Worlds Collide: Combining Story and Systems in Dragon Age: Inquisition

[Music] Cool. Hi, welcome to our session, Worlds Collide, combining story and systems in Dragon Age Inquisition. Uh, firstly, quick bit about ourselves. This is Kalin. He was lead narrative designer on Dragon Age Inquisition. He's been with Boware for over seven years and was previously a designer on Dragon Age 2 and Dragon Age Origins. Uh, I'm still not entirely sure how to pronounce his surname, so you'll have to ask him. Um, and this is this witty gentleman is Mark. Uh, he was the lead technical designer on uh, Dragon Age Inquisition, joining us in 2011. Yep. Um, he was on LA Noir previous to this. So, I mean, he is Australian. Let's try not to hold that against him. So hopefully if you're here, you've heard of Dragon Age Inquisition. Uh we will try to keep it light on spoilers.

Thank you one person. We did it. Dragon Age Inquisition is by far the most successful launch in Boware's history. Uh if Metacritic means anything to you, it's sitting in the high 80s. Um and we were honored with over 150 game of the year and readers choice awards. um including the Game Awards and the DICE awards last month. So, that was awesome. Yeah, for us it it's it's Boware's biggest single player game to date. Um we have, you know, stats that say one of our exploration levels is the same size as all of the levels in Dragon Age Origins combined. It's huge. So, it was a massive undertaking and we had 11 of those exploration maps in Inquisition. It was pretty big game. So for the development of Dragon Age, these five statements were our design pillars, our guide to creating a boware game in an open world setting. As we began to build the game,

it very quickly became apparent that in order to achieve these goals, we'd need to combine story and systems beyond what we' done before. Yeah. Um these these these pillars were the same for everybody. So Mark being on the technical side, myself being on the narrative, we were all aiming towards these same goals. We just had different perspectives on how to achieve that in the beginning. We're best friends now. Uh so for the next 43 minutes or however long we ramble, we're going to talk about the challenges we faced in combining these these two elements. So, um, we're going to talk to the challenges and then the approaches we took to solving those. Then we're going to go into some examples right from the game. Yep. Oh, I should have done the disclaimer about my poor transition

timing. Um, yeah. And then we'll end up with some some principles for um combining story and systems. Cool. Uh so for story we're talking to everything from the critical path story missions to the optional quests follower banter and even the the law of the Dragon Age universe and for systems we're meaning the game play so the mechanics underlying systems progression all the activities that the player engages with we're calling systems poor timing. So, we'll start with the uh the challenges and the opportunities we had. Um, DA was still or I should say Inquisition still had the classic epic boware story that that people have come to know and love, but it also had hours hours of optional content. Like I said, making it our our biggest single player game to date.

Um, the problem here was with the open world nature, we needed to figure out a different way to tell stories. Uh, we didn't want to use Oh, I clicked too much now. We didn't we we wanted to transition away from story tubes to a to the open world. Yeah. So, the the challenge became, as you've probably already read, how how do we fill this open world with all that story content? Uh so taking inspiration early on from games like Skyrim, we we needed to to find new ways to deliver that content across the much larger space. Some of the early ideas were quite a departure from the way Boware traditionally created content and as with any significant change, this was a process that took some time. Finding that balance led to the occasional clash of philosophies. Uh, so an example that might demonstrate this, for for most of the project, I had a big poster that I'd printed out and stuck to the wall next to my desk that just said freedom over perfection. Uh,

it was a constant reminder that we needed to value player freedoms over systemic and narrative perfection. And it was definitely a departure from previous Boware titles. So, our goal with with Dragon Age Inquisition, we were trying to create 20 to 200 hours of gameplay. Not not an easy task. Um, so we had to we had to change our our approach to this, our our bioware way. So, this the old way of doing things was creating a lot of handcrafted, highly polished um scenarios. The cost of doing this did not scale well to an open world setting. Um, on top of that, we had a much uh, no, not a much smaller team. We had the same size of team we had on Dragon Age Origins and DA2 in terms of level design. In terms of level design, yes. Um, but the scope was much bigger for

