Dragon Age: Origins Interview
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Leaving my Human Noble rogue to fend for himself, I sat down with Mark to siphon some information about quite a few different topics that were on my mind. Have at it:
GB: I'm going to start you off actually with something a little bit unrelated, but something I wanted to get your perspective on right away. Dragon Age was originally announced for consoles earlier this year, but it was PC-only for nearly five years before that. Do you think that a stat-heavy, story-driven, AAA RPG can still be profitable if it's PC-only in this day and age?
Mark: I think that the possibility exists. I think the difficulty is when you're building the amount of content, the amount of cinematics, things like that, that we do, that you have to try to appeal to as many people as you can. I think if you were tighter and more controlled in your presentation, that there's still an audience there. It would just be tough.
GB: Given the current state of video games, did you feel that it was absolutely necessary to go after the console crowd?
Mark: I actually think that I I think we that we could still be successful on the PC. It's just that I think we have a story that is accessible to a broader audience, and we just thought that this was a great opportunity. The interesting thing is actually Dragon Age worked on the consoles two years ago, and then we decided to focus on the PC, and then we sort of changed our minds.
GB: Alright, let's go back to my regular set of questions. Are there any hidden areas in Dragon Age: Origins that you would say are kind of reminiscent of the Twisted Rune? You know, the really brutal but well-rewarding secret area in the bridge district of Athkatla, accessible only with a rogue stone? Anything sort of reminiscent of that, or even throwbacks to the BG series?
Mark: Yeah. There's actually there's a couple of areas where they're secret or accessible, off the beaten path, where we're going to that very difficult, rewarding, tactical experience, like you'd get in the Baldur's Gate II. And there are a couple of areas that are artistically inspired by some of the some of the and I can't remember what the name of it was. I've been trying to think of it for a couple of days, in like a couple of our magical shops are more are very reminiscent artistically to older Baldur's Gate areas as well.
GB: Really? So are any of the Dragon Age followers somewhat based on the followers that were in the Baldur's Gate series? Did you try to keep the equivalent personality of Minsc you know, anybody like that?
Mark: Yeah. We do have characters with a variety of personalities, so there's no one based directly off of any previous Baldur's Gate, or previous characters, but we like to have our characters with a lot of different personalities. So I think there's for people who like someone that's more wry, more humorous there's definitely characters there for them.
For people who liked Minsc, with that sort of I don't even know how to describe Minsc's personality, but with that sort of Minsc-y personality, there's people that I think they'll like in Dragon Age for sure.
GB: It was mentioned during the presentations we've had that the origin stories affect certain outcomes even up to the last ten minutes of the game. If you were to play through all six origin stories all the way through to the end, what percentage would you say is different? What sort of replayability factor are we looking at? I've heard 800 hours worth of gameplay getting thrown around for this game. Is it conceivable that even a third of it is never-before-seen when you play through the game a second time?
Mark: It depends some of the things are dependent on the story the choices like a lot of things are affected by your origin story and the choices you make there. Also, other things will be affected by choices you make throughout the rest of the game. So your origin story isn't the only thing that affects what content you're going to or not going to see.
So conceivably, if you played through one origin story and made very specific choices, and then played through a different origin story, and then played from a different moral stance, you may see almost no similar content.
But if you went through and played and made similar choices, you're going to see a lot of differences, based on your origin, because the people are going to react to elves differently than dwarves, and humans versus mages. But you're going to see more similarity if you make the same moral choices at some of the branching points in the plots in the stories.
GB: Are there entire areas that are inaccessible to you if you make specific choices?
Mark: Yeah. There are certain areas that are only accessible with certain characters, and depending on the choices you make, you may not actually even get some characters. That would block off entire parts of the game.
GB: Achievements are gaining a lot of popularity across all platforms, but in Mass Effect, it actually gave you in-game bonuses. Will there be in-game bonuses of some kind with Dragon Age's achievements?
