Dragon Age: Origins Interview
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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.
