Bioware has a lot of tales to tell, that's the distinct impression I'm getting from Dragon Age's Online Producer Fernando Melo. From the bloody swords and also bloody sorcery of the DA universe to Mass Effect's cinematic space operas, Bioware's reasserted itself as the torchbearer for Western role-playing games, with a design aesthetic built on narrative above all. To paraphrase an Internet meme: My stories, let me tell you them.
This new one, Awakening, is the first to pick up where Dragon Age: Origins ended. Apparently the death of the Archdemon didn't spell the end of the Darkspawn, and as that little issue leads to a whole new adventure, you pick up a new party of compatriots and work to rebuild the Grey Wardens along the way.
While Bioware isn't specifying how long that adventure might be exactly, the $40 price tag (hefty for a downloadable expansion, though it'll be a physical retail product, too) suggests pretty damn long. An EA spokesperson claims "it rivals the length of most full games on the market today."
I had a chance to talk with Melo about the Awakening project, the series' over-the-top gore, the expansion's romantic prospects (dim), and much more....
Bitmob: Can you go into how Awakening came about -- did it start with the story first?
Fernando Melo: It's interesting because I think, traditionally, you would start from what's happening in Origins and what kind of ideas we might want to do. In the case of Dragon Age, we had already invested man-years into the world and the lore. It's almost like working backwards, there're all these stories we want to go and tell -- how soon can we get them done, how soon can we put people on telling this side of the story, etc.?
And the second part is listening to what fans are asking for. And really, there were a couple of surprises where people gravitate towards characters or locations or whatever the case is. Maybe there's an open-ended question that we left out there in Origins; is there something we can do to tie that off or bring some closure to that point? Return to Ostagar was a good example of that.
With Awakening, it's much more than a traditional DLC piece, there's a huge amount of content in there. We've been working on it for over a year now, which is almost like a full game. We wanted to add not just a new chapter of continuation, but really, it's like a new book in the set.
It fast-forwards the timeline a little bit so we can actually tell stories beyond the framework of what we've said in Origins, and the beauty about it is that Dragon Age is something that spans many, many years, and has a huge number of locations beyond what we've seen in Origins. Awakening allows us to expand that ever so slightly, but the nice part is that there's so much room to grow and tell so many different stories about characters or places or things.
Bitmob: You guys finished the PC version of Origins quite a while ago, and spent a number of months getting the console versions ready for a simultaneous launch -- did you split a team off at that point to start working on Awakening?
FM: It's not like PC development just stopped, we continued to do a lot of bug fixes, etc. [But] the majority of the team had moved on to console development. We also created an online group that was dealing with the creation of downloadable content, as well as Awakening. That was just over a year ago...a little bit more than that. We first started with our initial DLC, and then that team rolled on to Awakening as more and more people were coming off of Origins.
But the writing itself, a lot of the seeds had already been sown well before we started in earnest on Awakening. For example, even with David Gaider's books, where he talks about the character of the Architect, and there's a couple of other characters that he mentions in the book, The Calling, which feature into Awakening as well.
The nice part about the franchise is that all these pieces are interconnected. Initially, it may not always seem like it, but over time you'll start to see all these correlations and some of the foreshadowing in something even as small as some of the items. They talk about a place or a person or something of interest, and then later on you'll actually get to meet that person or potentially go to that location and live out some of that history, which is really cool. And in this case you'll actually be creating history.
Bitmob: I was under the impression -- the wrong impression, apparently -- that all of Origin's DLC would take place before the final events of the game in the overall timeline. But Awakening is set after that; is it safe to assume that all future DLC will also take place after Origins?
FM: Ummm, not necessarily. All the content that we've released so far, because it was tied largely around what was happening in Origins it made sense to set it in that place. Moving forward, like I said there are so many different places, and the timeline itself is quite broad, we've really only seen a tiny sliver of it, even as big as Origins is. There are lots of places we can take that. So I wouldn't assume -- not to say that we've planned it out -- but I wouldn't assume that it's always going to land in Origins or Awakening.
Bitmob: At least one of Origins' old party members will re-up for Awakening, but you're not saying whom. What about some of the new characters?
FM: There are three party members that we've uncovered so far: Anders, Velanna, and Sigrun. Anders is an interesting take on mages. In Origins, there was maybe kind of a preconceived notion with a character like Wynn, where mages are sort of all happy about living in the Tower, and accepted their place in the world. Anders is very much not that. He's a rebel; he's constantly escaping the Tower because he hates it. When you come across him in Awakening, it's in the middle of one of these attempts, and it's up to you to figure out what you want to do in that case. It's a really interesting dichotomy between the mage characters that you were used to in Origins.
Velanna is a Dalish Elf Keeper, and the thing with her is that she feels that she's been wronged by humans, so immediately she's predisposed to not trust them. And again, much like with Origins your race plays a factor as to whether people warm up to you or not; she's a great example of that.
It's an interesting way to kind of further the Dalish Elf view, where I think in Origins we painted one aspect of it -- most of the Dalish Elves that you met were just kind of, this is the life that they lead, and resigned themselves to that role. Whereas Velanna is an example that not all of them are happy with that circumstance. Some of them are desperate enough to rebel against it, or potentially to take that on first-hand, and she's a character along those lines. You get to see what impact that has on her culture, as well as how she feels about it and how you choose to interact with it, whether you accept that or not.
