Dragon Age: Origins Interview

BioWare co-founder Ray Muzyka fields more questions about Dragon Age: Origins, their relationship with Mythic Entertainment, and a few other topics in a new four-page interview on Gamasutra.

You’ve said that Dragon Age is intended to be a social experience. There are of course all the user mod tools on the PC, but what else do you mean by that? “Social” is an interesting word to describe a single-player RPG.

Ray Muzyka: The thing that I’ve always been intrigued by is the concept of a hero’s journey. A roleplaying game actually is really well suited to showing that, because you have all these key moments: Quests you’ve completed, choices you’ve made, consequences to those choices, progression, customization.

You look different at different points in the game, you get badass armor, equipment, or items. Your party members are alongside you, traveling around. You take screenshots of who they are at different times, of different people, of where you’ve gone in the world. And there’s how the world map gets explored — the narrative of an explorer.

These are all different types of narrative, the way I see it. There’s the narrative of combat — which creatures you defeated and how, what tactics you used to defeat them. The narrative of progression and customization — how you look at different points in time, what equipment you have. The narrative of the story — which quests you’ve done, which stories you’ve unlocked, which choices you’ve made. The narrative of the social — which characters you have with you.

If you can surface those to other players, you’ve effectively created a social environment, an online-enabled offline experience. That’s what we’re trying to do with Dragon Age. We’re trying to surface some of those.

We’ll have more to show on what we’re planning, but I think it’s really cool. We’re creating a community site that’s going to enable the fans to get revved up about what each other is doing. They’re showing their choices and consequences to friends. Even though it’s single-player, you can still reveal those choices to each other and have fun doing it.

It enables some of that stuff that occurs anecdotally amongst friends at the water cooler: “Hey, did you play this yet? Did you go this way?” “No, I didn’t run into that. I did it this way.” “Really? I didn’t run into that at all!”

You can meet people who are across the world and enable them to see those kinds of things, too, which I think will lead to a lot of fun discussion and collaboration in the community. Imagine that getting broader when you have post release downloadable content that expands the game as a platform concept, or community-driven content that people can play through and maybe the fans embrace this and make content that can even be expanded further with even more choices in it.

There are a lot of possible extensions to this, but I always thought the idea of a hero’s journey being shown through an RPG would be really cool. So, with Dragon Age, we’re going to try that.

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You mentioned Mythic earlier — what are the practical ramifications of the [recent] BioWare and Mythic reorganization?

Ray Muzyka: Structurally, each of the organizations remains intact. They’re working on the same projects they were working on before, I just have another studio that reports into me. It’s not that BioWare or Mythic is changing; they’re retaining their brands, their unique cultural identities, their projects they are working on. I’m really excited about what we’re doing; we have great people at each location.

Rather, a new group is being formed that is more of a reporting structure of Rob Denton, the GM of Mythic; Richard [Vogel] and Gordon [Walton], who already report to me from [BioWare] Austin; Yannick [Roy], our studio director at BioWare Montreal, who already reports into me; and then BioWare Edmonton, and I already manage that studio myself.

It’s a collaboration opportunity. Each of the groups continues to make the same thing in their [own locations]. But it’s fuelling and enabling more communication, collaboration, best practice sharing, encouraging each other to play each others’ games — but no formal change per se in what anybody’s doing. It’s a recognition that there’s a lot of synergy between them already. I’m going to make sure everyone at each location knows who the others are, and their comparable roles, and to make sure they talk.