Dragon Age: Origins Interview
-
Category: News ArchiveHits: 747
VideoGamer.com: The game is a purely single-player experience. Did you ever consider multiplayer functions in terms of the party format or was it always going to be a single-player game?
BK: There are a lot of multiplayer fans in the company and on the team. I worked on Neverwinter Nights and I was a lead designer on two expansion packs for Neverwinter Nights. It's a difficult thing to create a strong compelling story and have a multiplayer experience. So fairly early on in Dragon Age we realised that we had to focus on the single-player experience. Even back with Neverwinter Nights expansion pack two, even though Neverwinter Nights was a multiplayer game we made the second expansion pack single-player for that reason. Once you start getting into cut scenes and dialogue, having multiple players is a pretty huge challenge. It's not an insurmountable challenge but we wanted to focus our resources on having the really awesome looking graphics, having great cinematic presentation. We definitely discussed it, and going forward we want to encourage people to download additional content, I think our PRC (post-release content) team is coming up with some nice ideas to make this happen. But I'm really happy with how things turned out. Like Mass Effect, being able to focus on the story has really proven itself.