The Interrogation Room: Dragon Age II

GameSpy’s Ryan Scott and Will Tuttle never spent any time with Dragon Age: Origins, but that didn’t stop them from going back and forth about BioWare’s upcoming sequel during an in-house “interrogation room” Q&A. Essentially, we get some quick impressions of Dragon Age II without any knowledge of its predecessor:

Will Tuttle: You jest, but I actually did really enjoy Sonic Chronicles! As for Dragon Age 2’s new focus on storytelling, I’m of two minds. On one hand, something’s very liberating about being able to go wherever or do whatever you want in a wide-open RPG like Dragon Age: Origins, as some people get much more invested when they’re basically creating the story on the fly. BioWare’s approach with Dragon Age 2 is no less valid. Good storytelling will never get old, so if the writers can craft a tale that’s worth telling (or, rather, worth hearing), I’ll be the first to hop on board.

One of the narrative elements I’m really intrigued by is the story-within-a-story layering that could be really cool if pulled off correctly. After some horrible event changes the Dragon Age universe, a Grey Warden named Cassandra has to track down the only hero that had ever faced the same challenge — and said hero is the character you play. As your heroic tale is recounted to Cassandra by a dwarf named Varric, the playable action is presented via flashback, occasionally showing different versions of the same event depending on Varric’s mood. Ryan, I believe you described the dwarf as “a scumbag Scheherazade.”

Ryan Scott: Haha, yeah I did. That’s totally how he comes off, as Cassandra starts out by questioning whether she can even trust his storytelling. As far as the actual story you play through, one thing I noticed — mainly because you picked all the evil dialogue responses and I picked all the good responses (and that’s mainly because we wanted to see how each way went — I’m usually a jerk in good-or-evil games too!) — is that everything kind of led up to the game conclusion. We fought some skeletons and a giant-ass ogre, some people died, we got accosted by a dragon who gave us a FedEx quest, and that was that. I know we saw a pretty thin vertical slice of the game, but I’m hoping the dialogue choices influence the direction of the story.

Will Tuttle: Actually, I generally play as the ultra-heroic nice guy in RPGs, at least the first time through. I’m really not sure how the team is using the dialogue, though it should be noted that it plays a lot like Mass Effect 2. People will react differently to you depending on the types of decisions you make, but it looks like you’ll always have a choice between nice, mean, and middle-of-the-road. One thing that BioWare stressed heavily to us during the demo was the fact that the writing team really wants to tell the tale of a major event in the larger Dragon Age world, not just the story of one guy (a la Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard). Dragon Age 2 takes place over the course of at least a decade, hopefully providing plenty of context as to why we should care that this presumably bad event happened. I personally like that they’re going in this direction; I just hope that they can pull it off.