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felassan · 11 months

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Some more snippets of interest and insight from Mark Darrah, from an older Mark Darrah on Games YouTube video where he was livestreaming playing Dragon Age: Origins some months ago -

Chat asked "Do you think they'll ever explore why Dwarven Darkspawn can use magic?" and Mark replied "Maybe, I doubt they will explore that too much. I mean it's sort've, the question is is like, are genlocks all dwarves, or are they some dwarves and some 'something coming from a broodmother that aren't really dwarves anymore'. I guess that would be one out."

[source]

He also talked more generally about DA:O and the franchise and things in general. These bits are collected under a cut due to length -

"I do wish one of the factions in DA:O had their shit together so they could help you immediately, like just an extra throwaway one that's like 'yeah, we got our stuff all packed'"

Chat asked "Do you remember any other game studios in particular that BioWare studied and took inspiration from to make new games? I heard dragons in DA:I were inspired by Skyrim". Mark replied, "Every game is influenced by the space around it. DA:I is influenced by Skyrim in that open-world games were kind've the expectation of RPGs at the time, and if you're making an open-world game in the early 2010s Skyrim is certainly the one to be paying attention to. We definitely looked at it, so the answer to that question is everything. There are certain games that I would argue had very little influence, the ones that you would think might, things like Wind Waker and GTA. These are games that are either so expensive (GTA) or just took so long (Wind Waker) that they're way less influential than you would expect them to be, largely because game devs look at them as being un-replicable."

Did the Ash Warriors survive Ostagar? "Pretty sure that's an unanswerable question"

Chat asked "Did the DA team remove many toggleable abilities in later games? Noticed DA:O has an ABUNDANCE of them". Mark replied "Yeah I think we got rid of them because, stamina and mana are kind of a weird thing because I personally find it very awkward that you're limiting power usage based upon two things. So you've got a cooldown on individual powers and then you have a pool of mana/stamina. But so, it's been kind've a thing that's kind've fallen in and out of favor with the combat team there."

Chat commented "Was it intentional game design that on PC DA:I has only 8 abilities? I was real sad that even the focus abilities took a slot. Lots of cool combos I couldn't do Q_Q''. Mark said "I don't think it's intentional, I don't know why there's only 8 on PC. I mean it was balanced to that for consoles, but I don't think it would be, it's likely just a UI, like 'how much time we spent on the UI' thing. The shower answer is because 8 is the number on the consoles, but I don't know that there was any particular reason why it couldn't be more on PC other than just not having to worry about rebalancing. I'm pretty sure it's 8 on consoles so it defaulted to 8 on PC, it could have been more but then you have to also do balancing to see if it affects the combat balance and it just introduces another vector, so. Its's just less variables"

On the end cards/epilogue slides in DA:O - "DA:O was originally envisioned as being a one off, so there was a lot of timebombs set up in there, for example Orzammar is supposed to be in a civil war about now, now-ish, so like there's a lot of mess left by DA:O's cards"

"I was thinking yesterday about all of the intelligent races that've been sort've introduced in the background of DA:O, you know like the tree ents, and the ghasts and the giants, that've just kinda been introduced as kinda one-offs and then never brought back in Dragon Age." Here chat mentioned the lizard people. "That's right, we do have the lizard people in the paintings"

Chat asked "Would you agree that elven history is basically them Tevintering before Tevinter could Tevinter? They had magisters, and slaves, and wars". Mark replied, "I mean the elves as-presented are basically yeah, pretty much, the Tevinter are pretty much echoing many of the things the elves have done, and picking up their bits of discarded garbage and doing bad stuff with them, so yes I don't think the elves, I don't think ancient elven lore is anything to be super excited about in terms of not being terrible"

Chat asked "Can you speak as to why the healing spells weren't brought back for DA:I?" Mark replied, "Healing spells and regenerating mana mean that every single combat needs to be a threat on its own, which means in an open world, you can't basically do an open world with regenerating mana and healing spells because the combat in the open world is pointless, it's just a series of increasingly tedious road blocks because you can't make every single encounter with some bandits be a threat to your life. If you had non-regenerating mana or you had some sort of damage mitigation, then you could do damage mitigation, same kind've problem but at least it's sort've preemptive so you can kinda whittle away, or you could do no regenerating mana and then make that be your limiting factor"

