00:16It was 2009, towards the end of when we were finishing Dragon Age Origins, when myself, Matt Goleman and Mike
00:23Layla started to get together on a weekly basis to talk about the direction we wanted to take the franchise,
00:28the things we wanted to explore.
00:30We built a kind of a cartoon animatic of what we would like to be in the game if we
00:36were going to really pull out the stops and do whatever we wanted.
00:40It's actually very much like the beginning of the game. There's a conversation wheel, there's a dragon airstrike, you're a
00:47cool badass warrior with spiky armor chopping murlocs in half by the millions.
00:52It was exciting. It was like, wow, man, can we actually pull that off? Can we feel like the party
00:57works together to demolish foes rather than having their disparate abilities?
01:02So brainstorming with the core leads on Dragon Age is pretty exhilarating.
01:06I really love to lead him astray with crazy ideas. Every time we would talk, I'd start talking about how
01:14every piece of our art would involve Ulrich von Hauck, the Licanthrope character of our game, howling and like tasting
01:21his own blood.
01:22Anyways, it kind of got out of control after a while, so I had to drop it. But it was
01:26pretty fun while it lasted.
01:27But you know, the final beautiful touch of it was when we said, what if we could tell a story
01:32that was more personal? And that's where the idea of Hauck, the champion of Kirkwall, and that rise to power
01:37over a decade of history came out.
01:38Where Origins really shone by having this huge epilogue, had thousands of variations based on the choices you've made. Instead,
01:44we've moved that into the gameplay.
01:46People you've interacted with at the beginning of the game are going to have their kind of situations profoundly affected
01:51by their interaction with Hauck, your character.
01:53If getting the relic gets Castillon off your back, then I'll help you retrieve it.
01:58There might be something I could do for you, if you're looking for company later.
02:03You re-interact with him. You see how that worked out. So we believe it may be our most reactive
02:08game to date.
02:09So here we were. We finished these brainstorming sessions. There's a lot of stuff on the whiteboards. There's a lot
02:13of pie-in-the-sky ideas.
02:15And then Dragon Age Origins came out. And it beat all of our expectations. Perfect scores, the VGA awards.
02:21We also had a bunch of meta reviews, you know, comments coming in about Origins.
02:25And what really resonated for me was this resounding theme that Origins was an amazing, story-based, classical RPG.
02:33But that there were elements of it that seemed to be dragging.
02:36If you're telling a dark fantasy, you don't want combat to feel like you're playing a chess game with a
02:40friend.
02:41So that seemed to be the reviews. No one was really panning the game to me.
02:43It let you have this cool tactical experience and obviously the story was intense, you know, well-loved.
02:48But the question for me was, is there any way that we could just take the RPG concepts, the very
02:54core tenets of it, and move it forward into a newer feel?
02:57Something that would work as well on the consoles as it did on PC?
03:00We've really stuck to our vision. We've kept what was good about Origins and shaved off the edges and made
03:06something really unique.
03:07Matt wanted much more composed imagery, places that played up the character.
03:11I wanted combat that felt like it wasn't silently rolling dice behind the scenes.
03:15That felt like when I was pushing a button, it was responding and my characters were responding accordingly.
03:20But because it looks faster, because it's got a character with a voice, because of this historical story we're going
03:25to do,
03:26it ran the risk of people saying, oh my god, that is so different. I'm not sure it's for me.
03:31And we knew that would be a potential problem.
03:33But at the same time, we also knew that the game we were designing was not one that would actually
03:38alienate them.
03:39So what we've been very open with is telling people to go hands-on.
03:42And the big thing we saw is that people, even people who loved Origins, people who came wearing armor from
03:47Origins,
03:48were playing the game and going, oh, oh wow, I see what you did here.
03:52It's almost hard to communicate how much this game still feels like Origins, despite feeling completely different.
04:00We're trying to make a game that we would love to play.
04:03We have the best in the biz, running their teams, and working really hard together to make this thing come
04:07true.
04:08Even when Origins was nearing completion, we had already started thinking about Dragon Age 2.
04:12We'd already begun sharpening that axe.
04:15So the moment they took the minders off, said, okay, go, we knew exactly what we were making.
04:20We knew the exact vision we were trying to bring to the play.
04:36We knew the exact vision we were trying to bring to the play.
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