Dragon Age II Post-Release Interview

Dozens of reviews for Dragon Age II have already appeared online, and while it managed to take home some great scores, the reality is that it might end up being the company’s lowest rated full title to date. So, to get a better idea of how the company feels about the reception that their freshly-shipped product is getting, Eurogamer fired some tough questions over to lead designer Mike Laidlaw:

Eurogamer: Are you happy with the reviews of Dragon Age II?

Mike Laidlaw: I am. What we’re seeing is a pretty wide range; I’ve seen perfects, I’ve seen less than perfects. There are some things I think that are certainly fair criticisms: the re-use of the levels is something we knew was a bit of a risk, but we wanted to make sure there was more content rather than less, so re-using some of the spaces and coming to them again was certainly one we were careful about and tried to re-use as artfully as we could. When we look at reviews and certain concerns that gives us really good, solid feedback to work from in the future. When I see reviews that comment on the way the story is told or interactions with the followers, those are very, very positive, and I’m extremely gratified.

Eurogamer: I’ve seen scores as low as a 6/10 – what do you think when you read those?

Mike Laidlaw: Well it’s hard to know exactly what’s going on with scores that are really, really negative. One possible culprit could just be a change backlash, i.e. this isn’t Origins and I wanted Origins 2. There may be some degree of what I would honestly say is emotional investment in the Origins story, or in the way Origins was presented which is leading to a stronger than average reaction of disappointment. That’s understandable, and if anything that really is a compliment to the work on Origins. I’m not sure it’s an entirely fair assessment to say all games must be like the previous game. I think we would have seen just as much negativity if we just, as I used to joke, stapled two Archdemons together and called it a super blight. It boils down to a game that challenges a fair amount of convention: it doesn’t tell the usual fantasy story or present the usual fantasy combat, and in doing so it does run the risk of someone going, “Wow, this is just too different and I cannot handle it.”

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Eurogamer: One stronger criticism levelled at Dragon Age II was that it was designed by committee; it tried too hard to appeal too far and wide, and in doing so it lost a sense of self. What do you say to that?

Mike Laidlaw: Dragon Age II was designed by just the senior, core team. Honestly I don’t feel it’s a game that’s been designed to appeal far and wide and so on. If it were, there were choices we could have made that would have taken it much, much further. We would have probably simplified down to a single character, maybe with companions; probably looked at doing some even deeper changes to inventory management, making sure that… You wouldn’t want to confuse people with enchanting or anything complex like that. Really what we wanted to do with the game, just talking about first-principles, was to look at elements of Origins that were over complex and needlessly so and see if we could pull those out in a clean way and didn’t take out what I always saw as core elements of the experience: strong, character-driven stories, and the idea that the combat should be a party working together, especially at higher difficulty levels.

Dragon Age II certainly made some changes but holds very true to what us as a team sees as core tenets of the series. There’s certainly refinement to do, there’s learnings to be had, but I don’t think it loses as much of the personality as it certainly could have.