Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening Interview

18 Mar 2010 at 10:35:10 by

It's not often you get to spend a decent amount of time with a top BioWare producer.  We were lucky enough to catch Fernando Melo, the lead producer and franchise leader on BioWare's Dragon Age.  In this exclusive interview our Tim talks everything Dragon Age you can think of, and also discuss how and why BioWare are a critically acclaimed studio.

What can you tell us about Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening, to start with?

The biggest thing about Awakening is, it's more of what people loved in Origins. It's built on top of what we did in Origins. We've been working over it for just over a year, in parallel; the same team, the same group, the same writing team as well. You can expect a lot of the same fantastic story-writing, the richness of the world, the new characters that you're going to get a chance to meet. It's set about six months after the end of Origins, when the Blight has ended. Normally what happens at the end of the Blight is that the Darkspawn kinda go away - this time, they haven't. There's something that's keeping them out. They're more organised, there's rumours of a sentient Darkspawn that talks and thinks. There's a real characterisation of evil that's masterminding or strategising against you, as opposed to just dealing with creatures, like we did in Origins. There's a real sense of evil around that which is kinda cool. New characters that you're going to get a chance to meet, as well, which are some of the things that people really loved. So yeah, in general, just more of what you loved in Origins.

Awakening's not marketed as a DLC pack, or a sequel, and it's been so long since I've seen expansions I was beginning to think the time for them was over. What led to the decision to make a full expansion rather than something else?

To be honest, it was a lot of the fan feedback that we got. As soon as Origins launched, the first thing we got asked was "When are you going to do a full expansion?" and that kinda got us thinking. We had already started some work towards Awakening anyway, and that's really helped validate that decision. I don't know if it's so much that the time has passed - one could probably have said before that for something like Dragon Age, an old-school traditional RPG, maybe those times were kind of gone. Certainly, Dragon Age has been really successful. We're really pleased with lots of awards that we got and the Metacritic for it, and people have really taken to it.

Fundamentally, I think that as long as you've got a fantastic story, that's what matters. With Awakening, we wanted to tell a really new story. Six months afterwards, there's a lot of events that are going to be happening, there are very big, epic changes that are going on with the world, and you're right smack-dab in the middle of it. Choices and consequences was another thing that people really enjoyed about Origins. It wasn't like you made little decisions - they were things that you really had to think about. In some cases, we heard from fans of spending 20 minutes at a decision point because there's no easy solution to it, right? And Awakening has a lot of those, as well. You fundamentally feel like you're going to be making something that is going to impact the world, and I think that's really what it was all about. There's no easy way to do that with DLC. DLC has a very specific purpose.

Dragon Age is a universe - we treat it as a big canvas. It's got a timeline; there's a set amount of time the "Dragon Age" takes place in. There's a geographical limitation - the physical world that we live in - but within that, there's huge amounts of storytelling that we want to tell. DLC allows us to very quickly tell little snippets of stories and fill in certain bits, or foreshadow things to come in some cases, but really for something like this - we want to unveil a new area, we want to really talk about some very big, big changes that're happening in the world - there's no better way to tell it than a really meaty expansion.

The mainstream appeal of the game surprised me. As you said, I thought the time for hardcore RPGs being big, mass-market things was over. Were you surprised by the response that Dragon Age had as well?

Yeah, I think we've been really pleasantly surprised, obviously. We always believed in the game - it's a game that we've been working on for many years. It started shortly after we completed Neverwinter Nights; it's been many years in the making. I think we always believed in the game, we always wanted to make this kind of game, but having that kind of validation where it's not just the PC press or gaming press in particular, but mainstream press...! We hear about Dragon Age now in TV, news, newspapers, and other media where I never would have expected to see Dragon Age, typically. It's absolutely amazing, and for the team, it's such a huge boon for them. We're really, really pleasantly surprised. I couldn't honestly tell you that we were expecting that for sure - definitely not. We always strive to hit a certain quality with our games, and in particular with this one, we didn't really pull any punches in terms of the storytelling or who the audience was for it, but what was really surprising is, as you said, hitting the more mainstream audience. We start to see people that are blogging on business sites and they mention Dragon Age, and relationships, and all these other things that I keep seeing cropping up, and it's crazy! It's fantastic. [Grins]

There is one thing I've been wondering, before we get onto the specifics. You've talked about the mass appeal, and a lot of that likely came from the fact that Dragon Age is on console as well. I did note, though, that the PS3 version of Awakening is only coming out as a downloadable version, as opposed to the PC and 360, which are getting boxed releases. What's the reasoning behind that?

It's a really good question, and to be honest with you, I don't know that I have a good answer. This was a real surprise for us. Originally, just like in North America, we wanted to do both retail box and a digital version. We then heard back from Sony that there's actually a limitation from their perspective. They don't do both. Basically, ultimately, however that decision came about, we ended up doing a digital version for Europe as sort of the preferred method by the powers that be, as it were. So it's one of those things that I think we could have supported, and it just kinda didn't work out in that case. But it certainly wasn't for lack of want.

Alright, on to Awakening specifics! Awakening's set in a new area called the Ameranthine. What can you tell us about it?

Ameranthine is set in the north of Fereldan. Fereldan is where Origins took place. It's a little bit north of that on the map. It's a relatively small Arl, or region. One of the really cool things about it is the geography is really quite varied - you'll find lots of different kinds of things. I'm not going to spoil it in terms of different areas that you're going to get a chance to see, but you will find lots of really cool, very spooky, very dangerous areas, of course. It is the world of Dragon Age, after all. [Grins] But also, we have the actual city of Ameranthine which you'll get to explore. Vigil's Keep is the new seat of power for the Wardens. As the Wardens, you've been given the Arl. The region of Ameranthine is now for the Wardens to administer, which has never been done before in terms of the history of Dragon Age. So that's going to be something that, from a storytelling perspective, it's a new kind of layer. You as the player are going to have to manage that relationship. Like every other choice, it has its consequences. If you choose to, you can invest time and energy and money towards dealing with what's happening in the keep, or, of course, you can go off adventuring. You still have to figure out what's happening with the Darkspawn and there's lots of things that you need to go and do for that, so I think it's going to give a lot of interesting twists and a new perspective that we experimented on, a long time ago, with Baldur's Gate in terms of managing a keep.

That was the comparison I was going to make, actually! Anyway: there are a lot of new characters in Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening, but can we expect to see returning characters from the original game?

Yeah, absolutely. There's actually quite a lot of characters that come back and do cameo roles, depending on the choices that you made. You may not get a chance to see all of them - it really depends on some of the choices, and where you left off with your relationship with them, when you import your Warden character in from Origins. If you start off as a brand new character, then you'll only get a chance to meet some of them, and again, their predisposition to you when you encounter them really depends on how you left your relationship at the time.

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