Lang interview over Dragon Age: Inquisition

Producer Cameron Lee legt in een lang  interview met AusGamers uit wat voor uitdagingen BioWare tegenkwam bij het ontwikkelen van Dragon Age: Inquisition. Hoe de dieren op elkaar reageren en op mensen is blijkbaar niet zo eenvoudig vast te leggen.

Cameron Lee is een Australiër. Misschien dat hij daarom erg loslippig is tegenover zijn landgenoten. Hier zijn de meest interessante stukjes van het interview.

AusGamers: What’s your favourite BioWare game?
Cameron: KotOR [Knights of the Old Republic].

AusGamers: I noticed that the female lead that we saw today [during the stage presentation] had a little bit more armour than I’m used to seeing in an action-RPG, so it’s almost like there’s this seriousness behind it as well. What sort of tone are you going for?
Cameron: That’s a great question, and the armour actually plays a part of that. You look at… the tone is more moody, I guess, and that’s because the events that are transpiring in the world are quite serious now. We spent the last two games building up this sense of chaos and strife over the world, and a lot of the books have got the same thing; we’ve tried to build up this thing. So the world now is in absolute chaos. The big rift is in the sky, as you know, there is someone behind it, which you got a first look at today in the trailer, which I was just wrapped with, so yeah, shit’s gotten real.

AusGamers: That’s the tagline, right?
Cameron: Exactly. That should be the tagline. Not, ‘Lead them or fall’, but ‘Shit’s got real’. That’s reflected in the art, that’s reflected in the armour and things you can create through characters and dialogue and choices you make, and you lead this big inquisition, this organisation and, again, you saw a very small clip, and hopefully you get a chance to play it as well back here, but the war table where you can command the inquisition and do this 300 or more operations and unlock different parts of the world to go and explore. Again, they’re all themed in this context of the world’s in strife.

AusGamers: I find it really interesting that there’s this whole big thing of the inquisition, which is obviously the subtitle, because my understanding of an inquisition is as a very negative thing from the likes of the Spanish Inquisition. I actually initially expected the inquisition to be the evil force that was taking over the world and I’m suddenly getting into the mind of, hang on, an inquisition doesn’t have to be bad. Are you finding that something that you’re wrestling with, or are you playing with the greyer area of the ideas of this group of people being pulled together to go, ‘Okay, you get to determine what is wrong and what is right’?
Cameron: It’s an interesting question; I get it every now and then. For us, the inquisition in its purest form is about uncovering the truth of what’s behind all this chaos and doing whatever’s necessary to find that truth. So then when you think about the Spanish Inquisition, although they did lots of horrendous things, I guess in their minds, anyway, they were trying to uncover the truth. So that’s our connection, or our thought behind the inquisition. It’s an interesting name because it invokes a lot of what you’re talking about, that memory of the Spanish Inquisition. But what we’ve found is when we first started testing the name, people go, ‘I don’t have a problem with it, but I imagine someone else might have a problem with it.’ But I’ve never had anybody say, ‘I’ve got a problem with it.’ It really is just all about you bringing together all these people, these heroes and these leaders in their own right, to form this inquisition and build it up over time and uncover that truth, and then try and do something about it.

AusGamers: You’ve touched on the idea of story, narrative, characters; how is that going to play out, ultimately? Is it a very linear story you’re going through, albeit with branching choices? Is there an open ending, or multiple endings that you can play with?
Cameron: We’re doing things quite differently in Inquisition than the previous games, so there are two major aspects to the game, one being the critical-path story, the other being the open area, exploration, and we link those together through the Inquisition.(…) (A)lthough the critical path does have these big branching points and exclusive content, exclusive plots, even, based on some of the decisions and actions you take in the game, the player, through their normal play-through, can go in and out of the story whenever they want to. They can go and explore, they can go and follow the story, they can spend 20 hours exploring, then come back and then decide, okay, now I want to get back into developing the story. I want to take this aspect of the story and go follow that. So there’s a lot more variety in how the player has control over their experience with the story than with previous games.