Mark: I don't believe on the PC that you'll get any bonuses from achievements. On the consoles, I don't think that's been locked down yet.
GB: How many achievements are there total?
Mark: There are 150 achievements on the PC, and then on the consoles, it's limited down to 50, because that's actually a requirement of the manufacturers.
GB: I did notice you have two achievements specifically for the Stone Prisoner DLC.
Mark: Right.
GB: I also saw a couple for something called Warden's Keep. Is that another add-on that hasn't been announced or something?
Mark: Yeah. So we have other additional downloadable content that we haven't announced yet, but there definitely will be additional achievements for downloadable content as it comes out.
GB: Alright. Now you have a team that's specifically just working on post-release content, right?
Mark: We do have a team working specifically on post-release content, yeah.
GB: How many different add-ons do you anticipate releasing?
Mark: Well, we're planning to do two years' worth of additional content for Dragon Age, so we'll have things all the way up to full expansion packs. But I mean, also, we'll have just small things, like weapon packs, and new equipment. So it's really hard to quantify in that way, because we might have 100; we might have actually probably we'll probably end up close to that, and counting everything. But in terms of actual plot content, I don't know, a couple dozen probably.
GB: A couple dozen? Really?
Mark: Yeah.
GB: You mentioned a full expansion. Do you think that everything will be released digitally, or can you foresee actually having a $30.00 expansion pack on retail store shelves, like we were used to seeing years ago?
Mark: Yeah. You know, we haven't firmed up our plans yet, but I do think there is still a market in place for that sort of thing, an actual physical expansion pack. I think that market still exists.
GB: So not just a conglomeration of six previously released add-ons, but an actual standalone expansion pack?
Mark: Yeah. I mean, we might see that as well, where you take existing downloadable content you've done before, and packaged up, and put it in a different form. But I think the advantage you get of something larger, the higher price point, that you can put more work into it. It can be a bigger story. It can tie itself together, and have cross-links and things, and whereas if you just take six different plots that you've done, and then just sort of put them in one box, it's still a great experience, but it's not going to tie itself into a greater story.
GB: So what would you like to see included in the add-ons? Could you conceivably add an entirely new origin story?
Mark: I suppose that would be possible. It would be difficult to do, to tie that into the story now. I mean, I guess we're doing something as complicated with Stone Prisoner, because there's a full follower which ties into the whole rest of the game all over the place. And that was done as downloadable content.
I suppose a new origin is possible. And that would be massive in scale. It's interesting. We have no plans for that.
GB: If you did that, couldn't you open up new classes?
Mark: Yeah. Certainly I'd be interested in exploring new classes, or at least new specializations, giving new talents, that sort of thing, as well.
GB: Well, the way the game is designed, wouldn't you almost have to have an original origin story to introduce new classes?
Mark: Well, it would depend on the class, because if it was an origin story that didn't require so if we added something that was another martial class in the vein of a rogue or fighter, that would fit within the existing origin stories relatively reasonably.
But if you went to something different, like a different magical class, yeah, then that would definitely require a new origin story to make any sense, because you wouldn't it wouldn't fit in the mage origin, because that's very specifically tied to magic. And it wouldn't fit into the other origins, because of the way that magic exists in the Dragon Age universe. You don't just have magic users wandering about.
So certainly any sort of arcane or divine or well, basically non-mundane class would require a new origin story, if we were to do something like that.
GB: How about a new romance, or even a whole new gameplay element like mounted combat? Could you see yourself adding something like that?
Mark: Yeah. I mean, mounted combat is a great thing. It's been implemented in a lot of different ways in a lot of different games. Something like a new romance would again be massive in scale, because it has to be tied in throughout the game, because it's not just about talking to him or her in the party camp. They have to talk to you along the way, and but again, I mean, something on the scale of effectively doing a new romance would be like adding a new follower.
I mean, we're doing that with the Stone Prisoner, so it's within the scope of things we will have already done by the time we come out.
