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 (J) - Lead Editor, TheGameReviews

Mike Laidlaw (ML) - Lead Designer, Bioware Montreal

ML: So, John, what’s on your mind?

J: You said each platform was built from the ground up for that platform. Could you talk to me a little about that?

ML: Sure. So what we did with the game is I had two principal rules when we were doing the console development because we built on the PC. I said, all right, first thing I want is that the content is identical, excepting cases where if there’s one thing that absolutely doesn’t work we’ll talk about it, but as a general rule: identical content. Now the only couple of changes we had to make were some slight tweaking of a couple of fights, because they worked better in the console space of the game, in terms of the interface and how the camera works. Very few, like I think there were two we had to change. So that was kind of step one to make sure the game’s content was the same because I didn’t want anyone to feel like they got the watered down version or “you cut this whole part” or anything like that. So to me that was vital, and the second thing was I had to play this game and feel like it was built for this platform. So, you know, I don’t want a quick bar across the bottom with abilities, when I’m playing on a console. This is where we went to the drawing board and said “Okay, Mass Effect, you know, you guys did this.” I was on Jade Empire, so I know what we did when we were going between console and PC. And so moving the radials, keeping pausing play, focusing on the role of the trigger, the layout for the quick bar putting it down in the right corner, right trigger shifts it, ’oh, okay, cool, you know.’ So suddenly you get this sense of physical mapping on screen and kind of reaction where characters can quickly and easily navigate their abilities, control their party and bounce between different members in the same way they could on the PC but with a totally different interface, so that was my objective. It took a lot of hard banging, and we have an exceptional development team. The programmers and artists sit side by side and just work on it and stuff, so even getting the tutorials in place was again a different process; we have different tutorials on the PC, by nature.

J: Earlier, you were talking about a lot about how you don’t just have good and don’t just have bad, but you have that moral ambiguity. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

ML: We made the explicit choice not to give a kind of morality meter or anything like that. I think it’s a perfectly good mechanic. It’s exceptional in Star Wars, where the Light Side and the Dark Side is very deterministic. But for Dragon Age, we wanted to do something different and give you a grey morality. I mean, you’re a Grey Warden for a reason, and towards the end we said that, you know, the way people react to you and the way you feel about those choices should be what drives you. So we created a kind of space like the Grey Warden you play can act in following vein, but like you’re never going to be like “No, I’m going to side with The Blight;” that’s not what Grey Wardens do. So within that space we gave you perfect freedom to sculpt your party, to chose who your allies are going to be, and to choose what kind of army you want to forge. Towards that end, you do have the “greater good,” you do actually have that as motivator and that is an amazing opportunity to give the player that is morally more grey. I’m saving the world, and that’s what I’m doing, so sometimes you have to break a few eggs.