Dragon Age: Origins Interview

Strategy Informer is next in line to crank out an interview they did with Dragon Age: Origins lead designer Mike Laidlaw during the recent press event up in Edmonton. A snippet:

Dakota Grabowski: Did the team ever try and implement multiplayer into Dragon Age: Origins?

Mike Laidlaw: It’s always considered. You always have to evaluate what your feature set is going to be when starting the project, so it was considered. When we sat down and specked out the story and the goals we were going to accomplish, we wanted to return to a massively single-player adventure that had levels of reactions that multiplayer titles can lose. That said, with Star Wars: The Old Republic, we are probably going to see a lot of that come back in, and I’m excited what they are doing down there [Bioware Austin], and I can’t talk about it. But for us, building up a new engine and a new IP, we decided to focus and create the best single-player experience we can.

Toward the end, the potential for a Jade Empire sequel gets batted around:

Dakota Grabowski: When is Jade Empire 2 going to be announced?

Mike Laidlaw: Haha. Well. we haven’t announced anything on Jade Empire 2 yet.

Dakota Grabowski: Oh, so you aren’t going with everybody’s favourite (no comment) phrase?

Mike Laidlaw: It’s pretty much no comment. But, you know, we will certainly announce it if it’s going to be coming out. At this point, Jade Empire is a staff favorite and a lot of us love it, so we’d love to revisit it at some point. But right now, we are very focused on Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2.