Inquisition. So early on, all the designers were acting acting as generalists. So the same designer could be responsible for a critical path mission one day and a gameplay system the next. Uh we actually had one of the he turned out to be a multiplayer designer but he was working on a dungeon that was intended both for a multiplayer scenario and a single player content level and they're very different ways to implement uh that that content. Uh very different types of work and a lot of momentum was lost with that constant gear switching between the different types of work the level designers were responsible for. So going into pre-production, we also knew of a few technological challenges. Uh we were moving to the Frostbite engine, which is gorgeous. Uh but it was primarily a first person shooter engine before we got to it. We were without our core RPG systems. Uh so we needed to rebuild or refactor a lot of the existing infrastructure of Frostbite to work with what we wanted to build as a

boware title. So, for example, we actually had no way to create conversations or plot tables, which have been Bowware staples forever. And with our final word count at almost double the Lord of the Rings trilogy, uh, being without that core really compounded the challenge of hitting those content creation goals. The new console generation was also on the horizon, and we knew very early on we were targeting a simultaneous five platform launch. Uh, and we also knew we were a multiplayer title, which definitely implemented uh definitely affected some of the implementation decisions across a lot of the tech. Uh, for me, this was kind of a playground. Uh, I just started a boware and everything was new for everyone. Um, new toys to play with, broad constraints, lots of investigations and prototyping going on. I I totally ate this up, but I understand it wasn't the same for everyone on the team. Yeah. to to contrast that I and I think a lot of

the old DA old hats were a little bit nervous. We didn't have our systems to make games that we knew how to make. There was a it was a little overwhelming at first for sure. Okay. So, we've talked a bit about our challenges, the the the kind of shift in mindset for our design philosophy, the the cost of content creation, and uh the new tech. So, we'll uh talk a little bit about what we did to overcome these these challenges. Um we knew that a lot of these challenges, while new to Boware, weren't new to the industry. So, we started early looking to other games to see, you know, what worked well. Uh, we looked to games like Skyrim or or Red Dead, I think, were Yeah. Far Cry 3 early on, Assassin's Creed. Yep. So, what we did early in production was we

created, like Mark said, a bunch of prototypes and experimented with different structures. Um, one of the first things we we started was what we call quest soup. So, we had a lot of kind of oneshot quests where you would go out and do a a simple interaction in the environment. And what we found was that while players knew why they were going out and doing this, that narrative component was there, the what was was kind of missing. It was wasn't as engaging as it should. Yeah. So, to contrast this, a separate group, which we called the FAT team, which is frugal and thematic. Uh the goal for this group was to create gameplay around a central theme but without the typical story constraints of dialogue and that sort of thing. Uh the systems were fun but without the story they lacked context and the gameplay kind of fell off pretty quickly. There was no why. Um, actually the first fat level uh was a swamp which shipped as the fellow meer uh where the

undead would spawn when the player straight into the water and that was the the system that was the theme. Uh it was also the first appearance of the world master system which we'll touch on a little later. Um we didn't we didn't limit ourselves to to this kind of experimentation and prototyping just in pre-production. We we continue to to layer on story in new ways. Uh, I clicked ahead cuz I'm terrible. But we started layering on some visual storytelling, something we called designer hugs. These were to add more story to the world, but not more quests. People didn't want more checklists. Yep. Yep. So, the goal for these was just to tell a story and uh ideally leave a little bit of the context open so the player could project that onto it. Um, so one of my favorite examples is actually just a skeleton at the base of a waterfall and it's just it's a skeleton model placed in the world at a

location, but the player can project what they think that might have been. So whether it's a suicide or if you know bears have spawned in down the river, maybe the bears have killed it or there's red templars in the area, suddenly the players generating their own narratives for relatively cheap cost of someone placing a skeleton model in the world. And and these didn't need to be static designer hug. These didn't need to be static events. Uh the the giant fighting the dragon in in one of the levels, the storm coast, is another example of a designer hug. So the challenge here was to present stories, not dialogue or dialogue, that's how you say it. We couldn't agree on it. Yeah. To the scale that our design required. Um so yeah, anyone could create these. Uh we had artists, QA, programmers, everyone suggesting different stories that we could tell. It wasn't solely from the level design or writing team. Uh so it was pretty fantastic to scale up. Uh so yeah, as Kaitlin mentioned, we

were redefining the length of a boware game to that 20 to 200 hour experience with a level design team similar in size to the previous projects. So, we we knew we needed to create gameplay systems to offer those many self-directed opportunities that we were going for with potentially repeatable content, but not without narrative to to flavor it, right? Um, another change that we made pretty pretty early on was we changed the our team structure on level design. Should clarify that. So, what we did was we broke everybody up into specialist groups. We had uh exploration designers uh who worked on the the open world setting. We had the technical designers that Mark was part of, the multiplayer designers, and the narrative team. Yeah, it it allowed for expertise and less gear switching. Um you could be focused on one thing with that team.