GB: And mounted combat?
Mark: Mounted combat, no current plans to do that. But it is something that I'm interested in doing in the long-term.
GB: Fair enough. So as the franchise continues for potentially years to come, would you ever want to introduce a multiplayer or at least some type of co-op component? Or do you see this being a single-player RPG franchise only?
Mark: So I think that's one of the powers of being a franchise, as opposed to just a series of games, is that there's room for a lot of different kinds of games within the franchise. So we may in the future see multiplayer games within the Dragon Age universe, as well as potentially a core single player, or possibly co-op game with a storytelling experience. But again, you might see a multiplayer thing as well, like a pure multiplayer game as also attached to that franchise.
GB: Do you ever see yourself branching out into other genres with Dragon Age? I mean, like you did with Mass Effect, kind of made an action-oriented iPhone game?
Mark: Yeah. I would I think it's a little bit early to make any concrete plans on that. I'd like to see the franchise establish itself and become well-known and understood before we start spreading out more. But I think once the IP is strong, it's a great place to tell stories, and there's a lot of different ways to tell stories. And like RTS is a way to tell stories that you can't really tell in a close-in, personal RPG action games let you tell stories in a different way.
I think there's just a lot of opportunities to move into different styles, different genres, but that's for the future. That's not for right away.
GB: Would that be something that BioWare would do? Because other than Shattered Steel or MDK2, BioWare has focused almost entirely on role-playing games.
Mark: Right.
GB: So you could you see the company making a real-time strategy game based on Dragon Age?
Mark: It's certainly it's certainly possible. It's certainly possible. I would never say never.
GB: Interesting. Moving on, what can you tell us about the website your building to host custom content for the game? What should we expect from it?
Mark: I think what we're trying to do is really bring the experience that people had with Neverwinter Nights, in building content there, to the next generation. So we want to be a very tight community where we're providing stuff and they're providing stuff. And we're providing a lot of tools to actually facilitate people working together in bigger groups. Games now just take a lot more people.
So what we're trying to provide with the toolset is the ability for people to work on the things they're good at, and help but as a larger group, work together on all the different bits that like you've got the guy that's good at making levels, and the guy that's good at telling story, and they can work together, and we'll provide the community with the tools necessary to do that, so that larger groups of people can get together and build a cohesive module as a whole, where it really wasn't that easy to do that before, where you had to sort of coordinate yourselves.
We're going to help provide that, facilitate that.
GB: Will this website be functional on launch day?
Mark: Yes.
GB: And is there specific criteria that a person needs to meet in order to have a module that gets posted on there?
Mark: No, but I guess there could be some legal requirements, but I don't think there's going to be any requirements to post something. But we will have a ranking system, and also some that are considered premium, where we are ourselves saying, okay, this is something someone made that we think is really great, so we would promote that higher up or potentially have it on a separate list.
But yeah. Anything if you're willing to make content for us, we're willing to let you share it with everybody else.
GB: And do you ever foresee the best content becoming part of a premium module program, like you did with Neverwinte Nights?
Mark: I would love to do that. I think it's a really great idea, because there's lots of interest and opportunities with that on the PC, but even on the consoles, because obviously, there's not a way for you to get user-generated content on the consoles. So it'd be great to find a way that we could do that.
And we don't have any concrete plans right now, but it's certainly something we're looking into.
GB: Do you see a BioWare-run website being direct competition with fan-created websites? Right now, you have the Neverwinter Vault and other sites. Won't what you're doing make it hard for fans to compete on a level playing field?
Mark: That's interesting. I never considered it that way, and it's certainly not our goal to go after these people, because they're a great part of our community, and they provide a great service. I guess because we consider it so important, it just felt like something we needed to provide. So we're not trying to compete with these groups, because if they can do something that we can't, then we're very happy for them to do that.
GB: Fair enough. That's all the questions I have for now, Mark. Thanks for your time.
