Dragon Age - News Roundup

A bunch of interviews and a critter update at the official Dragon Age site for this roundup.

First, GameShark has a total of three interviews (thanks, Blue's) with an annoying multi-page format:

• Executive Producer Mark Darrah
• Lead Designer Mike Laidlaw
• BioWare co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk

GameZone also speaks with Mike Laidlaw about choices (spoiler warning):

“We try to hit choices that have impact and deeper meaning,” he said. To illustrate that point a pivotal moment was shown in the game. The lead player had a choice to make – destroy an artifact so that no one could use it, or leave it alone. In the first run-through of the scenario, Laidlaw’s character destroyed the artifact, which outraged two of his party members – those characters with deep and distinctive personalities that had been part of his group for some time. But what he did was morally offensive to those characters and they attacked him and the fourth member of the party. Using a little developer magic, Laidlaw’s protagonist killed those members (which were then lost to him for the remainder of the game), and then proceeded to kill the guards and guide who were responsible for him being at this point. The idea was that the artifact was too powerful to wind up in the wrong hands and it was better to not let anyone else get hold of it.

But wait, what if he made a different choice. The scenario was replayed and this time the protagonist set the urn up as a symbol of hope for the beleaguered lands trying to combat the Blight and Dark Spawn threatening to sink the world into eternal evil. One party member grumbled and standing was lost, but the two that had attacked so willingly before were joyful and the protagonist’s standing with them went up. 

The Bioblog has collected three video developer diaries from GameSpot, each discussing a different aspect of the game (such as Writing and Epic and Music of Dragon Age).  We've linked these before but they're all in one spot, now.

Cheat Code Central also has a large interview (thanks, GameBanshee) that features Mark Darrah, Mike Laidlaw and the BioDocs.  Apparently, DA had a large writing team:

CCC: How many writers are working on this game?

MD: At the peak, I believe there were seven. The writing has been going on for a long time. The lead writer has been on the project from the beginning and he's written a lot about the way the universe works and has written a lot of the story. One of the things that you need to do to tell a story of this size is that you need to make sure that there's something behind the backdrop, that it's not just a picture painted on a wall. As a result, there's thousands of years of history written. There are a lot more stories to be told in this universe.

PC World's Matt Peckham (yes, Matt Peckham) joins the action with a three-parter with Mike Laidlaw, dividing it into thematic sections.  The first is titled "Why Storytelling in Dragon Age Might Not Suck".  A lengthy snip:

GO: You let players choose from any of six origin stories, stories you've suggested resonate throughout the play experience. How pliable or reflective is Dragon Age's game world respective of those choices? Do they change the way the entire game plays out, or just invoke the occasional narrative nod?

ML: Origins for us are such a key element of the game that we appended the word to the title. We knew we wanted to do these right and make them a hallmark of the game. We could have done a cursory approach, certainly, but instead we thought, "Okay, what's gratifying about having an origin that's playable?" That's where I think it starts--knowing that you get to experience a focused start to the game that gives you perspective and a different flavor when you're finally starting into things.

With that in mind, we made a concerted effort throughout the rest of the game to call out the different elements of your origin, the important part being that we do it at appropriate points. If the game constantly flogs it, it'd lose any sense of being special. Instead, we made sure there were moments in the game that not only point back to "Oh, you're of this origin," but actually reintroduce characters from that origin and have them iterating realistically based on how you acted during it.

It echoes forward as well, in terms of the larger plot points you're dealing with. If you come out of the mage origin story, when you eventually return to the mage tower, which is one of the things you'll be doing as a Grey Warden later in the game, characters there will remember you. They'll remember the way you acted on your way out. They'll remember the kind of decisions you made during your initial testing and react accordingly.

Where the origins system really shines, I think, is that a character who goes to the mage tower, say a human noble, can encounter these very same characters and they'll react differently. They won't recognize you. Your character won't have any interplay. So there's a level of depth and granularity that's added in when you have these secondary encounters, which occur in more than one place. It's called out multiple times. As a result, you get the feeling that your origin's not just something people occasionally mention, but also something people are reacting to accordingly, based on the way you acted and the choices you made. It's the pay off of, "Gosh, it's been 20 hours, I've finally managed to return to this place, and people are still pissed at me," or "People are incredibly happy to see me." It's not just a cursory mention, but a very specific callback to the way you forged your character in those early days.

Finally, the official site has been updated with the Brood Mother, featuring the video we linked yesterday and the usual description, screens and wallpaper and there's a new Penny Arcade Witch Hunt.