We've written a lot about both 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mass Effect and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dragon Age at TheGamer, but a quote that's always stuck out to me is the idea - discussed at length in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:our oral history of Dragon Age: Origi🦂ns - that wꦇorking on Mass Effect was like being on a ꧅Navy ship, while Dragon Age always had more of a pirate ship vibe. Speaking with Brent Knowles, the lead designer on Dragon Age: Origins, I asked him if that comparison was fair.
“That is probably fair,” Knowles admits. “I think from a design point of view, we landed relatively close to what some of us imagined from near the beginning. We kept the ‘origins’, right? That was a big thing, and that was something that was on the cutting block at times. ‘Why are you having all these multiple beginnings that only a handful of players are going to experience each one?’ [But] we did have some pretty massive cuts. We had a lot of change in art direction, we had changes in project direction. At times, I felt like we were going one direction, and we had to change and go a different direction. In my opinion, we kept some of the big things. We didn't end up with a voiced protagonist, which would have radically shortened the game - that was something that was on the table late in development. But we did drop the multiplayer aspect, so maybe pirate ship in the sense of just going wherever it made sense to go at one time, and with different captains taking the helm at different points.
“I don't think we radically steered in a creative direction. We were certainly being compared to Mass Effect, and there was an intent on changing us into more of a Mass Effect experience at a point. We stayed firm on that. And maybe people below the higher level management on the team didn't initially see that push to become Mass Effect. I think on the second title, there was maybe more of a push in that direction, and then a rebound on the third one to a degree. Mass Effect was so popular, but you can't constantly change in game development. We could have got it done in less than five years if somebody at the high level decided to go in a different direction.”
Knowles was also the lead designer on the original 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Neverwinter Nights, and got his start at BioWare on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur's Gate 2. Compared to Dragon Age and Mass Effect, these are games we discuss substantially less at TheGamer - not because of any aversion to them, but because we're mostly fans of BioWare's epic era when its two mammoth trilogies ruled the RPG world. As someone who left BioWare just as the classic era was shifting towards this new phase of the studio's life cycle, Knowles recalls seeing this change in direction coming.
“It was not a surprise for me,” he says. “It was definitely becoming clear that there was a portion of the company that were leaning towards cinematic heavy experiences. I had started at BioWare on Baldur's Gate 2, so I was coming from a different type of graphic quality point of view. The original Neverwinter Nights didn't have the capacity for cutscenes, it was added for the expansion packs. What I noticed with Dragon Age was I ultimately worked on it for five years. It was the only game I shipped in that five-year window. In my first five years of BioWare, I shipped like three or four different titles, right? So it's becoming clear to us that making these cinematic heavy games was an expensive and time consuming endeavour. We tried to shelter the Dragon Age team to try to make it more of a traditional BioWare game - what we viewed as a BioWare game. Sheltering from what we felt would be simplifying it too much. Mass Effect is a great game, Mass Effect 2 is an even greater game. They are different, though, right? I'm certainly from that earlier BioWare school. Maybe I underestimated BioWare. I was worried that it would be impossible to make high quality story games, a super high quality triple-A having to plan everything so far ahead, write it so far ahead, and then not be able to re-record audio or re-record performance capture.
“I thought part of BioWare’s magic was we would go through playtest lots. I submitted tonnes and tonnes of bugs for all the games I worked on. Story bugs, art bugs, everything. We changed things as people played and said ‘this isn't as good as it could be’. And I was worried that BioWare would not be able to do that. Because it's hard, and it's expensive. And I think I've probably been partly proven right to a degree, but they're still super successful - even their less highly rated games still do really well. There's still lots of really highly talented people at BioWare, they just went a different path. I was starting to come into higher leadership roles, and that's a hard type of project to manage. There are hundreds of people involved and all kinds of things. And you don't get to do any of the fun stuff, right? If you're managing that level, you're just managing all the people and their expectations, so it can be a very daunting experience. I like to kind of get my hands dirty and get to do some of the game design, and the writing, and the creation aspect of it. So good for them. They were braver than I just to stick it out.”
While Mass Effect is held up as BioWare’s most influential title, Knowles feels Neverwinter Nights might be the studio’s dark horse. Launching around the same time as Morrowind, several RPG-focussed magazines (remember those, eh? Kids, they ꦬwere like websites made of real pages) compared the two at the time. In terms of public standing, Morrowindಞ has enjoyed more enduring appeal, but behind the scenes, Knowles argues Neverwinter Nights has had a much bigger impact on the shape of modern gaming.
“[Neverwinter Nights’ expanded edition] gets a tremendous number of downloads and sales and people making content for it,” Knowles says. “I think because of the creator tools, it has a very interesting legacy - maybe even more so because at BioWare, we started requiring people to build content if they wanted to become a designer. So if you wanted a job as a designer at BioWare in the mid 2000s, you had to hand in a Neverwinter Nights module that we reviewed before we decided whether we'd interview, and then there was a test interview where they actually had to make a short one as part of the interview process. A lot of these designers who came through BioWare that way have now moved on to lots of other studios. Many of them are still with Bioware, but many have gone on working at various game studios like Bungie and Blizzard and other places. So in a way Neverwinter Nights was where they got their start as game designers. And they're now branched off to all these various indie and triple-A games. That's a huge legacy in the game industry.”