So, as Mark mentioned, the the tech was new and scared me. Uh, so kind of first order of business was let's let's recreate what we had before and then really push it with the new engine. Yeah, we're pretty fortunate that the Frostbite engine has some powerful visual scripting tools. Uh, so we, yeah, very early on started to prototype a lot of the systems and and tech that we'd later use for the project. I like to tease Kalin that this this was the utopia before dialogue existed where we could just make cool things. And that's just when I was panicking the whole time. Yeah. Uh ultimately the goal here was to use the the results of this pre-production and this experimentation to really drive what we needed going forward in in full-blown production. All right, cool. Uh so we're

going to jump into some examples from the game. And first up, we've got systems that were built to directly support or supply established narrative concepts to Dragon Age. So the first example that is dynamic banter and for boware games the the follower banter is the main way the player learns about and engages with your followers. Uh in the past this was all manually scripted with trigger volumes placed throughout the levels. For inquisition there was a lot of story to tell uh with nine followers, four player races, two-player agendas, all the permutations of that in a much bigger space. It just it wasn't practical to script down those triggers manually. So, this system was built to just attempt to fire banter periodically in the lulls while wandering through exploration areas because it could happen almost anywhere. The lines available to that system were the more generic uh lines. They weren't contextsensitive to

specific locations or necessarily events even. uh that was still important for delivering story content being developed between the two followers or two or more followers in question, but it yeah it wasn't the highly contextsensitive banter from previous games. It's got a quick example. I am sorry. I'll mark this on my calendar. Cassandra had a feeling. Perhaps not that sorry. So these are yeah you can as you can hear this builds on the relationship between those two characters which has been established for yeah a couple games. Uh it has no other required context that could happen anywhere as long as you're not mid battle or something. Uh so that's what this system ultimately aimed to achieve. Yeah. It's not to say we we totally got rid of of the scripted banter the the oneshot deal but it this this was supplementing that. Yeah. It'll it allowed that banter the

specifically scripted stuff to be far more specific to what had happened uh rather than that playing halfway through a really critical mission. Yeah. More control. So the the second example we have is our our simple conversation system. What we did here was we wanted a way we wanted a way to move a lot of the the heavy dialogue into to optional hubs to allow players to to engage this content if they wanted to. We didn't we also wanted a way that didn't always take control away from the player or or constrain the camera. It was great in the end for quickly setting up content, you know, 20 to 200 hours. Yeah, keep hammering on that. But it was it was a real discussion point for a lot of the project. Uh this system also allowed different players, different player types to engage the way they

wanted to. Uh so some people don't care to dig through the investigate trees and they could just quickly skip through that single option that they knew would end the conversation for them. uh they were no longer constrained to a cinematic or a conversation. So it was advantageous to the play your way goal from earlier as well. It was nice too if you didn't want to or it was a nice new delivery method for um something that you wanted spoken but not in a hidden in a codeex y somewhere in a menu. So the follow approval system in previous games there's a bit of a disconnect between the character whose approval you were affecting and the bar you push to maximum. This helpful diagram is actually what Kalin sent to the team when trying to explain what we were going for here. This is the official system. Yes. Uh so for Inquisition, this bar misrepresented the design a little bit. So once you reach those thresholds, there wasn't necessarily a conversation that would play because Cassandra might also depend on you

having completed one of the crit path missions before she would progress to her friendly dialogue. Uh so having those thresholds was actually misleading to the player. But uh for me it was really that disconnect between the character that you're talking to and the character that's being developed there and then this system on the side that the bar you're just pushing to maximum because friends. Uh so the initial change was just to abstract the bar. We replaced the numbers with approves and disapproves and that later evolved to the the greatly and slightly differentiator. It really it added better shape, better definition to the character because you had a better understanding of what it was that they liked and disliked or really didn't like or Yeah. piggybacking off of um Mark's example, we had another kind of approval system in the game, which was court approval in one of our our critical path levels. So this this was I like this example because it's a good one of we took a completely narrative construct

the the approval of the court and made a gameplay system out of it. We found that it was it was much too abstract to just deliver um narratively I guess would be the best way to put that. and then adding a bar on top of it helped the player to really understand that their actions or inactions in in this case really did have an effect on on the level. So our next example judgments this this this example this was a way for us to provide fantasy fulfillment to the player. You were the inquisitor. You were judging people, people that you could come across in a previously in a level some villains whether whether you murdered them already or not as this. I'm judging a box.

