Interview Choices & Consequences in Dragon Age

[Jason]

Tags: David Gaider; Dragon Age

BioWare writer and Codex dweller David Gaider chatted up <a href="http://www.crispygamer.com/interviews/2008-09-02/a-farewell-to-licenses.aspx">Crispy Gamer</a> about <a><a href="http://dragonage.bioware.com/">Dragon Age: Origins</a></b>.
<br>
<blockquote>Crispy Gamer: In Dragon Age, during the demo I noticed a lot of talk about choices affecting how the game plays and where you go. How much do choices factor into the ending of the game?
<br>
<br>
Gaider: BioWare creates story-driven games. We don't really create sandbox games. There's even a point in Baldur's Gate II where the world opens up and you can go wherever, but it's still under our control. Of course, you can lose yourself in the world of Dragon Age, the choices are there. I would say that there are more choices than in our more recent titles, but that's hard to judge.
<br>
<br>
There are a few big decisions that you have to make towards the middle of the game that change things quite a bit. In fact, those are really hard to write because once those things are in place so you have to account for them through the rest of the game. To that end, there have been places where we've been tempted to take things out because it would be easier on us.
<br>
<br>
Crispy Gamer: Do some hand-holding?
<br>
<br>
Gaider: Right, but we decided to keep them in because we love those parts. We love the way this works and how there's more freedom. For endings, we have big endings and small endings. I love the Fallout idea where you find out how the choices you made effect different areas we went to.</blockquote>
<br>
There's also some bits about level scaling and how Gaider wants to make you cry so <a href="http://www.crispygamer.com/interviews/2008-09-02/a-farewell-to-licenses.aspx">read on</a>.
<br>
Spotted at: <A HREF="http://www.crispygamer.com/">Crispy Gamer</A>

 

[yes plz]

Eh.

There might be a ton of 'choices', but that doesn't mean there will be many 'consequences'. Mass Effect offered a lot of choices, but outside Virmire, none of them changed a damn thing outside of a few changes to the next cutscene you saw.

 

[thesheeep]

There might be a ton of 'choices', but that doesn't mean there will be many 'consequences'. Mass Effect offered a lot of choices, but outside Virmire, none of them changed a damn thing outside of a few changes to the next cutscene you saw.

Unfortunately, yeah. I was disappointed by that aspect, too. A mixture of both those "small ranged" consequences and long ranged ones would be kind of cool.
Oh, it would be so nice if this Gaider guy came here to answer if this mixture is there... ahem

 

[aleph]

And, you know, if you don't like elves or dwarves, do you actually even LIKE fantasy?

:agree:

 

[Longshanks]

Yeah, elves and dwarves are integral to fantasy, to have anything not directly derivative of Tolkien would take creativity, and that's too much to ask for.

 

[Mr. Teatime]

That's what has near killed my interest in this game. It looks utterly derivative.

 

[Volourn]

Any fantasy game that doens't have dwarves in it automatically loses 10% of its score as it means that game is worse than a fantasy game with dwarves simply by default. Period.

 

[Mareus]

I don't mind elves, dwarves and the fantasy setting if the story is good and original. It really depends how much thought they put into it. So we will see.

 

[Skald]

Also :

When I open a new book, or sit down to watch a movie, or purchase an RPG, I want to be introduced to a world that I’ve never imagined before. I’m drawn to fantasy and science fiction for the thrill of discovery - to peel away the layers of setting and learn the “rules” of a new world.

 

[Mr. Teatime]

Well elves and dwarfs with a twist - a dwarf who doesn't speak with a scottish accent would be a start, Arcanum's version should be held up as an aspirational example - would at least be palatable. But this game simply looks as if it wants to be Lord Of The Rings, just like most fantasy RPGs (and many fantasy books, for that matter) do.

Cutting the 'For Feroblim!' stuff would be good. Let's have the PC an orc or something. Make the humans the bad guys, and make that clear from the outset rather than at teh big plot twist! at the end. Make the world the current one but put elves and dwarves in it, if you can't break your addiction to those races. Use Norse mythology, Greek, Chinese, anything, instead of mining the elves and dwarves in their most cliche'd form just because Tolkein did it (and far better than you). Something original, please.

 

[Volourn]

@PIC: Exception that proves the rule that dwarves rule. One of the reasons why I disliked that movie.


"Well elves and dwarfs with a twist - a dwarf who doesn't speak with a scottish accent would be a start"

Most dwarves don't speak with scottish accents. It's a new age CRPG trend.


