Dragon Age Interview: Of Betrayal & Blight

Dragon Age: Origins Interview – Of Consoles

bit-tech: A murder your heroes type of ethic?

Mike Laidlaw: Yeah, definitely. Nobody is above reproach in that game...or rather, that series of books. For us it was great to make our own IP because we weren’t hindered in any way. We can make hard choices, we can make the player make hard choices without limit.

Plus, from a company standpoint, it’s great to know that we have this franchise that we can grow and market if needs be. Novels and sequels and all that cool stuff. We can control that all creatively and we had the talent to do it, so...

BT: Are you planning to roll out some Dragon Age books then? I’ve only just finished reading both the Mass Effect books.

ML: Yeah. It’s already out in fact. I’m not sure if it’s out here in the UK, but it’s certainly out in North America. It’s called Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne and it takes place about one generation back, before the game. It’s about King Merrick and his son, Calen, who you can meet in the game. It’s really quite a good read and it’s great to dive in and then, when you come to the game, you can know more about those characters.


BT: So, one of the contentious issues for hardcore gamers is that the release date was changed and the early PC release was pushed back to fit with the Q4 console release. Why was the PC version delayed?

ML: We know they are different markets and one of the things that we hear a lot and which is probably the root of the issue is “Oh God, did you dumb down the PC version for consoles?” and the answer is absolutely not.

In fact, what we’ve done is a helluva lot of work to try and cram this hardcore PC game on a console. There’ll be some minor differences between the game, but the gameplay should be identical. Nothing was cut for consoles. We’ve got a lot of experiences porting games back and forth from Jade Empire and Mass Effect and doing console to PC conversions. Going the other way is actually quite easy. You can scale quite quickly. The main hurdle is the interface.

BT: What type of interface have you got planned for consoles then?


ML: We’ll be showing the final versions of that in a couple of months and letting people go hands on then. We’re still tweaking and trying things out, so I can’t speak to the exact specifics, but really it’s to do with things like acknowledging the move to a radial menu instead of using lists. We’re exploring all that right now in terms of quick potions and spells and so on. It’s...well, it’s not that it’s up in the air, but we haven’t locked any of it down just yet.

BT: And we noticed that you plan to have downloadable content for Dragon Age: Origins judging from main menu. Will that be across all platforms?

ML: Yes, it will. We’ll be doing a post-release support campaign that’ll run probably for about two years. We’ll go across all platforms whenever we can and when you’ve got Windows Live and PlayStation Home and all those systems then you don’t need to worry about delivery.

BT: Are you going to be tying the game to Games for Windows Live then?

ML: I’m not certain on the exact strategy for that right now. We’ll be looking at whatever the most popular and best solution is, but I don’t know if we’ll be tying in directly to Live. If it’s seamless and the best way for the player though, then that’s what we’ll do.

And that’s it! You can check out our Dragon Age: Origin hands-on preview for more information, but otherwise you’ll have to wait until Q4 for the multiplatform release of the game.