Dragon Age: Origins Interview, Part One

GamerZines has posted the first portion of an interview they conducted with Dragon Age: Origins lead designer Mike Laidlaw during their recent trip to BioWare’s headquarters in Edmonton. A sampling, as usual:

GZ: As early as May you said the PC version was pretty much done with regards to content. What have you been doing since them?

ML: It’s funny, the PC version was heading towards done and we were nearly wrapped when we received the extra time for consoles. So I pulled together a small strike of our most veteran guys and said “Okay look, I think we’ve got a few more weeks here.” So what we ended up doing was a pass through and adding in more content- more little side quests, lighter battles and a few random encounters, which adds a nice layer of filler. Anywhere where there was a bit of a lull we had more time to put something in. So doing that we bought the Quality Assurance team in and had them do their pass through as well. Because we had that extra time we wanted to take advantage of it, and just see what we could put in… and of course working on DLC. So a lot of the team is moving over to start working on The Stone Prisoner expansion and other downloadable content that’s coming out.

The Stone Prisoner for example, adds a new follower to the game, someone else who can join your party. We also have the toolset – we do have one coming for Dragon Age and they are developer grade tools. The same cut-scene creation tools and cinematic dialogue tools and everything we use here at BioWare to make the game. Honestly I’m really excited to see a vibrant mod community show up. About two months ago we brought up our most veteran Neverwinter Nights modders. Bought them to BioWare and gave them a chance to have a hands-on with the tool-set with tutorials from members of the team. We unleashed them into a beta and we hope that those guys have already begun to learn the nooks and crannies and how the system works. So when the game launches and those tools become available for people to pull down they’ll already be veterans out there to help them out, offer hints, write guides and that sort of thing.