but what can we do that's different.  So, 'yeah that's an elf recognisably, but how are they different?'  Those were some of the big questions we asked ourselves when we were developing the game.  It's a distinct world and it's a darker fantasy, we're thinking of it almost as a new genre where it's a little more aggressive, a little more challenging, the kind of thing that will make the player go 'wow I wasn't expecting this'.

Can you talk about the party system and how this works with the class setup?

Basically what we've got is three basic classes and within them each class has got its own full customisation tree.  So, 'I'm a warrior, do I use two handed weapons, am I sword and shield, do I use a bow?' all these things are available to you.  Rogues have different flavour, 'am I a dirty fighter, backstabber'; Mages certainly have a hell of a lot of different variety. 

So you basically have not only your own character who you build up from the very beginning, but you have other characters who fill in these various different niches, and they all come with their own personalities, their own reactions to the choices you're making, and their own tactical purpose and roles.  Once they're in your party you can customise them anyway you want, in that case you may want to build your party like that, if you've got a Rogue that you made, but you might not need either of them actually. 

It's not just about how you build individual characters but how you build your party as a cohesive unit, we're allowing you to use tactics, basically exposing the whole AI to the players and saying 'you decide how they act'. The player can dive in and say 'you hold out girl, you nuke em to high heaven, and you start healing', that way the party is like this orchestration and you're the commander, dive in and take control individually as you see fit or let them run automatically.

Does the game keep them together?

For the most part they're all kept together, there's a couple of surprising story moments where they get broke up a little but I don't want to spoil those.  You're together, you're working as a unit, and there's others who... like the party that's available is bigger then who you can take on a single mission, you can take four and there's nine floating around.  It's kinda cool to go, 'ok you're on my B team, but occasionally I need you for the story reason or what have you'.

The story starts with one character and you build as you go through...

Exactly, you basically start at you origin and that's where the name comes from.  Those are unique fully playable sections of gameplay, so it's like 'I'm a city elf', boom, that's your origin and that determines what launches you into the larger story of you being a great warrior.  Each of them provide a pretty unique perspective on the world so when you play as another origin you'll be like 'oh wow I think the humans are dicks, now I've played this'.  It's a really cool experience and to my mind it's awesome to see a new opening.

The dialogue is veritably BioWare in terms of depth; what have you built on in terms of technology?

The Mass Effect conversation system, the concept of digital acting is one of the greatest benefits we bought from Mass Effect to Dragon Age.  We have the whole system that doesn't just do lip synching, lip synch by itself is cool and good to get right, but we also have emotional states, we have senses of how is this character moving and how is he agitated.  And then we actually have the team of both animators and designers, who go in and tune the conversations, the more important they are the more likely they are to get hand touched. 

So you have characters that are available to move on and off stage, cuts to referential points... there's one moment where a character is talking to a character he's in love with and he leans on a tree and says 'the real problem is her', and as he leans the camera focuses out at the distance and she suddenly becomes where the depth of field is. And it's like 'wow that's awesome'; you can tell a real compelling story when you have all the tools a cinematographer would have at your disposal.

In terms of play, how much variation are we talking about between the characters?

I think you would find that about 30% of the game is locked off and exclusive based on... the origin certainly matters, it's the first hour and a half of the game right so there's a big chunk of it.  But as well, how people react to your origins is constantly being referenced, I remember one awesome moment - we use UK actors for all the elder elves - and this guy's like 'well I don't know how to talk to an elf like you, you're important' completely stunned, and I played that part as a Dwarf and he had completely different things to say, so it's really cool to have that constantly coming up. 

And then you have, to me it's really unique when you have characters that you play through once, you meet them and they're there, 'ok cool'.  You play through as your origin guy and you're like 'oh yeah I remember this guy', you meet him and he was your best friend and you meet him again and it's like 'it's you, you're here, you can rescue me', it's like this completely different experience to when you met him and you didn't know him at all.  So there's a fair amount of that and the followers all have their own stories, some of it is how much do you dig into, how many side quests you find.

Dragon Age has multiple beginnings but will there be alternate endings?

There's certainly multiple endings to the game, I don't want to spoil them at this stage.  The game is always tracking all the decisions you're making, all the characters you're interacting with.  In terms of permutations there's thousands of different ways; 'are they all a huge cut-scene?' no because that would cripple us financially, but there's very subtle ways the game records that, like 'oh cool you did this, here you go man we remembered it and we noticed it and good job'.

Do you have any plans for multiplayer?

No it's a single player game, but we have a pretty aggressive plan for downloadable content and one of the things we're always proud of is our community.  We have community guys coming in to work for us who've done it.  So the end user toolkit and there will be an aggressive campaign for the sense of your game getting online so people can see it and compare.  We'll be releasing more details on that as we get closer to launch.

In terms of release, you clearly want to get this right and it's been pushed back a little in the past, are you now working to a concrete release date?

We're still locking down the exact date but we're looking at the last quarter of the year; it will be out this year.

TVG would like to thank Mike Laidlaw for taking the time to answer our questions...