Dragon Age II Interview

It’s a media-overload period for Dragon Age II, as the Guardian interviews Mike Laidlaw about narrative, games as art and the evolution of combat, all focused on Dragon Age II.

Your theme is narrative and storytelling in games. That’s something for which Bioware is famed how do you take that and build it into a gameplay experience?

I think the key is to use story not as a replacement to gameplay but as a flavour of gameplay. And to acknowledge that just having a good story isn’t enough if you don’t have the flow and pacing that comes out of combat and out of having progression.

Those three things are the holy triumvirate, really, of RPGs. I’ve played games with great stories, but if the combat gets dull after a while, you start to disengage between the story moments. For us as a studio, we basically keep it as a priority our studio mission is to build the best emotionally engaging games in the world. And a big part of that is a commitment to writing as a craft.

We have over 25 writers on staff across all the Bioware studios and five editors, and then many of the senior staff are ex-writers like myself, so that keeps the focus.

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And you’ve changed the combat system so it’s more responsive compared to Origins, and made the game more action-oriented. Are you worried that will alienate hardcore Dragon Age fans?

There’s always a danger of alienating the hardcore when you change anything they wouldn’t be the hardcore if they didn’t truly love what was already there. But we wanted to make sure that we held onto the elements that made Dragon Age: Origins strong party-based, tactical even going so far as to replace spell-combos with cross-class combos so that now, when a mage freezes someone, a mage can’t blow up that guy like you could in Origins; now a warrior or rogue has to get involved.

So the whole party becomes part of this concert of death, which makes the game even more tactical. But the fact that now, you charge into combat and swing, rather than shuffling awkwardly into position, to me takes care of a convention we could do without. There was even some initial backlash, with people asking: “What, have you made it an action game?” The answer is, frankly, action games have been stealing from RPGs for the past five years levelling up, and getting a badge so that you can get a new weapon, that’s an RPG mechanic.

So it’s time that we, as a genre, took a look at some of those elements that action games have done exceptionally well and asked what we can learn from them.