Dragon Age: Origins Interview

If you can tear yourself away from Dragon Age: Origins for a few minutes, you’ll find that there’s a new interview with executive producer Mark Darrah over at GameZone. The Q&A was clearly conducted prior to the game’s launch week, but it’s still worth a read while you wait for the game to install:

Words like epic and immersive are often tossed about lightly but don’t seem to have the weight that one would hope. With this game, in the incredible amount of story, the interconnective storylines, the branching storylines what that a daunting task in and of itself?

Mark: It really was. This is a story that has 800,000 words of spoken dialogue, a million words in the game itself. And that is supplemented by . well, an uncounted number of words of supporting documentation, so I think when you are trying to tell a story of this magnitude, you can’t just tell the story, you have to build the universe that it exists in or you start to see the edges of the box, you realize that ‘˜oh, this is just a painted backdrop and behind it exists nothing.’ There needs to be something back there so there is twice as much or more that was created in terms of storytelling, in terms of world creation that isn’t even in the game but it just needs to be there to make it a real experience for the player.