Transcription du podcast à l'écrit (anglais) par un moderateur du forum anglais "javierabegazo"
Not sure if anyone's interested, but I was listening to a cool album so I
thought I'd pass the time by transcripting the Podcast, here it is,
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As
Lead Designer and Creative Director
If you don't feel like you
can go in with a battle plan, then I think we're failing in terms of
getting that tactical, and that Think like General side of it.
Mike
Laidlaw
Victor Wachter
Hello and welcome to BioWare
Podcast for Dragon Age II. I'm Victor Wachter, Community Manager for the
Dragon Age Franchise, and I'm here with my good friend, Mike Laidlaw,
Lead Designer for Dragon Age II and Creative Director for the Dragon Age
Franchise.
ML: Hey Victor, how's it going?
VW: Good, how
are you?
ML:Oh, doin' well.
VW: So we're here to talk
about Dragon Age II. As we speak it's just been annouced yesterday that
DA II is in development and we wanted to use this first podcast to give
our community a little bit of insight into what it's all about. So
there's already conversation and speculation on our forums and elsewhere
across the internet...
ML: Yeah, there's been a ton of
speculation, It's been kind of cool to watch it go back and forth. I
know it's kind of an informational drip feed, which can be kind of a bit
frustrating but at the same time, it's neat to see people come up with
their theories.
VW: Yeah, exactly. I mean, what's interesting is
DA II has been no secret, you know? And now the community is in a
position where like "Oh my god, we're actually going to start learning
about it." So, that's what we're here to do.
ML: Yeah, we'll
hopefully what we're here to do is to clear up a few questions that seem
to be lingering and just, ideally, have a chance to talk about, kind of
I guess the WHY, a kind of a philosophical approach.
VW: So
Lead Designer (LD) and Creative Director (CD) what does that mean,
what's your role on the DA team?
ML: Well I look at it as kind of
wearing 2 hats. LD is the hands on, working with the design team, you
know, David Gaider, your own Jacobs, all the old Vets of the DA Team,
and really carrying through the vision and making the decisions as to
what features are going in, what are we improving, what's our key kind
of goals for the game. And working with all the different design
departments and ofcourse with Art, and Audio, and Programming as to kind
of make the best damn game we can.
So that's kind of on the
ground, kind of leadership of the team. Um, and really trying to
maintain a sense of excitement and keep the vision for DA II pretty
clear.
CD kind of expands on that role and is the hat I wear
when dealing with anything external, so when it comes to the DA Comics,
in a lot of ways through the approval of the Novels, even though that's
still Dave (David Gaider) and I working hand in hand, and of course we
just announced the anime treatment for Dragon Age as well. So any of
those kind of ancillary products are part of my role of CD is insuring
that not only are they fitting within the DA universe, but , and my
personal goal with this, is that they enhance the DA universe.
So
Kind of the rule I've been running with, is I don't ever want to take a
step backward. I don't want to rehash something that you could see in
another place. I don't want a novelization OF the game, I want a
novelization that ADDS to the game. and I know thats an approach that
Dave uses as well. That's how the novels kind of add that extra layer to
Logain's character, and Duncan, and Maric and so on.
VW:
Interesting, so it's not just Dragon Age II, it's Dragon Age, from
Origins through Awakenings, to Dragon Age II and beyond into future
games.
ML: That's really the approach we've been taking. The
Executive Producer, Mark Derrick, and myself have had any number of long
talks about this and we kind of look at Dragon Age as a Grand kind of
campaign. It's not an individual adventure, it's not just a single
movie, and it's not even something that we really want to limit to
something like a trilogy. We want to treat this like it's a world that
evolves, and changes, that I guess as the players are interacting with
the games and the novels, you name it, but definitely with the games
being the Flagship items. That' they're seeing Thedas, and the setting,
and the characters that they know grow and evolve over time.
It's
been a really challenging approach because it'd be really easy to just
knock off, " oh lets just do , lets just staple two Arch Demons together
two wardens together, and we're done, there's a sequel."
