Guardian Gamesblog Live: We Interview Dragon Age 2 Lead Designer Mike Laidlaw [Need For Speed Shift 2 Unleashed Lead Designer, Crysis 2 Executive Producer Talk Realism In Games, Game Leak]

Posted on TFTS by Staff Writer on Tuesday, 22. February 2011 under: Computer/Console Gaming

The London Guardian Gamesblog Live media event had me at Dragon Age 2. And just having the pre-release versions of games there would have been tremendous, but also having the “brains behind the games” meant a whole different sort of thing altogether. Real honest to goodness developers and industry professionals wouldn’t sign on just to mindlessly hype their new releases. There was going to be some schooling involved.

Dragon Age 2 Lead designer Mike Laidlaw first took the stage, discussing the narrative development process and Bioware’s intentions of expanding the Dragon Age series as far as it will go. That means a six part anime series, spin-offs, comics, maybe even a potential movie, the works. We will be delving into all of that with him further on, not to worry.

The second speaker, Need for Speed Shift 2 Unleashed Lead Designer Andy Tudor, tried his best to detail the many ways Slightly Mad Studios makes every other workplace ever seem boring in comparison. As if working on one of the biggest racing franchises in video gaming wasn’t enough of a reward in and of itself, Slightly Mad Studios employees occasionally get a day at the track, driving (and occasionally wrecking) supercars. They also have to face the hardships of working with supercar makers like Pagani on reproducing as yet unseen top secret car designs for their game. 10 O’Clock Live should consider starting a fund for these guys.

Crysis 2 executive producer Nathan Camarillo came out to not only tell the heartfelt story of the Crysis 2 leak and how the team took it, but also exactly how impossible what Crytek managed to squeeze out of the five year old Xbox 360 technology was. The more interesting takeaway is that Crytek have apparently hit the limits of the PS3 as well. Not so with the PC, which is still the favorite Crytek port of call, mostly because PC hardware constraints are financial in nature. The tale of the day the world stood still for Crytek though, had the room completely silent. Hearing him describe the Crytek staff going through all six stages of grief and the personal day he had to take um… personally to get over what happened would probably be the most effective anti-piracy ad ever conceived if there were such a thing as teenagers with an attention span above 45 seconds.

After the event I managed to take up about fifteen minutes of game journalist turned game writer turned Dragon Age II Lead Designer Mike Laidlaw’s time. I like to think that I mostly managed to contain myself and that the confusion I made between Mass Effect and Dragon Age and the D&D vs. Dragon Age universes as well as horribly mangling one question to the point where Mike’s attempted answer was downright heroic in reaching the point I wanted to make instead of the one I made weren’t huge faux-pas, but be ye fairly warned, gentle reader. This will probably be as much a chronicle of my failings as a first-time interviewer as a source of information about Dragon Age 2.

Some of you may remember the ad Intel did a while back where the co-inventor of USB strutted around the Intel office in slo and also mo with a bitchin’ soundtrack while the nerd population swooned, fainted and just generally sort of lost their collective cool. I remember their tagline, “Our rockstars aren’t like your rockstars” clearly, mostly because I had two very distinct thoughts about it almost simultaneously.

The first was that maybe that’s the reason the very concept of celebrity as a compelling force is alien and meaningless to me, and the notion of gushing like some sort of logorrheic X Factor audience member over, well, anyone indescribably so. I mean, I yawned while shaking hands with Michael Jackson and the first time I met the star of a fairly popular Romanian sitcom I smooshed a piece of cake into her eye at close range. To be fair, it was during a food fight and it was sort of my birthday, but still. The second one was to reassure myself that I’d surely keep cool even when faced with one of “our rockstars”. Or, as it turns out, lie to myself.

