TheGameReviews recently received the opportunity to visit Bioware’s Edmonton Studio. For the sake of full disclosure, we have opted to let our readers know that we were flown up there on behalf of Bioware and did not pay our airfare, hotel, or food. We feel that this has in no way compromised our judgment about Dragon Age: Origins and will be presenting what we hope will be a fair, unbiased, and informative look into the game. Check back throughout the week for an in-depth look into Dragon Age: Origins.

John Laster: So you’re the producer on Dragon Age: Origins, correct?

Mark Darrah: That’s right; I’m the executive producer, which is just a fancy producer title. What that does mean is I’m not only working on the production stuff on Dragon Age: Origins, but I also do all the other production stuff for that franchise, such as novels and the pen and paper game. But if we were doing two titles in the franchise, I’d be in charge of both titles.

J: So what other stuff are you working on besides the game?

M: So right now there is a novel coming out before the game, and another novel coming out along with the game. There is a pen and paper game in the works. We have apparel deals. We are working with a company to potentially get swords made. We also are working on comic book, and a few other things just in a planning phase at the moment.

J: So I was told all the platforms have been built from the ground up. What are some of the bigger differences I would see between the three versions?

M: It is the same story on all three platforms. The big, major difference is from the interface perspective. The PC is designed for the mouse and keyboard. Mouse and keyboard is really good at doing a very large number of things relatively slowly. It’s good for doing more tactical things, pausing the game, pulling out, looking around and issuing orders. The consoles are much better at giving a very small number of commands very quickly. So the controls are much more geared at keeping the action fast, letting you play the game with less pausing and more quickly. [It focuses on] less tactical, more action oriented gameplay, which I think is the biggest single difference you will see. The interface was done completely from scratch. So you will see a more paper based interface on the PC. The consoles are cleaner, quicker and sleeker designed more for the fact you don’t have a mouse, you have an analog stick.

J: One of the big things I noticed while playing is that the game felt very gory. What were the decisions made around that?

M: I think it’s just that the one thing this game is really about is the fact that even when there is an epic quest. You have your epic quest to stop the arch demon. There are still a lot of things that get in your way. The game is gory. It’s darker. There are politics. You have people fighting each other when they should be fighting to save the world. Those are all parts of the same thing that add depth to an otherwise good vs. evil story. It’s about adding grey to the world.

J: As far as good and evil, what is there in the game to encourage people to play in the middle, vs. just choosing to go all the way good or all the way evil?

M: So in the end, you’re playing as a grey warden and your gathering armies to fight the blight and stop the arch demon. So you’re constantly presented with situations where in order to do that you have to make decisions where there isn’t a clear good or evil choice. Where saving someone might cost a village its life or vice versa. So often there isn’t a clear good or evil choice.

J: So what have you learned from some of the past games that Bioware has worked on that have affected Dragon Age?

M: So we have learned things as simple as from Mass Effect, where we have taken some of the lessons they learned on the radial menu on the console, and how to present a deep game to a console gamer. Even to how we told stories back with Baldur’s Gate. So there have been lessons learned all the way along the way. There is always something to be learned from the past. There are always lessons to be learned from what other people are doing. It’s always important with game development to make sure you aren’t getting stagnant. We have to be aware of games like Oblivion and what they are doing. And Square and what they are doing. You always need to be looking up and around at the game industry as a whole.

J: I noticed you working on a whole social aspect to the game. Could you comment on that a bit?

M: What one of the people on the project called it is a massively single player game. We want you to be able to present the story that you are experiencing to your friends and to be able to compare and contrast how your experience is different than theirs. And because the game the choices you make have such a broad, big impact to what is going on, it is important that you are able to see how much else there is available and are able to share that experience with other people.