But
instead what we wanted to do is kind of look at a new angle for the
world, with new stories, and what can we do to tell a story not just of
Bob, but of the Age that Bob lives in.
VW: Right, and you're
covering 100 years of that world which to me, is just awesome. because,
if you think about anything that can happen in a century, any century,
even the 21st century, and we're only 10 years into it, the history
playing off of each event, and specific individuals. We have that
continuity.
ML: That's exactly it, and I think that a similar
even of course would be the kind of Liberation of Fereldan right around
the beginning of the Dragon Age. and in a lot of ways, what effect did
that have on the world, and politically, it's certainly changed the
relations with Orlais, Economically, Fereldan became a nation again,
stopped being a subjugate kind of Kingdom, and of course that led to it
being not in that strongest of positions. And if you play through
Origins, there's even hints that it seems like the Darkspawn or the Arch
Demon seem to always start the blight when things are weakest, where
they can salvage a good beach head, and in part, why Fereldan suffered
the Blight as it did. and then the things I'm looking forward to
exploring are that what happens in a situation where essentially,
Fereldan HAS suffered some devastation, what does that do to the
political shift of power.
And again, so this is why it's really
important for us to remember with any of the games, and any of the
novels, is that all this stuff has to live in context. and again is kind
of tying back to that Creative Director Concept
VW: Right, and
when you consider the fact that We're not even done with Dragon Age
Origins, there's still some stories to be told there, to build on, and
that may even have their ramifications in DA II (talking about coming
DAO DLC???) Is that fair to say?
ML: Absolutely, I'll be frank,
I don't think we'll ever be done with Dragon Age Origins, the team
worked for years on building up the world and what it established in my
mind is an amazing jumping off point.
When I look at what
Origins provides, it's just this tale riddled with story hooks, What are
the Qunari really up to?, What's going on with Mages and Templars? What
kind of struggles come out of the Orlais and Fereldan Debate, what kind
of tensions could flare up there?
Seeing the Ramifications, and
the effects that the Warden had on the world, and I mean this is the
very specific and personal thing for the gamers, What did their Warden
do to the World of DA?
That's something that we honestly have
to honor, we have not just a goal, but a responsibility that even
though DAII isn't the continuation of your Warden, It IS a continuation
of the specific Thedas that you've created and kind of continue to
create as you go forth through the different games.
VW: Nice,
nice. And I think that that's the hook that people are looking for.
They want their decisions that made in Awakenings, and Origins, to
matter, right?
ML: I think not just "matter", but this is where
video games come into their own as an Art Form, is that not only do they
matter, but we can react to them.
Honestly one of the most
challenging things is that how can we make a game that can account for
the choices that you've made, and I mean you made some heavy, heavy
choices in Origins. and yet still have some decisions for the Canon, and
the core, because there ARE people out there who I think, would love to
play DAO, would love to dip into the world, would love to explore this
rich lore, but they may not know about the game, they may not be able
to play the game, it might be too hardcore, too tough. There were some
difficulty elements in Origins, I'll definitely admit that.
So I
think in a lot of ways, what we want to do is make sure that we're
presenting this story , that we're doing DA II, and the tale of Hawke,
and his role, and his flight from Fereldan, what we're trying to do is
make a new story and a new character, but a world that is intimately
familiar, and intimately reactive for the players who are coming
forward, so we don't want to alienate people, to make them feel like "
Oh well I can't possibly play this because I didn't play the first one"
but we want those who did, to understand, that we love this world as
much as they do, and we want their interactions, to be something that
the game celebrates.
VW: Right, because even in Origins, you
made some pretty world shaping decisions, so I think the future of
Orzammar, basically the future of everybody you visited, I mean like,
What does Arl Eamon's family look like at this point, what are the
Dalish Elves doing, you basically determine the fate of all these
groups, and I think that that'll be really cool, to see how that plays
a little further down the road in future games..
