We collared Dragon Age II's lead designer after his Gamesblog Live address to discuss how innovative narrative structures impact gameplay, whether games are art and what it's like working at the legendary Bioware
Following his talk at the inaugural Gamesblog Live event, in which he explored "the importance of narrative and storytelling in gaming", we grabbed Dragon age II lead designer Mike Laidlaw for an interview.
Articulate and thoughtful, with a background as a writer before he started making video games, Laidlaw would be a good man to put in front of those who persist in maintaining that games are uniformly mindless.
After pumping him for further details regarding Dragon Age II's unusual "framed narrative" structure and how that affects gameplay, the conversation progressed to more general observations on the nature of role-playing games (RPGs) and the joys of working for Bioware one of the largest, most cerebral and most successful developers. Finally, Laidlaw offered an impassioned argument in favour of games as a valid art-form.
Your theme is narrative and storytelling in games. That's something for which Bioware is famed ? how do you take that and build it into a gameplay experience?
I think the key is to use story not as a replacement to gameplay but as a flavour of gameplay. And to acknowledge that just having a good story isn't enough if you don't have the flow and pacing that comes out of combat and out of having progression.
Those three things are the holy triumvirate, really, of RPGs. I've played games with great stories, but if the combat gets dull after a while, you start to disengage between the story moments. For us as a studio, we basically keep it as a priority ? our studio mission is to build the best emotionally engaging games in the world. And a big part of that is a commitment to writing as a craft.
We have over 25 writers on staff across all the Bioware studios and five editors, and then many of the senior staff are ex-writers like myself, so that keeps the focus.
Talk us through Dragon Age II's framed narrative structure.
It's one that has been used before, but the idea of the framed narrative is that one story is telling another story. It really hasn't been done a ton in gaming, although it has shown up occasionally. What we wanted to do was to try and build a game that covered a much longer span of time than normal ? a whole decade of history.
We have an agenda of wanting to make the Dragon Age franchise stand out as one that evolves over time, so that as you play the games, it feels like a world that is changing. And while that can be a bit of a monumental task, our goal was to deliver an experience that feels like you're playing through the most significant moments in the life of the man or woman you control.
That meant we needed a narrative style that would get us from significant moment A to significant moment B, and that's what the framed narrative came out of: the idea of an interrogation that really is dragging forward through time, and the person suffering the interrogation, Varric, wanting to make sure that the interrogator understands the details, not just the high-level information. And that's where the player's experience comes in, because those details are key to that.
And the framed structure allows you to add an element of unreliability to the narrative ? are there not parts of the game that you replay from different narrative viewpoints?
Yes. That's something we're playing with. You have to be very careful in gaming, as a medium, whenever you take away the player's trust. Because if you say: "No, this isn't what you did," then after a while, nothing will matter and for all I know, you'll be telling me it's all a dream at the end of the game, and I'll want to punch you.
So, the big goal for us is to ensure that at those moments when we do add some unreliability, they serve a gameplay purpose ? whether that be through enriching the story or, as we're doing at the beginning of the game, giving you a taste of what your character will be like at a higher level, what the legendary version of your character is.
Through that, you can dive into the game and encounter the combat systems that we've changed nice and fast, then get to see how the story plays out.
And you've changed the combat system so it's more responsive compared to Origins, and made the game more action-oriented. Are you worried that will alienate hardcore Dragon Age fans?
There's always a danger of alienating the hardcore when you change anything ? they wouldn't be the hardcore if they didn't truly love what was already there. But we wanted to make sure that we held onto the elements that made Dragon Age: Origins strong ? party-based, tactical ? even going so far as to replace spell-combos with cross-class combos so that now, when a mage freezes someone, a mage can't blow up that guy like you could in Origins; now a warrior or rogue has to get involved.
So the whole party becomes part of this concert of death, which makes the game even more tactical. But the fact that now, you charge into combat and swing, rather than shuffling awkwardly into position, to me takes care of a convention we could do without. There was even some initial backlash, with people asking: "What, have you made it an action game?" The answer is, frankly, action games have been stealing from RPGs for the past five years ? levelling up, and getting a badge so that you can get a new weapon, that's an RPG mechanic.
So it's time that we, as a genre, took a look at some of those elements that action games have done exceptionally well and asked what we can learn from them.
So is there still a place in the world for turn-based RPGs? The Japanese seem to think there is.
Yes, I think there is. There's a place in the world for every genre, in my opinion. The problem is that if a genre doesn't change and evolve, or acknowledge that tastes change over time and entire new generations of gamers have come along, then it runs the risk of being pigeonholed as inherently old-school and not interesting. In a lot of ways, the key is to take classic gameplay on and reimagine it in new ways. Any game that refuses to change "simply because this is the way it's done" runs a significant risk of stagnating in an industry that's all about innovation.
Bioware seems to be bidding to take over the world at the moment ? with Mass Effect 3, Star Wars: The Old Republic and Dragon Age II in the works, you must be the biggest developer in the world right now. What's it like being a part of that huge mass?
It's a carefully managed thing, because I think the greatest danger to us would be hubris ? getting lost in our own pride and becoming egotists. But that, luckily, goes back to the founding principles given out by [Bioware founders] Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka, who are still very active in the company.
Greg is running the studio for SWTOR, and Ray will come in and play Dragon Age II for 50 hours and give extensive feedback, and he's still very grounded. That trickles down, and we realise what we're doing is creating something that we believe is art, and that we believe is entertaining. But that doesn't make us rock stars. What it does is make us people with one of the best jobs in the world, and one that we desperately don't want to screw up.
But people are still reluctant to admit that games are as relevant, artistically, as, say movies or music. What can be done to alter that perception?
I think, if anything, time is required ? time, and a willingness to support artistic vision. There is a danger of the games industry as a whole becoming this money-making, sequel-pumping cash-cow, but in my experiences of everyone I've met in the games industry, I've yet to meet that soulless guy who just wants to make that quick buck.
Certainly there are fiscal responsibilities but, even within that, there's always that gleam in the eye of the developer when they have an idea. To me, any time we can come to an event like this and talk about the emotion of storytelling or, say, the way that they're evolving a type of combat in Crysis 2, that makes me understand that what we're doing is part of an evolving and growing medium. And if that medium evokes a response in people then, to my mind, it's art, in and of itself. But I do think that we're at a point when it's hard to defend games as art because we don't have our own fancy language. While that's coming, it does take time to evolve.
Saying, for example, that games can't be art because they don't provide the same experience all the time is like saying that you'd have to invalidate the entirety of theatre as art because somebody might cough, which I consider to be bullshit.
Bioware comes across as one of the more intellectual developers ? Greg and Ray have academic backgrounds. Is it a company that values the cerebral approach?
I think it is. I wouldn't say we're unique in that. But I think a cerebral approach is better appreciated by RPG fans than it would be by, say, shooter fans. Although that carries the risk of it being exclusive and only for nerds, which is exactly the wrong impression.
There are so many people playing World of Warcraft, and so many people levelling up in Call of Duty; a lot of people don't even realise that every time they gained a driving point in GTA: San Andreas they were levelling up as if playing an RPG.
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