When you guys talk about the game, you talk about it as a dark heroic fantasy; something with more mature content and mature content is one of those things that is a little subjective as to what that means. There’s been obvious attention paid to the presence of sexual content and the violence and the amount of blood and such. Where do you draw the line between what is mature and what is gratuitous?

That’s a really good one. I think at the end of the day you have to be comfortable with what you’ve created as a creator. And everyone’s got their own line, so it’s a fuzzy space. But our art director has a wonderful mantra, “Violent, but not gratuitous. Sexy, but not sexist.” I think everyone’s kind of got a line where they know that, okay, this is charged, but it’s not degrading. This is violent, but we’re not lingering on shots of entrails. Instead we’re just showing spatters of blood and stuff like that. So, I think what you have to do is make a game where if someone said, “Your game is too violent,” you, at the end of day, can say, “I don’t think so. I think my game is appropriately violent.” Because this is a game about swords and sorcery and, you know what, swords do a lot of damage.

This is true. To extend on that, having played the game for a couple days now and having seen how a lot of stuff is presented in terms of the actual blood, it’s a huge source of imagery in this game. Is something thematic going on there with Dragon Age, its story, and just the concept of blood in the game? It’s everywhere in this game, in the story elements, splattered on armor, on the logos, the credits…

Yep. One of the major thrusts of the entire game, of course, is the Greywardens in opposition to The Blight. It is a game that is designed to be relatively uncompromising about the combats and the way that they occur. So, you have blood on a purely visceral level of – our combats are not just abstracted, here’s a series of numbers and then a guy falls over. Instead we try to aggressively have finishing moves; like the leaping up and stabbing the ogre in the face. That kind of stuff, which is just an indicator that this is the direction we’re taking from a stylistic and reward path. But then you go deeper and dig into the story and you realize that the blood of the darkspawn is essentially the corruption that’s spreading. There are stories of lineage; there are stories of these old kings that go back to the beginning of time. And you realize that you have almost, these elements of blood that weave their way through the story and become a thematic element over the course of it. One side represents corruption, the other side, in a way, almost represents hope and sort of the strength of man. In a way, it’s a lot of the same things Tolkien played with, the elven heritage, Aragorn being one of the lost men of Dunedain.

You mentioned earlier the notion of betrayal in the game and in the time I’ve spent with it I’ve seen no less than two or three different instances of it. Was that also a theme you consciously chose to explore?

Absolutely. To my mind violence, lust, and betrayal are the three major themes of the game. Violence in both the very physical standpoint and just the scope of war, the cloud of war hanging over. The lust for power as well as lust for just physical gratification is certainly a major part of it because you’ll see people who have fallen into those traps. And betrayal being something that, to my mind, is kind of a major theme of Dragon Age is the sense that even in the face of this storm cloud clearly on the horizon – explicitly so – in that opening scene with Duncan, people are still willing to follow their own agendas, even though it means that there may be nothing left for them to rule. They’re still willing to make plays for power. It’s that human weakness that I think helps make the game so compelling in terms of its villains, because you can understand them. They’re not just doing this because they’re evil, they’re doing it because they see an opportunity and they’re striking. Or they don’t understand the scope of what they’re up against, that quintessential, “Oh it’s not really a Blight.” No. It is. It humanizes the experience, I think, for the player to have people they can understand, “My god, I can see how I’d end up like that.”

When you’re coming up with these characters, in particular ones that are going to lead to a betrayal, do you worry about tipping your hand too much before the actual act of betrayal? Do you want people to be surprised by the act, or do you want them thinking, “Well, obviously that guy was going to stab us in the back.”

It’s funny how people are reacting in different ways. I think the best presentation of any betrayal is that they don’t say, “Well, obviously,” so much as they go, “Wait, I… ohhh, of course!” That’s the best betrayal. It’s where there’s enough hints, and certainly follow-up – information scattered around where you understand, not just that they did the betrayal, but how they planned it or how it came about. That, to me, is when it really shines. It may not be totally a surprise, you know he’s up to something, but it isn’t immediately telegraphed what he’s up to. So having a character who says, “Yes, well, I’m sure it will be interesting,” is one thing, whereas a character saying, “Well, I sure hope the reinforcements arrive. Nyar, nyar, nyar.” That’s where you fail.

I want it noted that you were rolling your eyes a lot there.

A lot of eye-rolling right there, yeah. You can add a mustache twirl. Nyah!

If at any point the villain appears to be attempting to digest the scenery [gestures], then you have failed. So, yeah, it’s a careful art. In a lot of ways, what we do to address it is the writer takes a crack at it and themes are explored and certainly we try to plot out, “What is it from their point of view? What are they thinking? What are they doing?” And then we’ll actually sit down with either local voice actors or just the team and read through the scenes to make sure it doesn’t come off as corny. Because moving off the page and to the spoken word gets us much closer to what the game is going to present. And it’s funny how you can be like, “That word, right there, I can totally tell he’s evil.” It does help. We have kind of writing workshops almost that help us try to make these particularly impactful scenes as strong as they can be.