Chat asked why DA:O wasn't turn-based. Mark said "Because Baldur's Gate isn't turn-based either, DA:O was definitely trying to evoke BG from a combat perspective, which is pause and play". He continued "one thing that I've always found frustrating with turn-based combat is it can, without some sort of auto-resolution it can make the minor combat really tedious, like 'I am definitely going to beat you, but I still have to go through five turns of combat because that's just how it's balanced'. Whereas way back in BG1, the thinking with pause and play was if you can massively overpower the combat you just don't pause, if you need to think more you can pause, so that's really where pause and play came from"

Chat commented that DA:O "does have a lot of rough edges that don't exactly puzzle together well in later games because they hadn't realized it was necessary". Mark said "Oh for sure there are rough edges around, both DAII and DA:I are actively trying to clean up the mess left by this game. There are too many.. DA:O has the problem of magic comes from a bunch of different sources, but yet it's not very well-defined, so since DA:O there's been an effort to kinda bring them together into something that forms a cohesive understandable metaphysics. You can have infinite sources of magic which you see in some fantasy where magic just comes from magic, which is fine, but that's not what we have in DA:O. We have blood magic and we have lyrium magic and we have the Ashes and spirits and darkspawn and the Taint and it's sort've, it doesn't know what, how these join together and that's been a thing that sort've loomed over the franchise. Better honestly to have had just, magic comes from magic, and not have to worry about it, but instead kind've had to slowly collapse the space into something understandable as time went on"

On teleporting in DAII: "I think it tries to explain itself through lore as being just moving really fast, I don't know if we bothered to do that in DA:I or if we just let it go. But yeah in DAII it's definitely presented as just moving really fast. The no teleporting rule is for two reasons. It's basically David Gaider putting a restriction into the IP because teleportation is, D&D has a, if you think about it, has a couple of really big problems. If you can teleport, what does defense look like? And if you have low level mind control how would society react to that? So blood magic is the response to the mind control, and the no teleportation rule is a response to how we deal with that, but I think, honestly you need to keep the door open. And in a computer game as opposed to just a tabletop game, you don't have to deal with some of the stuff, you can just make it incredibly rare as a solution. There are problems with the way things have been presented in DA, even in DA:O, that would introduce problems that are very similar to teleportation - you move through the Fade, that's like moving through the ethereal plane or the plane of shadows of what have you, which introduces exactly the same problems as teleportation. I do think that the presentation of how society views magic in DA, at least the background presentation (people are pretty much fine with you doing it), is probably pretty accurate to how society would view it. It's a tool, you're not gonna necessarily just go murder everyone but you're definitely gonna try to control it in some manner, especially in a society like this"

"Everything in Dragon Age is presented from the perspective of shining a light on things, but you can never draw a one-to-one connection with anything in real life. That's always going to be a restriction or maybe even an intentional thing to allow the conversation to exist. Doesn't mean there's not room for commentary but yeah it's not, the Dalish draw inspiration from a bunch of different places"

"I think one of the main reasons that sylvans never showed up again is that the models wouldn't have worked in future versions. That doesn't mean they couldn't have recreated them, but that's part of it. I think that part of the problem was getting the artists excited into making them. They are a custom skeleton, I mean you might be able to make them off of, say, the giant skeleton, they would obviously be different than the ones in DA:O, but yeah, there certainly would be a use for them but they would have to be rebuilt because the ones from DA:O are too old. You might be able to make something work on the Behemoth"

"The Behemoth is definitely an example of 'thing that was created because an artist was excited about it'. It's got a lot of weird shapes, so it's got a lot of trouble reaching things, so it's actually problematic from a gameplay perspective, but sometimes Art makes something and you work with it, sometimes Design makes something and you work wit it. I like that kind of back and forth, where the leadership on a specific feature can move around a little bit"

DA:I has a lot "going on so the mages and templars are kind've being pushed into the background [there] for sure, somewhat intentionally"

Chat commented "It just occurred to me that the monstrous spider model must've been made after this for DAII since there aren't any in DA:O". Marl replied "That's probably correct. Most of the models, despite the short development time, way more was rebuilt for DAII than makes rational sense"

[source]

(pls note that in places there is a bit of paraphrasing of the info, the best source is always the primary source with full quotes in their original context)

#dragon age: dreadwolf #dragon age 4 #the dread wolf rises #da4 #dragon age #bioware #video games #long post #longpost #one day i will finish getting thru these videos #and the seemingly-endless list of posts i have a list of to make hh #one day..

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