"Arcanum's version should be held up as an aspirational example - would at least be palatable"

I like Arcanum as much as the next Codexer - even more so since I liked the combat - but their dwarves weren't all that original. Dwarves who suck at magic but great with tech is not new. Dwarves with a sad history of losing formner homelands is not new.

You used a poor exmaple of a game breaking dwarven stereotypes as Arcanum did no such thing. Which, to me, is a GOOD thing. Dwarves are fine the way they are.


"Let's have the PC an orc or something."

B O R I N G



"Make the humans the bad guys"

Humans are often the bad guys in fantasy. L0L

 

[muds_animal_friend]

[I paraphrase] And, you know, if you don't like elves or dwarves, do you actually even LIKE the gang-raped bloody corpse of Tolkien's legacy?

No I do not. I like fantasy, which is a vast and varied genre. Gulliver's Travels, The Nightlands, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Odyssey, Alice in Wonderland, Titus Groan, Weaveworld...

 

[Volourn]

Then don't fuckin' buy DA. Problem fuckin' solved.

 

[thesheeep]

He's fuckin' right.

 

[Skald]

Then don't fuckin' buy DA. Problem fuckin' solved.

Thus Spoke Volourn.

 

[sportforredneck]

It seems good that they're actually offering different paths to the end, or at least changes from the middle of the game for later. It's a step in the right direction. Maybe by Dragon Age VI they'll have it perfected.

 

[muds_animal_friend]

Then don't fuckin' buy DA. Problem fuckin' solved.

Unfortunately nothing changes whether or not I purchase DA. The chances of an RPG with an inventive setting being produced will still remain as unlikely as finding anything of substance in one of your ten thousand forum posts. Games with creative settings tend to be commercial failures. Generic crap wins.

 

[PennyAnte]

Re: Choices & Consequences in Dragon Age

There are a few big decisions that you have to make towards the middle of the game that change things quite a bit.

These few (up to three?) will probably be the only examples of what most of us would call "consequential" choices. They will be the story bottlenecks you can't avoid that will spin you out into a small number of possible futures. For the most part, it will be like other Bioware games in this regard.

I don't think there's much a developer can do about that though, if you're writing a game that unfolds like a single novel. You only can put in so many alternate plots before you've written several different books instead of one. And even if you fully write the good-guy novel and bad-guy novel, that's still only two "choices."

What I dislike the most is a game that keeps all the events "exactly" the same; it's just that you're reacting to identical events either as a normal, diplomatic person (good) or half-rational jerk (evil).

I think at the very least there should be an effort to include somewhat independent "short story" type stand alone story arcs within the main "novel."

For its part, Mass Effect could have offered more consequence wthout much more development work. For example, on Noveria, you don't have to nuke the wild Rachni - you can just go back to the Normandy after dealing with Benezia. If you did that, the planet should have been overrun, complete with a news blurb about it at the Citadel (and you unable to land there). This would not have required any new plot or artwork and just a tiny bit of dialogue.

If you are late getting to Liara, she should be dead. But maybe you find her equipment and notes and through them have a way to help decode "the cipher" and make sense of your vision, allowing another, more meaningful consequence while still keeping the story basically the same.

These would be like your ability to save almost everyone at or wipe out the Feros colony. If you wipe everyone out, you lose the merchant and hear at the Citidel about it being shut down. (Although I don't know if you still can land there if it shuts down.) The game at least needed more of that.

I still love Bioware's games and have played them all. But there is room for improvement. That said, despite some reservations I probably also will buy DA - Bioware is the only game company about which I can say I bought and played all their games. I still think they're much better than a lot of the alternatives.

 

[senduran]

For anyone interested, read some of David Gaider's comments on this topic here. Since you need to be registered at the Bioware forum to see that, I've quoted a few bits here:

That's what has near killed my interest in this game. It looks utterly derivative.

At the same time, however, to expect that we should provide a version of fantasy for someone who-- according to all evidence-- does not seem to actually like fantasy... or accomodate those who appear to insist that even a superficial glimpse at the world should contain things so radically different that their jaded sensibilities are simply thrilled by the very non-clicheness of it all... does seem a bit much sometimes, as well.

As I've said elsewhere, we set ourselves up for this a bit by using the tropes -- but they are not used without purpose, and we have our own twist on those tropes that simply aren't going to be visible on a cursory glance. For those that are seeking something radically different, this would never be what they were looking for anyhow-- but that does not mean that the exact opposite must be true, that we are deliberately trying to keep things stale and make everything exactly as it appears. We're not.

