Dragon Age II Interview

Games On Net managed to corner Dragon Age II associate producer Heather Rabatich for a Q&A about the game’s art direction, improvements to companion AI, the amount of violence compared to its predecessor, and more.

games.on.net: Did Bioware feel that the first game was a little unfinished or a little bit buggy? It was a little bit of a complaint at launch.

Heather Rabatich: We definitely knew where we could make improvements within the game. It was in development for a long time, and we had a story to tell, and we had a game that we wanted to make and when you create a game as large as this one there’s bound to be issues of that nature, which is why when we were going back to make Dragon Age 2 we wanted to address those concerns that people have from playing the game, and try to make the best game possible this time around.

games.on.net: So would you say there has been extra attention to polish and bug fixing this time around?

Heather Rabatich: Yeah, we have an amazing QA team at Bioware, that are really on top of a checklist of all the things, and every Friday updates it, y’know, ‘˜this is broken’ or ‘˜this doesn’t feel right’. They play through it in a really unique way and I think that’s potentially something that’s unique to the Bioware studio, we had QA members embedded on each of our gameplay teams, so one person devoted to a certain series of plots so that they live and breathe them. It’s easier to catch things when you have someone that’s really familiar with it, and they’re not just catching bugs but consistencies within the story and all these different things that could come up that the player cares about, people do care that this decision should have made this reaction. So we have people testing that kind of thing and they’re fully embedded and with us in our studio.