Gallery: How Dragon Age: Inquisition is crafted from lore Gallery Gallery: How Dragon Age: Inquisition is crafted from lore + 11

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Dragon Age: Inquisition is BioWare's upcoming third entry in its fantasy RPG series, returning players to the continent of Thedas just in time to protect it from extradimensional tears in the fabric of reality. Making matters harder is the eruption of an all-out war between Mages and Templars, a plotline seeded in the previous game. As the Inquisitor, you have the power to seal the rifts plaguing the land, and the inquisition you'll lead may be the only hope of restoring peace and stability.

In the first half of our massive two-part interview, Wired.co.uk speaks with executive producer Mark Darrah and creative director Mike Laidlaw on the resurgence of single-player RPGs, bringing Dragon Age to a new console generation, and how to deal with thousands of years of fictional mythology and conflicting canon.


Wired.co.uk: Dragon Age: Inquisition is considerably larger than the previous games, which seems to be a trend with western RPG's. Is there a kind of arms race between developers to create bigger, fancier worlds, and is it risky creating worlds so big players can't experience all of it?

Mike Laidlaw: We've definitely moved towards a game we don't expect you to see all of. That's actually good though, because historically we've had this problem of people not wanting to talk about, say, Mass Effect 2 because maybe you've not gotten to the same point as me and I don't want to spoil it for you. Especially in this day and age, where people are much more socially connected, you want them to be sharing their experiences.

People talk a lot about Skyrim saying "oh yeah, I totally went on that drunken bender" and then someone else goes "There's a drunken bender? What?" It is intentional in our case to provide more game than the average player will experience.

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In terms of whether it's an arms race, I don't know. I think you could look at the state of open world games right now with games like Skyrim, the Batman: Arkham games, Far Cry or Grand Theft Auto. These are all very different games with very different gameplay, but they're all open world. I think they share some elements but they're not really in competition with each other, other than that these games all take a certain amount of time and are therefore inherently in competition with each other. We're a fantasy RPG which obvious makes us much closer to Skyrim than GTA. My hope is that people will not see this as BioWare's take on the former so much as an exploration of the Dragon Age universe.

Do the integrated social and media sharing features of the Xbox One and PS4 help with that discussion between players that you want to see?

ML: Yeah, players definitely have a lot more opportunities to share now, and we'll see people uploading those key moments instead of "here's the part where I spoil the story!" Some people will do that, but I think they'll get no views. I think what will actually become interesting is people going "I found something cool over here" or "Cassandra said something that makes me go whoa!" Just these little 45 second things that make viewers think "well, I never saw that when I went there!" or "I didn't even know you could go to that area!" I think that's what those sharing features will actually enable.


How about the power of the new consoles? Have they allowed you to bring the game up to the level you want, or do you still have to code around the fixed nature of console hardware?

Mark Darrah: The nice thing about when we went into this game is that we knew what our three big factors were: that we wanted to make a Dragon Age game, we wanted to make it with Frostbite, and we wanted to make something could be played on older gen consoles, new gen consoles, and PCs. The next thing is that we already have the 'PC as a powerhouse versus the Xbox' conflict already in our DNA so it didn't take a lot of mental jumping on our part. What we did, and Frostbite does this very well, is build our systems to be scalable. The number of creatures that exist in an area, how much wildlife and stuff there is, can scale dynamically based on the platform. It also scales based on what effects you have had on the environment. So if there's Fade rifts open and a bunch of demons wandering around, there will not be much wildlife about. Once you close them down, you'll see nature start to reappear. Maybe you're out hunting bears for their leather, you need to shut down rifts to improve the spawn rate for bears.

The end result is that we set a target of gameplay parity across all the platforms and I think we've hit that very well, but it's the visual fidelity that can scale up and down. The older consoles are not going to put forward the fidelity of a PC, and definitely not what the Xbox One or PS4 can do. If the system scales well, and it does, then you can end up in a place where it's like "well, this is my older platform but I'm still getting the same game," which I think is very important.

It seems there's a hunger for single player, epic-length RPGs -- Dragon Age, The Witcher, and so on. Is the market tiring of fantasy MMOs, which seemed dominant for so long?

ML: I actually play a lot of MMOs myself. I just got back into Final Fantasy XIV the other week because I wanted something I could do 20 minute sessions of -- it turns out you can chop down trees in that time! That's perfect for me on the couch on the PS4, going "oh yeah, this is good after a long day." That little glimpse into my personal exhaustion aside, I don't think it's a rejection of MMO's so much as that a lot of MMO's have been released and most of them are still running. If you want an MMO, there are plenty out there. The difference with a single player game is that in the same way you lose yourself in a good novel, you can lose yourself in a single player story. You see it in all these games, where you can fill your house with turnips or decorate your armour with a dragon skull. It lets you go inside for a little while and, well, not hermit up necessarily, but be in another place and time for a while. It is escapism and you can't really have that when 'BonerLord247' goes running past you in the middle of a raid.

