Dragon Age: Origins Interview Snippets, Part Two

Destructoid continues to churn out small morsels from their interview with Dragon Age: Origins lead designer Mike Laidlaw up in Edmonton.

On grey moral choices:

“We’re trying to be a lot more grey than that, aggressively,” he tells Destructoid. “Okay, the Blight is pretty much evil, it’s out to destroy everything in its path and really there’s not a whole lot of redeeming qualities to that as an agenda.

“But at the same time you have characters that have their own motivations, opportunities for you to be opportunistic, and maybe do something that’s inherently evil but at the same time, a part of being a Grey Warden and carrying the fate of the world on your shoulders, maybe it’s what you think you have to do. It’s a choice you have to make.

“We’re also trying to give you, I guess, a sense that the villains, the characters you’re interacting with, they have real motivations for why they’ve done what they’ve done. So while it’s very easy at first to go ‘well clearly he’s the bad guy,’ as soon as you dig in deeper and the game certainly encourages you to do this, you tend to find there’s more going on than just the surface.”

On the “new shit” campaign:

“It’s funny,” laughs Mike. “I think honestly the fact that it was labeled as Marilyn Manson actually caused people to flare up more than if it hadn’t been, but if you dig into what I think people are reacting to, it’s, ‘Why are you putting rock n’ roll into my fantasy? Or ‘Why are using Goth Pop?,’ Whatever you want to call Marilyn Manson — why are you putting it in my fantasy?

“I think part of the reason it’s infamous is because people were surprised and just weren’t expecting it. What they expected was a long string of flutes and some harpsichord, perhaps. Quite frankly, Dragon Age ultimately is about surprising the player in terms of their expectations of fantasy.

“It’s going to shock them in a lot of ways. At the same time there’s a deep RPG in there, and a great story, but what I think that particular campaign achieved is, it hit an element of the game, and the game’s about eighty hours for average players, so you certainly can’t make a three minute marketing spec that covers every friggin’ element of that, so you pick a part of it and go, ‘let’s talk about violence for a while, and while we’re talking about violence, we’re going to play some music that, essentially, is pretty violent.’

On why moral choices in games fail:

“I think it’s difficult because the raw morality you’re presented with in a game is a very narrow slice of life, a narrow experience band,” he explains. “So in order to convey what’s good or bad or evil or not takes a lot of heavy lifting. You can do an entire play or an entire novel around a single moral moment and the reactions or repercussions of of it, but a game is a big experience and you have to account for the player working within a possibility space as opposed to a single linear narrative.

“We often lose the ability to dive into the internal monologue, a lot of those things that act as ways to help morality and that kind of choice are less effective in games, or at the worst scenario, they haul you away from being a videogame anymore and they take control away from the player.

“How close are we? I think Dragon Age is the closest that BioWare’s ever done. I think we’ve done a pretty good job of challenging you in situations where there’s no easy answer … Ideally, we end up with players with different mindsets and different thoughts and if things are really humming, then your origin story has helped to paint the world a certain color, giving it a certain tint that helps you tackle the world from a different angle.”

Maybe I should start posting our interviews one-question-at-a-time over a three-week period, too. How awesome would that be?