Dragon Age II Interview

RPGamer is the latest website to return from BioWare’s Dragon Age II press event, and they’ve brought us back an interview with lead designer Mike Laidlaw, lead writer David Gaider, and executive producer Mark Darrah. A couple of snips:

I’ve been playing as a rogue, and most of the skills I’ve seen so far have been very positioning based. A lot of them are very fast and make the rogue a lot more fun to play, but some of the positioning skills feel a little stiff. The rogue has a backflip move, and this one in particular feels that way it’s always a backflip; it’s not directional, it’s always straight backwards from wherever you’re facing, even if that’s into a bunch of enemies. Was this done intentionally because this is a tactical sort of game, or are you just not wanting to make it as “actiony” as a traditional action title?

ML: There’s a fundamental answer there, which is cool. One of my tenets when we sat down to look at combat was, “What I want to get away from, guys, is the sense of active defense,” because at that point you’re basically making what we’d call a brawler, where you have blocks, you have dodges, and that sort of thing. The problem with active defense, as I see it, is that active defense works exceptionally well if you’re controlling one guy, but I don’t want to move Dragon Age into a position where I’m controlling one guy, and I don’t want to feel like the AI won’t flip out of the way so I must try to control all four peoples’ defenses. So when I sat down with the combat team, we developed a rule that said, fundamentally, defense is a preparatory activity putting on armor, drinking the right potions, casting buffs, maintaining modals, that provide protection so that as the player I’m largely the offensive coordinator, choosing what spells to cast, what debuffs to throw, whether or not to stun the guy, and so on. The end result is that, while you can’t do directional stick evading, what you can do is pause the game, switch characters, take the aggro, and play it like an RPG with the kind of complex tactical elements that we thought were really neat. The rogue’s evade skill does some additional stuff. It flips backwards which is great, but it also causes enemies to lose threat, so they tend to move back to your tank. It has a sort of double role. It’s a really fundamental thing: if I want to make a team-based game, I think that active defense gets you in trouble, so we moved away from that and said, “Make defense preparation and active in the moment.”

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What kind of plans do you have for tie-in novels for Dragon Age 2?

DG: We had such a short timeline for this game, I just didn’t have time to think about it, really. The first novel I wrote, we were crunching. So I would work here until nine o’clock at night, then go home and start writing by nine fifteen, and that was kind of hell. So I didn’t want to do that again, but now that the game is done for the writers, I might have time now. So we’re talking about it. I would like to keep writing. It’s always a good situation when it comes to something like a novel to have somebody working on it who knows the property and knows, for Dragon Age, “What is a Dragon Age story?” The thing you can run into with third party developers sometimes is that they may like fantasy, but there’s lots of room in fantasy for just about anything. They think that just because Dragon Age is fantasy that anything applies, but no. Dragon Age is a tale that takes place in a particular area in the fantasy genre.