ML: I think
that's a really good point. I think that even there could be a reaction
to where like
"Well, you didn't cover EVERYTHING in DA II" and I
don't think we're going to be able to cover everything, every single
decision, but I think from a long term approach what we really hope to
do is see that the decisions you make in DAO WILL matter, Far into the
future, not just for one game, not just for Awakenings, that things
should come back to surprise you later, when you thought " Oh god, I
thought they forgot about that"
VW: Right, so speaking of things
that shape the world, apparently Hawke, the main character of DA II is
according to the press release and everything we've read so far, is "The
person who changed the world"
So that's a pretty bold
statement... um so lets talk a little about Hawke. Who exactly is Hawke?
ML:
Hawke is a mystery. He's like a walking enigma, and in my mind, DA II
is in a lot of ways, like an experience in which the players are asking a
question, and that question is "Who is the Man/Woman who changed the
world?"
So the role of Hawke is one where, we already know that
Hawke has had a dramatic impact, that things have already shifted as a
direct result and throughout the game, we'll be exploring the most
important moments in Hawke's life, It's the largest span of time we've
ever done before.It's where, a full decade is something we're exploring.
through the course of that decade, we get to see not just how he
changed the world, but WHY and in a lot of ways, these are questions
that I don't honestly know the answers to, I don't know Hawkes
motivation because that's where the player comes in. They're the ones
answering this question.
So the things that we know about Hawke,
that are kind of fixed in stone are that he DID have this dramatic
impact on the world, and I don't want to spoil what exactly has
occurred, but we know that Hawke escaped from Lothering, the town that
burned during the course of DAO, You travel through it, your Warden
travelled through it and this is where he's from.
His family has
fled, escaping the Blight, and managed to fight for their survival and
managed to escape a Fereldan that's not just at war, but that's being
torn apart and corrupted by the Darkspawn. Through the course of that,
he makes his way up to Kirkwall, which is a city that's just absolutely
steeped with History, an imperial Port, that, since the Tevinter
Imperium has kind of pulled back, this city has become a hub of trade,
and because of their position just north of Fereldan. They're the
gateway to the larger continent and right along the major shipping route
to Orlais.
In this city, Kirkwall, this is where Hawke has his
impact, this is where the changes begin.
VW: so it sounds like,
from what i'm listening to, it sounds like the Legend of Hawke in some
ways, is written, but it's not. It's like there's this legend that
already exists, and the players deciding what that legend is. It's sort
of an interesting story telling technique.
ML: It is, it's
something new, something that we, I mean, it's been done historically
for years, is that sense of, ok, something happened, and we're
investigating how. and in alot of ways in like a CSI episode is like,
Someone is dead, How did that happen? But this is the glory of video
games, is that DA II lets players kind of determine what happened,
rather than it being this predetermined plot that runs through.
So
the mechanic that we're using to do this is called a Framed Narrative.
It's a Story telling technique it's where basically one story, is
effectively telling another story. It's where, the play, within a play
within Hamlet is an example of this, or a more modern example of this
would be something like the Princess Bride, right? Where you do have the
story of Wesley and Buttercup and all this grand adventure happening,
but around it, you have Fred Savage, and his grandpa who on a sick day
are reading from this Story Book.
So in a lot of ways, there's
as much story as watching this kind of feverish and disaffected young
man get more and more entranced by this story his grandpa is weaving.
so to me, that's a really compelling technique, because that means that
not only can we have characters who know where the world is headed, but
they can ask the questions to get us to those most important moments.
What
I don't want to do is feel like any moment of DAII is wasted shoe
leather, I want to dive right in to the heart of it, the politics, the
struggles, the grand discovery that Hawke makes.
VW: Cool, so
how much choice does the player have in determining the course of this
narrative, would you say it's uh, as it progresses through the decades.
How
linear, or non-linear would you say it is?