AusGamers: (...) Okay. When I was watching the demo, I was thinking about how, if I was talking to you about, say, making a first-person shooter, we would be probably taking about things like artificial intelligence, which really doesn’t seem to be a question that people are asking in terms of an action-RPG. How important is AI in Dragon Age?
Cameron: It’s actually really important. It’s amazingly important, because what you’re doing is creating a fantasy world, right. From the ground up, you build this thing. That’s building the characters, that’s building the factions and the cultures and the environments that they live in. So when you look at animal life; how would animals behave? How would foxes react to wolves, then how would wolves react to men? And then there are demons and behemoths and giants and dragons and all these things, so they all have different types of predator and prey behaviours against each other. And then, human AI, in terms of pure combat, that’s actually really important, as well, because you want something that’s believable and reactionary. So if you see an archer and soldier, as enemies, why wouldn’t an archer try and get behind a soldier and have the soldier take point, so the archer can continue to fire arrows. When we’re looking at creating the AI for combat, we do think about all those things. And it takes a long time to get all that sort of stuff right. We had these really interesting bugs where the archers would always try and back up behind cover, but in a massive open-world game, cover is miles away, right. So you’d be chasing these archers all over the place, and so this is why we spend a lot of time on AI, to get it feeling right and balanced and believable, yet still have it be controllable enough to be entertaining. So when you run up against, say, you’ve seen some wolves that have attached some archers, everyone’s behaving realistically, and then you become a third aspect to that combat encounter, everyone doing what they need to be doing.

AusGamers: Just going back to AI, do you find that the ability to freeze combat whenever you want almost nullifies the idea of having super-smart AI, because players can get their three buddies to attack whoever’s at the back, and the player can then focus on whoever they want to, so they won’t even notice what’s going on behind the scenes?
Cameron: Yeah, not really, for us, because our AI is pretty smart. These days, what they’ll do is try to counter whatever strategy you can place. If I started to lay down fire traps and things like that, they’re going to try and path around it, or you might, for example, send one of your archers up to a high vantage point, so they’re going to send a warrior up to that high vantage point, so there are different things that the AI will do. They’ll react to things, and they’ll try and counter your strategies, which is pretty cool.

AusGamers: Is it possible to play through the entire game in real-time, or is that something that’s really advised against, or would become almost impossible, especially when you’re involved in a multi-tiered approach to the dragon fights where you’re attacking specific parts of the body?
Cameron: You could absolutely do it. So the approach that we’re taking to the whole games development and production is very much about this concept of play your way. So we’ll give you a massive world with all these different factions and characters and environments and stories in it, and then we give you the tools like real-time combat, or tactical combat, we give you all these different classes and races, and all sorts of stuff. Then it’s up to the player about how they want to play through it, so someone could absolutely play it through all action, they could play it through all tactical, if they wanted, or a mix of both. We’ve gotten to the point now where, for us anyway, as developers, for when we play it, we swap in and out of tactical and action really smoothly and really easily. You saw it a little bit in some of that [stage] demo. You’ll notice it went in and out, sometimes you’ll plan more elaborate moves, sometimes you’ll just do a quick thing, because it’s so quick now to do it. So that’s generally how we tend to play, but players, different players play different ways, and that’s why we’ll give you the tools and you can do what you want.

AusGamers: I find that games nowadays rarely seem to be single genre. So, every shooter you’re looking at nowadays has RPG mechanics, as a given. But when you go over to the RPG world, it’s a bit more difficult to find those obvious links to other genres, I mean, outside of the idea of an action-RPG. What sort of other genres or games specifically outside of the RPG realm are you looking to, and how will we see that evidenced in Inquisition?
Cameron: Influence comes in from all kinds of places. It could be movies: our art director is a big fan of Japanese movies and Renaissance art, so you get influence everywhere, and that’s just from the art side of things. From a game-design point of view, they could be, I’m trying to think, like operations at the war table, there are many games that have done this concept of, I have people working for me and I’m going to use this UI to order them to do things. And so when you look at that and you go, okay, well we have this big organisation that we lead, how do we lead them? And then how do we make it immersive, how do we make it part of the game world? Then you start thinking about, okay, what if you really were a commander and you had a war table, you could imagine, generals would have in medieval times, and then what would that mean? Okay, I can now order my people out, and then you start linking it back into other systems that you have, and that’s really where the iteration and the development comes from. So, for example, as a leader of the Inquisition, you can judge people. You have a throne, right? And you can sit on the throne and you can judge people, and a number of those judgements can actually lead to you making people serve you as an agent, so you judge them and say, ‘I’m not going to cut your head off, but you’re going to come work for me now.’ So they become agents, and by getting agents, you speed up or enhance some of the operations you can do at the war table, so all of these things link together in that way. We look at this influence in a variety of different ways. Sometimes, you’ll be sitting there at night playing a game, or sitting there in bed and go, ‘Shit, that was really cool fun,’ and then you start to follow it through and it takes on a life of its own now.

AusGamers: Cool. Thank you very much.
Cameron: You’re welcome.