Dhruin
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Ray Muzyka has been active doing interviews lately and Gamasutra is the latest site with a conversation with EA's "group general manager of the RPG/MMO Group". Titled An Age to Come, Ray discusses Dragon Age's planned social networking aspects, PC vs console controls and modding:
More information.We'll have more to show on what we're planning, but I think it's really cool. We're creating a community site that's going to enable the fans to get revved up about what each other is doing. They're showing their choices and consequences to friends. Even though it's single-player, you can still reveal those choices to each other and have fun doing it.
It enables some of that stuff that occurs anecdotally amongst friends at the water cooler: "Hey, did you play this yet? Did you go this way?" "No, I didn't run into that. I did it this way." "Really? I didn't run into that at all!"
You can meet people who are across the world and enable them to see those kinds of things, too, which I think will lead to a lot of fun discussion and collaboration in the community. Imagine that getting broader when you have post release downloadable content that expands the game as a platform concept, or community-driven content that people can play through and maybe the fans embrace this and make content that can even be expanded further with even more choices in it.
There are a lot of possible extensions to this, but I always thought the idea of a hero's journey being shown through an RPG would be really cool. So, with Dragon Age, we're going to try that.