ML: Well the game
itself will move forward through the decade. your period of time, so
we're not just going to build a game that just jumps you around a
timeline, where that can get a bit confusing, though there are games
like Eternal Darkness that really just nail that as the effect, but i
think that it's , when you're trying to get inside your character's
head, you're really trying to dive in and feel like you're role playing,
You're not hearing the story of a family which was the Eternal Darkness
model. In this case we're trying to have you tell us how this world
turns out. S
So in the course of that we're trying to have you
get big swaths of freedom, meet characters to kind of understand them
and to kind of achieve your objectives your own way . To work your own
way through these political and you know, historical situations. and
then we're going to advance time forward and take a look at how that
turned out.
At how the decisions you made affected Kirkwall,
Hawke, people around Hawke, and so on. So, that we get, you know my
favorite parts of DAO where that we fire up this epilogue and I find out
that oh, Bann Teagan got married, look what happened to Arl Eamon, and
all those kinds of elements, but you get to see them happen more than
once and you get to see them happen in the middle of the game.
For
my mind, if we have any major sucess, it's that the thought that
there's a player who sees how things turn out and course corrects his
character and goes "Oh god, I was too much of a dick to that group of
people, I need to rectify that"
When we do that, that's when I
think players get really engaged and feel they are telling their own
story.
VW: So this framed narrative, I liked the example of the
Grandfather in Princess Bride, so um, who's telling us this story?
ML:
it's not so much a story being told, as more of an Interrogation. Two
characters named Cassandra and Varric and I don't want to get too deep
into who they are yet, we'll get to that later, but suffice it to say
that Cassandra is a representative of the Chantry, who is desperate to
find out about Hawke because what she's trying to do is understand why
he made the decisions that he did, and in many ways, is trying to find
him/her, and look at the way the world is standing on the brink of war.
Because that is something she establishes very early on, that things are
very very bad right now, and that perhaps if they can find the person
who was there when it all began, that there's a chance they could fix
things.
VW: and By fixing things we generally mean dropping some
swords, casting spells, dropping enemies. Lets talk a little bit about
Combat
-----------COMBAT IN DA II FROM
TRANSCRIPT---------------------------
ML: Certainly when you
read, it's "Enhanced combat", that could mean any number of things, it
could mean Rock paper scissors, cause that's fast.
What we did
is we sat down with the Gameplay Team and the Designers that we worked
with, and we went with 2 steps.
Step 1 was a brutal honest
examination of DAO's combat, looking through reviews and all the
community feedback, because the guys have been great about what they
loved, what they hated about DAO. Really trying to understand where we
could make improvements, change the experience for the better. so to my
mind, the things that we've done, the main directions is we've made
Combat more responsive. What it means to me is that to put it, not too
fine a point on it. When I'm pushing that button, on my keyboard,
controller, where ever the hell i'm pushing that button, I want it to
make something amazing happen on my screen.
So when you think
about how kind of DAO played out in combat, you were playing tactically,
you would issue orders, and say, ok, Alistair, I want you to move up
and hit that guy, and then, what would happen, is that he would kind of
move into position, line up, and THEN combat would begin.
The
question that we asked ourselves and the question that we posed to the
Gameplay team was, is there a way that we can make it so that when I
want you, you up there fighting, that that character moves in, and
almost immediately starts attacking. If I want to cast a spell, do I
want to stand their waggling my hands for a few minutes, or do I want
rains of fire to come down from the sky. Well I think those answers are
pretty self evident, and the guys ran with that, as a philosophy.
How
can we make something like that happen immediately?
How can we
improve the over-all responsiveness of the game?
and that is the
primary change we've made to combat, and it's infinitely better.
VW:
What's changed, what's going to be familiar?
ML: Well the
familiar elements are going to be the ability to issue orders, the
fact that you're still controlling a party, we haven't lost any
elements like that.
You're able to say to your mage, Ok, I need
you to heal here, and throw an Inferno here, with a rogue, you can
obviously worry about the tactical positioning of, am I behind, am I
getting the optimal back stabs, and certainly, you can pull your Left
Trigger, or SpaceBar, and pause the game, and look and see, ok where's
the guy who's throwing fireballs cause that guy needs to die.
so
in a lot of ways the tactics, the pause and play and issuing of orders
and giving that kind of sense of battle field command has not gone
away.