And then Sigrun is part of the Legion of the Dead, the Dwarven legion that is forever placed in the Deep Roads, fighting Darkspawn until they fall. It's a way for us to really open up and reveal a little bit more about that kind of subculture of the Dwarven world, which we really only touched on very lightly in Origins. When you join the Legion it's at your funeral -- they just assume that they're dead, and it's just a matter of time. They're going down there to serve a very specific service, and kind of make up for their sins or make up for their shortcomings as Dwarven society had seen them.
You get to learn a lot more about the Legion, how they work, what they do, and some of the facets of being part of that. There's never been a recorded Legion of the Dead character who's also a Warden character, so there's an interesting dilemma there as well that you might have to deal with, depending on some of the choices you make.
The character in particular that we can't talk about, because we haven't revealed it yet, is the recurring party member from Origins. There's one that comes across. The really nice thing is that there's actually quite a few of them that make cameos, and it really comes down to the choices that you made in Origins whether or not you meet them, and how they're disposed to you when you do.
Bitmob: Will we see more Morrigan?
FM: We made it very clear that Morrigan played a very important role in Origins, so it's safe to say at some point, we haven't seen the last of Morrigan. Whether that's in Awakening or not, we'll have to see.
Bitmob: What kind of class balancing and tweaking are you working on for Awakening?
FM: For me, one of the nice things is the new specializations, and some of the new spells and abilities. I think with Origins, mages were exceptionally powerful, and sometimes warriors and rogues were not seen as really as strong of classes. And in particular, if you played something like a ranger, a ranged rogue, you might not have felt like an archer, you might not have felt that it was as strong a character. With some of the new specializations that we've introduced and some of the new abilities, I think that those characters are very cool once again. And for me, I love playing rogues, so it was very nice to be able to make that a very strong character to lead the group.
Bitmob: My main character was a warrior, and I regretted not going with a mage. Warriors were kind of "fire and forget" -- send them off and then control the mages in your party.
FM: One of the things that we recognized with mages -- they cast something and it has some cool VFX, there's some kind of immediate payoff that you get from it. Warriors in particular, rogues maybe not as much, but warriors tended to have a lot more passive abilities. They could manage aggro, they could help the party and do good damage-per-second, etc., but they didn't really have stuff that was very visual, that you could get a lot of payoff for using the abilities, with a few exceptions. I think we really brought that back into the fold. Not only do you have more abilities that you can activate, so you feel like you're in control of the battlefield, but they also have much more of a visual payoff. And rogues, the same way....
Bitmob: The sheer amount of gore in Origins, the head-to-toe blood splatter was a bit off-putting to some people. What was the thinking behind that?
FM: To be honest, we wanted to paint a picture that this was a dark place to be, a dangerous place to be, there's lots of blood and combat is messy. One of the things was, how do you make it plausible to clean yourself off? We didn't want to try to micromanage that, or somehow turn it into some kind of gameplay thing that you had to do.
Over time you lose some of it, and funnily enough, in Origins if you have Dog in the party you can get him to lick it off, but that was actually just more of a joke than anything else.
Bitmob: Any changes planned there?
FM: Nope...we really focused on the strengths that we saw in Origins, and what people really loved. I think there's definitely a good case to be made to potentially tone that down in the future.
But in the meantime, instead of creating new features, we really wanted to focus on getting a fantastic new story out there. At the end of the day it's not about introducing lots of new functionality, there's no kind of whiz-bang features. There's lots of subtle things in there, like runecrafting, the respec option, these kinds of things. The real merit to Awakening is the massive amount of storytelling content.
Bitmob: The sexual relationships in Origins were another polarizing feature -- are those going to make a return in Awakening?
FM: They will not. It'll be interesting to see peoples' reactions to it, because it was by far one of the things they enjoyed. I think there was a real risk, though, of us trying to add romances in [that] would've felt tacked on. The story doesn't lend itself to it; when you play through it, you'll realize the pacing is very different from Origins, there's a real impetus to just get on and solve the problems at hand. The characters that you're playing with all have strong enough backgrounds that you would need to really invest a lot of time to turn those characters around into something that was romanceable.
Time will tell; I think that we'll definitely get called out on it, but I think it was one of things that was the right decision to make, rather than trying to shoehorn something in. We'll just have to keep evaluating it based on content-to-content. Some cases where it makes sense we'll absolutely do it, and where it doesn't, we won't.
Bitmob: I hate to put you on the spot like this, but I also love to...when I talked with Bioware co-founder Ray Muzyka recently, he called Mass Effect 2 "Bioware's best game to date." How do you feel about that?
FM: I don't disagree. I've been playing Mass Effect 2, and I think the team has done an amazing job. It is a cinematic Tour de Force. I thought Mass Effect 1 was absolutely brilliant in that regard, and in Mass 2 they've blown me away with what they've been able to achieve.
In terms of how does that compare with Dragon Age, they're very different games. I don't think Dragon Age was ever meant to be a cinematic Tour de Force. It has very strong storytelling, but really it's anchored in a traditional fantasy fighting game. I don't think that you really want to create the same sort of feel that Mass is going for. There's definitely crossover, but they cater to slightly different audiences.