Neverwinter Nights and Baldur’s Gate are, to Knowles, s♓ynonymousꩵ with BioWare. Dragon Age: Origins is something of a pitstop between the original era of BioWare and the blockbuster era that effectively ended with Dragon Age: Inquisition. One of the things the Dragon Age series has maintained from OG BioWare though is its focus on tactical combat, despite making a temporary diversion from it in Dragon Age 2. Many players choose to stick with action combat, either bashing their way through foes with a mace or flicking between companions in real time to send spells, shots, and skulls flying all at once, for those who want a more methodical tabletop approach, you can pause combat and view it in top-down mode, enabling you to set up each phase of play.
Knowles was a big proponent of including this in Dragon Age, and while it has remained in the series ever since, the RPG scene as a whole has left it behind. In fact, Dragon Age 2’s version of it was severely watered down, with Inquisition showing it a lot more love, underscoring how important it is to Dragon Age as a whole. But what has it been like watching Dragon Age stand alone against the changing of the tides? “I think other companies have come up with creative solutions to try to be modern,” Knowles says. “I think X-COM’s a strong example of that. They went cinematic and it had a lot of tactical elements. There are a few others, like the Divinity games, where I've seen really creative takes on it. It is a rarity - there seems to be a trend to a single character you're controlling and more action-centric [combat]. But when we were making Dragon Age, it was really important for us to feel like a modernised Baldur's Gate, and it would have been hard not to have tactical combat. I think when you decide what your intent is for your game, that was a really strong pillar for Dragon Age. We needed to have the tactics, but there were certainly internal arguments of getting rid of the top-down view and automating everything. I think that's why there's that somewhat clever AI system where you can create rules and whatnot for your companions in Dragon Age Origins to accommodate people who just wanted to control one character. Everybody still does smart stuff. But I definitely wanted to be able to pause and click on each character. That's something [where] maybe nostalgia is playing a big role, right?
“Baldur’s Gate 2 was my first team. I got to do a lot of the combat encounters and bring a lot of Dungeons & Dragons, the tabletop experiences I was used to, into Baldur’s Gate 2. In Dragon Age, I ended up becoming too much of a lead. I didn't get to do a lot of that hands-on stuff some of the other team members did. We know the player can pause and assign actions, you can do a lot of this action, this counter action. And for tabletop players, that's cool. A lot of action games are just a blur of action, right? Your reflexes matter, visuals are going off all over the place. But the Baldur’s Gate games, we felt smart as a player. You'd walk in a room, you'd maybe get completely wiped out. Oh, okay, they did this spell and they did that spell and all that kind of stuff. And then you had to figure out your new tactics and come in fresh. Dragon Age had a bit of that, but it was not at the level of Baldur’s Gate 2 for sure. But I don't feel you could really have much of that if you didn't have some kind of party control policy in place. If that's not the type of game you're making, then you don't need it at all and action-centric [combat] with one character being controlled is perfectly fine. But we definitely felt Dragon Age: Origins needed to be party-controlled with pause and play.”
Knowles’ passion for tabletop-style combat is currently being put to good use - he’s written a Dungeons & Dragons campaign book based on a retelling of Norse mythology. Having been heavily involved in the t♔hree games most influenced by Dungeons & Dragons, there’s a cyclical feel to the whole thing.
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“It's probably very strange if I spent too much time thinking about it,” Knowles admits. “My life has been very much like this. I wrote and played Dungeons & Dragons throughout high school, I wrote a couple of articles, I got a job at BioWare. And then every other thing has been connected to somebody from BioWare or from Wizards of the Coast. My Dungeons & Dragons knowledge made Baldur’s Gate 2 a much better game, in my opinion. I really felt the stuff I had learned at the tabletop, I was able to put into the game. For me, and other people like me, it was cool.
“Then I got to help mentor new designers and teach them some of those elements. So even designers who came from more first-person shooter kinds of games, they maybe got some RPG-ness from discussions with me, and I learned stuff from them. Fast forward to now where I'm doing this campaign book, I can look at how we structured story at BioWare, how we gave the player a choice but constrained it. I didn't do a lot of writing directly, but I worked with the writers all the time. [I knew] all the tips and tricks they did to create compelling adventure areas and narratives and companions. I can now put all that into a role-playing book. Originally, I was improving the quality of the video game from DnD, and now I think I'm improving the quality of a role-playing product from my video game knowledge and experience.”
describes itself as Norse mythology merged with tabletop fantasy, and has reached its Kickstarter goal. However, it can still be backed - and tier rewards can still be claimed - for the next ten days.