Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening Interview

Dragon Age: Origins online producer Fernando Melo has tackled another set of Awakening questions, and this time the interview is courtesy of 1UP’s RPG blog.

1UP: The flipside of that, of course, are the mages. Have you taken any steps toward making them less overpowered in Awakening?

Melo: The short answer is: you don’t. The nice thing about creating much higher levels than what you have now is that your enemies start to become much craftier as well. They have access to all the same spells and abilities now. So whereas enemy mages are still powerful, they have much better counterparts than what we had in Origins. And I think that’s one of the reasons it felt so off-balance, which was that mages absolutely were king. And again, once you took out the mages in an enemy group, it was just a matter of time at that point.

Whereas now you start to see characters on the battlefield like warriors that, again, have the same abilities that your characters have. And now you really have to watch for these guys, it’s not only about controlling mages on the enemy side, and that’s one way in which we’ve kind of tried to balance it off. But truthfully, I think it’s one of those things where I think we might have made them a bit too powerful off the get-go. And I don’t think there’s an easy way to rein that back in. I think it’s maybe balancing off the other parts to make it feel more equal with everything else on the battlefield.