A Farewell to Licenses

Can BioWare do it again, this time without the D&D license? David Gaider thinks so.
9/2/2008 8:10 PM | 0 Comments | Page 4 of 6

We've been playing with this idea of "gateway" encounters. So that when you're on your way to an area, you might run into a group of monsters and those monsters would be indicative of what you'll face. That way you can decide to go forward or not.

So, if you enter an area that's too tough, you'll maybe decide not to go, but if you want to go...

Crispy Gamer: Then you can.

Gaider: More power to them. If they can handle it, then they deserve the rewards. If you put in too much scaling, it feels like leveling up was pointless. When I played Oblivion I almost didn't want to level up. There were some missions that you had to escort people, and those people didn't scale but the monsters did. If you were too high level they'd slaughter your charge. Oh, but we never make mistakes like that!

Crispy Gamer: Oh, no, never.

Gaider: I'm sure we will. On the other hand, we can't leave scaling out. Of course, the hardest of the hardcore...

Crispy Gamer: That's me.

Gaider: You don't want any scaling at all. Most people, I think, want to have some leeway. Because if the player goes to an area that they're too powerful for and the boss comes out and he just whacks him, they might say, "What the hell was that?" I think that the real idea is to give the player some idea of what to expect.

Crispy Gamer: Are you guys including co-op and multiplayer?

Gaider: Oh, no. Nope. For Dragon Age it's just single-player. We had planned it early on. We wanted to create a second campaign for multiplayer, and I think that taught us some lessons. The more you spread out your focus, the more you run a risk of making some of the other pillars of the game not as strong as they should be. As you and I were coming over, we were commenting on how many MMOs there are at GenCon. There's so much multiplayer.

Our past couple of console games have been single-player, would it really hurt to do another one? Nah, not really. I guess we could add it in eventually, but I'm really leery of that. Multiplayer is one of those things that you don't want to tack on at the end.

Crispy Gamer: No, that's something that most places design in from the get-go.

Gaider: Precisely. We're looking at some sort of tool set to release as well for player-created content. I loved the multiplayer for Neverwinter Nights, but if you look at most of the content made for it, it was single-player. We'd love to do multiplayer, but you want to do it well. We decided we can't include multiplayer and the single-player game and have them both be as good as we want them to be. Crispy Gamer: Which brings me to another point. You use elves and dwarves in Dragon Age -- are you afraid of getting backlash from that instead of making up an entirely new world?

Gaider: You know, if you see an elf, it's going to have a slim build and pointy ears because that's what an elf looks like. If it looked different, why would you call it an elf? If I show someone an elf, they can say, "Oh, an elf, I hate elves." Without the look into our history, you wouldn't know that our elves aren't like the typical fantasy elves. They don't dance around in flowers.