Is Bioware's Dragon Age the last of its kind? A solo-player game absent an integrated online component? Or is it actually the next step in what Spore designer Will Wright calls the "massively single player" experience?
Dragon Age (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Windows) heralds Bioware's return to fantasy role-playing, a "dark heroic fantasy" that lets you choose from six origin stories designed to change up your game in more than the usual cursory ways. It's out on November 17th.
In the final part of our interview with the game's lead designer Mike Laidlaw, we talk about the "death" of single-player gaming, a fantasy version of The Wire, the death of moustache-twirling villainy, social networking, and how to get noticed in a crowded room.
This is Part Three (Part One, Part Two)
Game On: A Theory of Fun author Raph Koster argued single-player gaming was doomed back in 2006. He went on to clarify that he meant games in which "only one person [is] making decisions." That pretty much describes games like Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and now Dragon Age coming out three years after his pronunciation. Your response?
Mike Laidlaw: I think the glory of stories--and I think this is something computers are only now starting to be able to participate in--is that stories are shared experiences. It's the shaman telling the tale of whatever around the campfire, the boy scouts with the flashlight under their faces. All these things are primal ways that we as a people communicate, share experiences, and quite often, share wisdom and growth. Before written communication, before the printing press, and before computers certainly. Lore and legends were often wrapped up as fables and parables, for the purposes of sharing experiences.
So to my mind, the most valid story is one that can be experienced but also shared, that can have moments that really resonate with you. And in an ideal world, we're looking at playing to the strengths of computer gaming, and making the game and story reactive, but also enabling people to share that story and say "Look, I did this, and then this, and then this," and feel like an experience happened to them that they want to relate to others. That is where gaming transcends where it's been in the past.
I don't think a single-player experience means you have to do it in isolation. I think that's where the fallacy lies, the sense that by firing up a single-player game you instantly shut down your messaging utility, destroy your Facebook account, and close your Twitter account. These things don't happen. People want to post about what's happening to them, and you're seeing games now that'll for instance allow you to post a Twitter update from inside the game.
We're actually developing something for Dragon Age called the Social Engine that allows you to share the experiences and growth of your characters. Even though it's a single-player game, you'll be able to hold it out for people to take a look and go "I can see what you're doing there, and how you're doing it." One of the big strengths of Dragon Age is that by the time you finish playing, we hope players don't feel like they experienced the story we wanted to tell them, but that they played through their story. We're using specific techniques to guide the experience, to make it so you're not lost and wandering completely disengaged, but within that there's substantial choice and variety. At the end I think it all comes together and you're like "This feels like something I did, and I want to tell people about it."
GO: What kinds of ethical level does the game operate at? Is it broad stroke "with us or against us," good versus evil, Clash of the Titans stuff? Or more like a mythic version of
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