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MD: I hate that guy! [laughs] But that's the thing, there's a deeper sense of immersion you can get when you control a group of characters that are 100% immersed in the world, that you can't get if you play an MMO. I think that's the value.


Plus, we're trying to put together some pretty cool experiences.

There's something about "what's going on, what's the mystery?" The fact that when you buy it, there won't already be an FAQ written about how to power level -- there is a draw to that. I mean, that FAQ is there a week later, but still!

Inquisition is the third main game now, and you have millennia of history in the Dragon Age world. How do you keep that straight amongst yourselves, particularly when story paths can branch off?

ML: We hired a crime reporter. We actually did. One of our editors is someone we brought on initially as a contractor and then hired full-time because he's fantastic. He is a research specialist and was a crime reporter with the Edmonton newspaper. He's very dedicated and very thorough -- crime isn't something you want to mis-report -- and what he'd do is comb through everything in

Origins, everything in the novels, everything in Dawn of the Seeker, the comics, all the different products. We've developed this internal wiki that tracks the states of all the characters. There are various fields for the characters: Dead, Alive, and Quantum, for characters like Alistair who may or may not be alive depending on player choice. Within the entry, it explicitly says "If Dead: This. If Alive: This". So we have that as our internal reference, and while the fans maintain a really good one, they can't put notes about what's coming, so we have to have our own.

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That's helped us organise things because there are a lot of products. We've announced our fifth novel, there are four out at the moment and a lot of the characters from the novels get referenced in Inquisition. The script-writing team will go and reference that. Being able to copy a noteworthy paragraph from a book that describes a location and then send it to a concept artist when they start to draw it for the game, that's invaluable.

That's how we keep it all on track.

Do you rank all your non-game content as 'canon' or does it have several tiers like Lucasarts used to do with Star Wars?

MD: Everything that is non-game is canon if it can be. For example, the comics have Alistair in them, so they're only canon if he's King of Ferelden. If he's dead, they're not. There are things like the first comic which are less canon because they're a little bit more divergent and then there are things that we try to keep wrapped in a little bit of a framed storytelling aspect. If the media took things a bit further than is rational, we might dial it back a bit. You might hear characters say things like "According to the stories, I killed seventeen dragons!"

ML: And which character might that be?

MD: That might be Cassandra....

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ML: She explicitly calls that out and says that might be a bit much. The way we see it is all our products draw off a singular canon. That does not mean it invalidates your canon from playing the game. We try to be at least a single point of inconsistency with your game, rather than "Oh, man, whatever's convenient." I think that's kind of sloppy as a creator. The other thing we do is try to have all of those feed into the games.

Whenever I sit down with a new author, or the role playing guys over at Green Ronin, I say to them "here are the things that are coming -- put some of this into your work, give me a reference here." That way players can read it and think it's cool, but then when they play Inquisition they'll realise that's what it all meant.

The writers all had fun because they feel like they're contributing to a greater whole and we're able to give them this great research package, which all comes from having a great research guy and his enormous wiki of doom. We can quickly put together all of the stuff you could possibly know about Orlais, this is what's been canonically put together, and writers have responded really positively to that.

When you were working on the Star Wars games, did that help you learn to balance between canon/semi-canon/free-form?

MD: When we did Knights of the Old Republic, that was a bit after the Star Wars novels had taken off but they didn't really have their canon in a great state at the time.

ML: One of the advantages as well of Old Republic was working in a space that was largely unexplored.

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There was the original Marka Ragnos stuff, where they had wood spaceships and battery-powered lightsabers, that was all pretty cool, but then there was a big dead space between then and A New Hope.

MD: I think that's because most of their licensing at the time had been toys and stuff like that, the old Marvel comics. They had a lot more brand control stuff in place as opposed to lore. It was like "you can't say the word damn!" and we'd say "But Han Solo says damn", only for Lucasfilm to come back with "Well, you can't say it! We've decided!" Or they'd say lightsabers don't come in the following shades of turquoise.

They've become a lot more sophisticated since then, gotten more lore-friendly. Because they have that layered canon -- or had, now Disney says they have two, canon and not -- they got a lot better at saying what counts.


ML: I think part of it was that this is a skillset we've been building as a company. We built Jade Empire, then we built Mass Effect, then we built

Dragon Age. With those last two, when you're dealing with two big ideas that are on their third iterations, you develop some strategies for managing your lore or you drown!

Keep an eye out for the second part of this interview series which further explores the design decisions behind Dragon Age Inquisition.