If anything, we're aggressively looking at the way tactics
work, and the way the tactics tables that come preloaded work, for
people that don't want to dive in on tactics, there's an improved
experience there. It's "I want my party to be smarter" was the challenge
that i put down to the guys working on that system. But in addition
to that, and really, that's where I think things have stayed the same,
when we talk about my boss, Mark is marching is, is I Do not want to
lose things that were amazing about DAO, and to my mind, the tactics and
that sense of party control was part of that.
But then where we
made the enhancements in turn was ok, I can issue these orders, but why
couldn't i see them executed near immediately, why couldn't someone leap
into combat, instead of shuffling into battle akwardly, so that's where
we focused most of the attention.
VW: So one of my favorite
things was about that, fighting in DAO was the way my party, my
companions could play off of one another, For example, I could have my
own mage, my PC and Morrigan, could be casting Blizzard and Tempest, the
two combined into the storm of the century, or Morrian could hit a
bunch of guys with Cone of Cold, Zevran could hit the Whirlwind at that
point,
Do we keep that same interplay, are we improving it at
all?
ML: We do, we've actually aggressively tried to improve it. I
think Origins did a really cool thing by introducing that Spell Combo
concept, where certain spells working together to have an extra effect
so what we're exploring right now is kind of the idea of a Cross- class
combo, where a rogue and a mage, even on a more consistent basis than
you've outlined, where not only can i have those interactions but I can
actually build a party that takes advantage of those interactions. I'm
taking specific abilities, I'm customizing my party, to deal death most
efficiently possible.
I think that there's a class of player that
doesn't need to worry about that, but i think when you think in terms
of , "Is this an RPG" has it still got that depth?" I think that you
HAVE to have systems like that, where the player can not only moment to
moment take advantage of that, but can go into combat going " I have a
stratedgy here, I have Zevran and Morrigan and they are going to team up
in this way"
Now of course, no plan survives contact with the
enemy, but if you don't feel like you can go in with a battle plan, I
think we're failing in terms of getting that tactical, think like a
general aspect of it. That's been a major focus for us and in alot of
ways, that's two sides, it's not only the design of how you can upgrade
customize your characters, but how can we improve the encounters, and
the enemies, how can we make them smarter, and really push me to the
edge, early game, late game so that I'm adapting to situations rather
than just " ah well, the Fire'n' Forget Combat"
VW: Nice, so in
addition we're also getting Smarter Enemies.
ML:That's
absolutely the plan. As the game progresses, we're introducing new
enemies with different behaviours to where you're going "Oh man, I'm
going to have to adjust my strategies and that within the game, there IS
the tool to adjust to those new strategies.
VW: Nice, so do you
feel like if I played Origins, and I have many times, am I going to
jump in and feel like it's familiar?
ML: Oh absolutely, the big
thing for us is that the interface, is, we've done a ton of work to work
on the interface from the console to the PC to make sure they evoked
the type of gameplay that we wanted to. so that point, to my mind, the
wheel is awfully round, so Tossing it out and restarting like, "Now,
you communicate with song" would probably undercut the gameplay that
we're trying to do.
I really want players who have played DAO to
be able to just dive right in and be like " Oh cool, I know how this
plays" Now, lets take a look at what's new, and that's where the
improvements in terms of that responsiveness will be almost instantly
visible.
VW: Well cool, I don't want to talk your ear off too
much.
That's a little ways between now the time we enter the free
Marches.
ML: I'll be honest, I'm itching to give out more
details, but I think at this point it would be a disservice to, just
that, there's so many cool things that we're trying to do with this game
that, we're trying to evoke the DAO Elements, we're trying to get that
sense of that improved combat, you know, as we get closer, I think it's
going to get very cool, and satisfying for the team to see people engage
with DA II, because on the team itself the excitement is really high,
it's something that we've taken in a direction where people are like "
wow, this is pretty fresh, this is cool" , I think it's going to be neat
to watch people's reaction to them.
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Transcript
Stopped at 25:00 as it sort of delves into just miscellaneous chatting
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