For those of you hoping for some sort of return to the glory days of barely penetrable mechanics that put hair on your circumvolutions and took Tibetan amounts of patience to completely comprehend, Dragon Age 2 will offer no succor. Bioware as a whole have abandoned that entire line and I really, really wish I could blame them. I put it to Mike that a split of the franchise into a Mass Effecty version for the action gamer and a Baldur’s Gatey version for the hardcore might make sense. Mike, however, says they’d do that in a heartbeat if their research didn’t show that the former group is in such excess compared to the latter that it’s like comparing the number of atoms in the universe to the number of people named Atom. In the universe. Did he think they succeeded in catering to both sides in Dragon Age 2, though? “Only just.”

Unbeknownst to me, I was about to make a rookie interviewer mistake, a regular classic if you will. Without providing clue one, I launched into one of my biggest gripes with the first Dragon Age and the subject of no small number of heated soapbox editorials, none of them mine, but plenty of which could have been. Morrigan is the player’s companion and love interest in the first game, a witch by trade and one of the very few atheist video game characters by her own admission. Or rather, apostate, which is what I should have called her, since it turns out that word makes all the difference. I dropped the A-bomb like I was asking about the weather and it’s easy to see in retrospect just why it would suddenly charge the conversation and maybe raise red flags about agendas.

As it turns out, the Bioware writers didn’t set out to portray atheists in a negative light. “Morrigan’s negativity comes from her questioning,” Mike says, “and she questions everything”. But before I could ask why her doubts bred negativity, though, we got sidetracked by my own misconceptions about the game world. I like to think we might have ended up at the conclusion that Morrigan was just written that way, that she just happens to be both a manipulative person and a skeptic, not that one necessarily follows from the other.

We also discussed the fact that Morrigan usually chugs magical potions by the boatload while loudly proclaiming her disbelief in the game’s supernatural divine figure, the ostensibly absent Maker, which struck me a bit silly as I thought potions were imbued with the potency of the Maker’s blessings. Unfortunately that’s strike two for me, the Maker isn’t the source of the magic in the potions, and apparently magic just is, neither of the Maker nor against him. “At that point you have essentially clerics and that’s D&D,” I was gently rebuffed. So while I still think the abundance of supernatural phenomena and unexplained forces in the game should have suppressed Morrigan’s skepticism of a supernatural higher power to a much larger degree, there’s no doubt that the clever relationship between magic and the Maker bears further clarification and exploration.

I also wanted to know whether Mike considered the newly-announced DRM Bioware is placing on its product, which now offers an allowance of a few offline days, worthwhile. He had to know his game will be gracing torrent sites come release day DRM or no, but the thinking here was that even a token gesture is better than nothing. The DRM at the very least offers “a degree of protection” and “shows due diligence in protecting our game,” he explained. Fresh off Nathan Camarillo’s pirate tale, I can at least understand the sentiment, if not the underlying logic.

A whole four minutes had gone by without my putting my foot in my mouth, so I proceed to ask what the future held for the franchise after the third and final game in the trilogy. Those of you who follow Bioware and their games at all are probably rolling your eyes so hard you can probably see a Gummi Bear still stuck to the ceiling from last Halloween. Yes, Mass Effect is the franchise that’s making its graceful exit on the third and last entry, not Dragon Age.

While much has been made of the framed narrative storytelling device, allowing the game’s narrative to unfold from different perspectives which gradually put a situation into context, Mike maintains the narrative achievement he’s found most fulfilling is the new interaction system between the player and his party members, especially “being able to disagree with someone in the party without it necessarily leading to a fail condition”.

The most challenging aspect, however, was getting player agency inside the framed narrative exactly right, as the forward jumps in time and multiple narrators all had to be expertly paced in order not to take away the feeling of control from the player. Gifts are out of the picture as well, regardless of how much you enjoyed admiring Zevran admiring his new boots. The days when you could just go up to a party member and say “Here’s some wine, everybody likes me now, wee!”, as Mike puts it, have come to an unceremonious end.

Bioware games are sort of like Lambic beer. Besides being foamy and delicious, they can only come from one place on Earth. The amount of craft, care and sheer effort that goes into even one of their games boggles the mind to the extent that it gives up before even trying to take it all in and talking to one of the major architects behind it was, teething troubles and all, an eye-opening experience.