Interview by: Todd Brakke

Dragon Age is wrapping up now, so six months from now what has to happen for you to call it a success story?

Sales always figures in. A sense that it hit its goal of creating a game that was a landmark in fantasy. That people have attached to the world we have created and understand that it’s got its own history and lore and religion and that they are obviously interested in more, that they want to see new content, they want to download new additions to the game, they’re clamoring for a sequel; that kind of thing. It would be extremely gratifying.

To my mind, really, if we achieve what we set out to do, which was to create a brand new fantasy world that compels people to play and the sales and critical reviews back that up – good high-quality evaluations, which is something Bioware has always tried to maintain, to continue to keep our games up to a level where we are proud of them.

You mentioned the deep nature of the world that you’re building. When a lot of the very early videos came out there were a lot of comparisons to Lord of the Rings and obviously there’s some inspiration there from that, but do you think once players get into the game and really dig into it that they’re going to see a lot of differences where it really does become its own world and not something that gets compared to something else?

It’s hard to make anything fantasy and not run smack dab into Lord of the Rings, especially after the movies. Those were exceptional renditions of an exceptional property. But to Dragon Age’s strength, I think what it achieves is to take the familiar – like our elves and our dwarves and our humans. They’re all the right proportions, the elves have pointy ears, dwarves tend to have beards. These are all things you know and understand. So you can ease into it without being particularly overwhelmed. There’s no, “What are the folkblah?” Right? Like it’s a completely made up race or whatever. Rather when you ease into that [Dragon Age] you go, “Okay, cool, so these are dwarves,” and then what we do is we start presenting how dwarves are different and we present how this world has elements of the familiar and then that little dash of the uncanny, constantly thrown in there. It’ll be like, “Oh, wow, these dwarves are really political. I was not expecting that!” And I think that’s where players get to feel comfortable and interested rather than overwhelmed and threatened.