Dragon Age: Origins Interview
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UGO: You guys keep talking about Dragon Age as a kind of spiritual successor to the Baldur's Gate series. Can you talk a little about how this game harkens back to those titles as well as how your more recent RPGs like Mass Effect have influenced the game?
Dr. Greg Zeschuk: The key thing for us was to figure out what a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate was with the new technologies that we have. What we've discovered are a few little things. Baldur's Gate was a very placid game with a formula--a formula that we actually built on over the years. If we look at the games we've done recently, games like Mass Effect, with the face technology it gets you in to the game much faster because the dialog becomes emotionally charged.
The combat is one of the key features in Baldur's Gate, and that's probably one of the most defining things in [Dragon Age]. The tactical, party-based combat where you have a group of characters that you control and you arrange them in the battlefield. You can pause on and off. It's actually real time in the sense that you decide what's going on in real time, but there's this great sense of urgency. You're not just taking a tactical view of combat--you can if you want--but you can jump down, see what's going on and trigger off a move right at ground level so you can actually see the direct impact. And then there are the larger battles... We always have these small, little characters against larger units. It gives you these large and visceral battles where a big, tough enemy will really pick you up and knock you back.
There are definitely a couple things we added: the overall BioWare story and the emotional attachment to the characters and combat that comes with that.
UGO: What is the Dragon Age universe like? We've seen that it's a very classic kind of fantasy setting, but what is the Blight? And what are the Arch-Demons? It seemed in your demo like that's another name for a Dragon...
Zeschuk: (leading) I'm not sure what the arch-demons are just yet...
Well we created a whole new fiction for this game. And a large part of the effort of the team was in spending quite a bit of time in the pre-production phase, really fleshing out the back-story to the world. Really, the Darkspawn are the enemy you face in this game. They're these mutated, freakish monsters that are humanoid, but not. They themselves fled to the dark side of the Blight and so you have to try and figure out the source of it, the cause of it, and of course, stop it. There are some references to the Arch-Demon and you have to figure out what that is...
The overall world is actually a very brutal, gritty sort of world. We call it the Dark World of Fantasy, which is different than classic High Fantasy--sashaying elves and happy hobbits. It's a brutal world where you have very tough decisions and there's all kinds of social commentary that is impacted by those choices you make.