Hard to get excited about? Maybe. But what we're going for is a big serving of the traditional with our own take to make it fresh. There's a great number of people who seem to get excited by that very much, thank you.

Use Norse mythology, Greek, Chinese, anything, instead of mining the elves and dwarves in their most cliche'd form just because Tolkein did it (and far better than you). Something original, please.

I don't disagree that those settings might be interesting-- but, to be honest, I find them interesting in a purely intellectual fashion. They would have a certain novelty to them that might be cool, but I'm not sure that such settings would speak to me in the same way as the pseudo-European setting does.

No doubt a big part of that is because that's the kind of fantasy I grew up with. To me, swords & sorcery as a genre covers a whole lot of ground, from Arthurian to D&D to Dragonlance to GRRM and beyond. I don't need to go to the completely unfamiliar and alien to find fantasy that I like, and in fact I'm not sure that I speak only for myself when I say that the unfamiliar and alien can be potentially off-putting. My willingness to step in and learn an entirely new milieu would depend on just how bizarre I found it.

There has to be a reason it's not done very often, after all. It's not as if anyone dictated Thou Shalt Not Create Fantasy Based Outside of Europe-- but look at Jade Empire or even Planescape: Torment. No matter how good you thought either of those games might be or how interesting you found their settings, how popular were their settings?

 

[kris]

Re: Choices & Consequences in Dragon Age

I think at the very least there should be an effort to include somewhat independent "short story" type stand alone story arcs within the main "novel."

In JadeE they had a mission like that. If the effects pretty much stay location specific then it ain't as much work. Same with character specific. The mission in Jae empire I refer too is the one about the flooding of the ghost city. Otherwise, Mask of bertrayal is full of good examples of how to solve these things with not to much work. especially with those character specific things which can have character come back with different agendas depending on your earlier choice. Or not come back at all.

It is the world changing event or story critical character choices that they will get problems with the amount of possible work involved.

 

[senduran]

A mixture of both those "small ranged" consequences and long ranged ones would be kind of cool.
Oh, it would be so nice if this Gaider guy came here to answer if this mixture is there... ahem

If you were a game developer would you come here? Anyway, here's what he's said on the same topic:

There’s some parts of the game that... well I don’t even know if they’re going to go out the way they are right now, because there’s so many choices that have such far reaching effects afterwards, that it ends up becoming very complicated. I was just writing sort of our end part of the game, our epilogue, which... we decided instead of having a cut-off right at the climax, you sort of have a playable denumout... and I was writing through that and there’s so many variations on how things could sort of turn out, which is cool, but it’s so complicated. It blows your mind sometimes.

[are there 500 endings?]

Little nuances of endings? Sure, with the denumounts I’ve been writing there’s all sorts of variations on how you affected these various areas in the world that you visit. I mean that’s one of the things we try to focus on in terms of how you affected the world, how you affected your followers, what you sort of did. I mean the overall story, sure, you’ve got to deal with the Blight, it’s a heroic story, so the idea is that you are fighting the Blight, but really the story to players is what they get to do personally, how... when dealing with the Kingdom, how do their choices affect who ended up on the throne, or whatever - just as an example, those are the things that the player cares about, right? Whether they were sinister and got to influence events, or are they a hero and how are they treated as a hero, those sorts of things. So yeah, in that respect we’ve got endings galore. In terms of larger, like, the decisions having major major variations? Yes, we’ve got more than one there as well.

 

[PennyAnte]

David Gaider has posted here before.

 

[Lesifoere]

And, you know, if you don't like elves or dwarves, do you actually even LIKE fantasy?

Wow, he is a colossal dumbfuck.

Quick, people, tell China Mieville, Jeff Vandermeer, Alan Campbell, George R. R. Martin (okay, he's got dwarves, but you know, not fantasy dwarves), Scott Lynch, R. Scott Bakker, Steven Erikson, and a host of others they didn't/are not writing fantasy. News at eleven!

Funny thing--even some really shitty fantasy writers actually don't include elves or dwarves in their garbage. David Eddings, Terry Goodkind, Robert Jordan.

 

[Warden]

If you were a game developer would you come here?

Hi moron!
A lot of game developers post here. Mostly useless shit... but aaanyway.
Dgaider posted too, until I made him leave.

 

[RK47]

And, you know, if you don't like elves or dwarves, do you actually even LIKE fantasy?

:agree:

You can roleplay a racist and start killing them on sight if you dislike elves or dwarves. If they put that in as a character background I'd definitely give it two thumbs up.

Oh awesome dorf craftmanship. Ooooh fickle elven archers...
Yawn. I'm human, Eat my sword.