Dragon Age: Inquisition - Interview @ Ausgamers

Ausgamers interviewed Dragon Age: Inquisition Producer Cameron Lee.

AusGamers: Obviously Dragon Age 3 is announced, that’s definitely something that’s happening out at BioWare. Mass Effect wrapped up, and that was a really long undertaking. I followed that from the start, and spoke to Casey [Hudson, Mass Effect Creative Director] a bunch of times. Now there’s probably a lot of stuff going on at BioWare, but I’m keen to know if the vibe in the office is a little bit different now that this one major arc doesn’t exist anymore?

Cameron: I guess a little bit. With Mass Effect -- the core trilogy of it anyway -- ending, it’s freed up some people to think about what to do next, and that builds a certain level of excitement. And combine that with gen four, which again: what can we do with these things? There’s, I think, a sense of real exploration in what we want to try and accomplish, and that’s great; that energy level sort of ramps up again.

Having worked on consoles for so many years as well, you kind of know how far you can push it, and now it’s like it’s an unknown barrier again on the hardware. And also as I said “What does BioWare do next?”, so that’s going to be really interesting to see.

AusGamers: And finally, I’ll just wrap up with one more: having come from Visceral, and now being out at BioWare, those two companies both having a pretty good history with transmedia, and BioWare being such a story-driven developer. Do you think that there needs to be more of a push to get these grandiose worlds that developers make, into the hands of consumers in various forms, as opposed to just games?

Cameron: Yeah, I think so. Particularly something like Dragon Age. There’s a lot novels, there’s comic books, there’s all the action figures and all that sort of stuff. I think we’d like to do more of that. Mike Laidlaw, who’s the Creative Director on Dragon Age, he’s a former writer himself, so he’s heavily involved in trying to push the franchise out, beyond just the core game.

We would never want to weaken the core experience that you have within the main game, but if we can sort of extend it out a little bit, there’d be some really interesting things that you could do there. And we’ve got some ideas, which hopefully we can talk about at a later date, around the topic.