Eurogamer: Does graphics and animation technology influence this too? It seems that you can tell slightly more complex stories now: there's a mixture of humour and fear in Dragon Age, and all of these things which would have been harder to get across when you didn't have digital actors.

Dr Greg Zeschuk: Exactly. You start to see the story in their faces. I just did this one other quest where it was really neat: I kind of knew what the story was, but I'd kind of forgotten how it went. We prototype a lot of our games on the Neverwinter Nights engine, and I'd played this sequence on the Neverwinter Nights version but I couldn't remember who the good guys and the bad guys were in this particular scenario. Then, to be playing in the final engine with the lighting, digital acting and the recorded dialogue: it was awesome. I noticed this one guy was acting kind of shifty, kind of weird, and I wondered if he was the baddy, and lo and behold, a few twists later... It was amazing. It was subtleties in the digital acting which made me suspicious of his motivations. I compare that to the 16 pixels of Baldur's Gate: that was compelling at the time, but this is so much more compelling.

[...]

But I was actually really impressed with this suspicious guy from earlier, I was like, "Wow, that's pretty subtle." In Baldur's Gate, you'd have a bracket saying "So-and-so looks around suspiciously," and now you're actually paying attention and thinking, "That guy's acting weird". That's a real improvement.
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