Multiplayer: Where did the idea for “Dragon Age” come from?

Greg Zeschuk, Co-Founder, BioWare: The idea really came from the work we did o the original Baldur’s Gate and this is almost a spiritual successor to that game to “Neverwinter Nights.” When we finished on the “Neverwinter Nights” series, we said, “Let’s take the things we’ve learned, the knowledge in creating all those great games, and make our own fantasy world — with some twists. We call it dark heroic fantasy, where the old sort of high fantasy with elves happily sashaying across the countryside and happy Hobbits — the world of “Dragon Age” is effectively the reverse of that. It’s brutal. It’s harsh. Really gritty, very realistic and filled with surprising situations that you see don’t see high fantasy characters in.

Multiplayer: You just mentioned Hobbits, and when you showed some of the action scenes I couldn’t help but have flashbacks to some of Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” films. How much are you guys trying to mimic the action we see in those movies and how much are you trying to not be like that action?

Zeschuk: The reference point of the “Lord of the Rings” films as probably the pre-eminent visual representation of fantasy and what those big battles would be like certainly played a role in what we built. I think a lot of what it comes from, funny enough, is what we did in tiny pixels back in the “Baldur’s Gate” days. When you pull it back to what we have now with all the technology — animations and mo-cap — it just looks that way. That’s the surprising outcome of just creating a game based on [its] principles.​