Dragon Age Expansion Interview page 2

18 Mar 2010 at 10:35:10 by

Are we going to have the ability to get some of these old characters back into our party again, or are they just in there for the cameos more than anything?

With Awakening, there's one character that does join your party. All the other ones are there in terms of cameos. They serve a very specific role in terms of where they fit in the story, but they do not actually join your party. That means in terms of romances and other things, you will not be able to continue pursuing those with those characters. That doesn't mean those characters don't exist - they're very much still in the world, and they're still there, and at some point you may get a chance to meet them.

Romance was quite a big thing for a lot of players in Dragon Age. It was done differently to how it was done in other BioWare games, with the relationship meter. This isn't getting such a big focus in Awakening. Why not? As I said, a lot of players really enjoyed it.

Overall, probably the biggest thing that we got back was story. That's really what I think drove Origins to its success, is that the story's accessible, the richness of the world, and the characters - and of course, the characters that you love, and you love-to-hate. [Laughs] We certainly have the love-to-hate part!

In terms of actually building romances, one of the things that we realised fairly early on is that it wasn't going to work out with the kind of story that we want to tell in Awakening. It wasn't going to work out very well to try to fit in romances. So we had a decision point very early on in the development of Awakening as to whether we put something in because every BioWare game has had these relationship moments in there, and we really opted to break the mould a little bit with Awakening and rather than try to potentially feel like we shoehorned something in, or tacked on a sort of fling or romance thing just to say we had it in there, we actually opted, because it didn't fit in very well, to not do it. Again, it's not that these characters didn't exist or that these relationships didn't exist - they're still very much there, and one day you may get a chance to find some closure for that, but it wouldn't be in the timeframe for Awakening.

If that was an early decision, how long ago did you actually start working on Awakening, or start thinking about it?

Awakening has really been in development for over a year. It started off in parallel with the ending of Origins. Pretty much once the PC version was kinda wrapped up - we continued to do bug fixes and improvements on it - the majority of the technical side of the team had moved on to doing the console versions, and really, that's when the writers began in earnest to tell some of the stories for DLC and for Awakening, and that's kinda where it sprung from.

Was the story of Awakening something that you had in mind throughout Dragon Age? Do you have the future of the franchise planned out, to some extent?

Pretty much. I don't know that everything would materialise in terms of expansions or sequels or DLC or what-have-you, but... Dragon Age, as a universe, was something that we invested man-years of development up front to build a really rich universe. As I mentioned, Dragon Age is a time-span. We have a geography that things fit inside of, which is the world, and we pretty much know the key events, the key individuals. We know the key catalysts for things that are going to make changes in the world. Really what we're trying to do - through the combination of DLC, expansions, and so forth - is really put you in those places where you get a chance to make those kinds of decisions. You get to make these impacts into the world. From that perspective, we have a lot more storytelling already that we can do. How much of that will come out, and in what forms... David Gaider's books have been doing great, we have potentially other things that we could do as well. That's really the whole point of treating Dragon Age as a true franchise, is that there's lots of possibilities for how we can tell all those little pieces and really unveil what is a much, much bigger picture than what we've seen so far from Origins and Awakening.

So when we're playing Awakening, will we think back to Origins and think "Okay, I can see where that was going now?" Will we see loads of little hints hidden away in the original game as to what happens in Awakening?

Absolutely. There's clear causal effects as well - you can clearly see an effect from decisions that you've made. There are also much more subtle things, where you'll realise "Oh, okay, this is what they were talking about. I can now experience that." And not just with Origins. You can already see some relationships with the books. If you've read those, there's a lot of that which shows up in Awakening and in the DLCs as well. Really, again, all of these pieces are already in place in the fiction of Dragon Age - all we really need to do is paint in a way that you can experience it as a player. That's kinda what we're trying to do with DLC and with expansions.

That was one of the things I loved about Dragon Age in particular, actually. It was such a well-developed universe, and the codex, I think, was a big part of that. There were... 250-odd entries in there? I know a lot of players who I spoke to went through and read every single one, and tried to track down everything. Can we expect about as much from the codex in this?

There's definitely a lot of stuff in there. I don't know if it's as big as Origins - I don't know many things that are as big as Origins, to be honest! [Laughs] But it certainly has a lot of meat to it, it has a lot of context to it. The codices are a great way for us to fill in a lot of gaps, and the writers love to use that as a way to foreshadow things, and tie in little loose pieces, and drop subtle hints of things. So it's great for fans that appreciate that, but at the same time it's not so in-your-face that we always have a lot of players that may play it once, and they just want to experience Dragon Age and they're not really into reading the 250 codex entries. And that's perfectly fine as well. One of the things that I really love about how the franchise is structured is that all the DLC pieces, the expansion, Origins itself, the books - they really do connect. It's kind of funny because, in a way, what you as a player are seeing at the moment is some sort of abstract parts that don't quite line up just yet. It will come. There will be a time where you'll start to see the pieces really start to fall into place, and a lot more direct connections can be made. We're only really starting to scratch the surface of that with Awakening now.

Can we take that as an announcement of more expansions and sequels to come, then?

I don't know about that! We certainly have made no secrets about the fact that we're continuing to support the franchise with DLC. Beyond that, we'll have to find out later on.