That was the time allotted for rebuttal. Her crimes negated any claim to Forgive me, there is an order. I call for rehabilitation. The skull shall do public theater about the evils of evil. I also judge the box. End table for orphans. That's quite enough, Inquisitor. Point taken. I really like this example because it it you actually get a recruit out of the box. Uh so here the writers did a really good job of of breaking up the the judgment into I think there's about six types broken down into three three categories. uh a merciful judge who would let people go, the executioner just straight up kill them, or something like in this example, the recruiting

judge who says, "You work for me now." Yeah. Importantly for me, this was an extensible system. So once we had the framework, we were able to reuse the streaming, the cinematic stages, the cameras and lighting. It was much cheaper than trying to create these discrete scenes anywhere else in the world. Um, and it it also evolved quite naturally. Uh, as new quests were being written or stories being developed, we could identify opportunities where characters could be taken out of those scenes and brought to the judgment system. Um, it was it was a really great way for the Inquisitor's story to be realized as as the head of this large organization and that story was really supported through the system that we created there. Uh the final example in in this category of of story with systems is the Inquisitor's Mark and favorites. The Inquisitor's Mark I think is the earliest narrative construct we had. Um so we thought let's add some

gameplay there. Let's let's remind the player that uh it's still a game too. Yeah. So, we built the fade rifts in response to the core art that we saw. The the inquisitor had the mark on his hand. It could uniquely interact with the the tears in the uh the veil. So, it's probably the most apparent marriage of systems and story in Inquisition. Uh the gameplay being supported supportive of the narrative and it was a constant reminder that you were in this unique position and there was a constant threat to the world. Uh the gameplay evolved over time. So the inquisitor's mark disrupting the rift was a later concept and even the mark of the rift ability where you could at will open a tear in the veil and suck demons back through this black hole effectively. Uh but ultimately just it immersed player in the core narrative of the game. Oh, did I lie? That's the fade rift. Oh,

I just Yeah. Cool. Uh so the next section's uh the opposite of the last. These are systems that existed and we built narratives to support the gameplay there. Catching up. Uh the the first or one of the first systems to go through this process was the ocular, the the view skulls that you see throughout the world. This was one of our earliest prototypes too that eventually became a system. And it was just toying with camera controls, a simple interaction on a pole. You clicked it, you could move the camera around. It was one of the first times both as players and devs that we were really able to view the vast scope of the levels and discover the Dragon Age as one of the other core tenants. As this evolved, we we added a magical lock and key mechanic and even a collection of unnamed mcguffins to try and give it more depth. But without the

narrative, without the why, the system still felt really empty. Uh, we included writing, probably later than we should have. And suddenly you're looking through the severed skulls of tranquil mages slaughtered by venator for their nefarious deeds. And it's it totally changed how this this system felt. I I really like this morbid example. It it really shows how we grounded this system within the world. We gave it context and it gave the player extra motivation to actually interact with these these skulls. It was in direct opposition. Yeah. A skull but different. Singing, swinging, sighting. He couldn't scream when he died. He felt nothing and then too much. So even in this example, you can see it's the storm coast and pretty much everything you can see in the what you'd call the vista there is traversible. It's across the world. So getting that

in quite early was was a really great way for us to experience the levels as developers and players. So another system that went through a very similar process to the ocular was the Australium. Uh initially this was just a line drawing puzzle gameplay mechanic. Uh concept artists provided constellations for us and it evolved into like the idea of triangulation. So you'd solve three of them and it would provide an unlocked location and it was all tied to that narrative concept of the the stargazing. Yeah, it was a it was it's another example of maybe a case where writing we asked them to come on a little later than we should have, but they but they layered on a backstory that that it was essentially a lock and key mechanism. The the Tinter, the enemy faction in the game would use these as a way to lock away anything that they didn't want other people to have or anything that they didn't want out. Yeah, it it

allowed a lot of creative freedom for the level designers for there to be a narratively justified you can put whatever you want in this space and and then unlock it through an existing mechanic. So I mentioned before very briefly the world master system. This was a system first proposed by a programmer who saw an opportunity for systems to support storytelling and exploration. Uh, initially it it managed the lifetime of spawners, bringing content in and out of existence as the player moved around, and that was it. Right. It um, not long after we we we had this base system, we we layered on a a plot conditions. So, depending what you did in the story could affect the spawners of the game. uh in this in this example, a decision you make early on in the game, early depending how you play, I suppose, uh will will populate the world with one

faction versus another. So you can have one encounter in one space with one decision and the same encounter can be a completely different um enemy faction depending what you chose. Yeah. Ultimately, this system allowed the environment to react to the player actions and the diversity of spawn options that we had just would not have been possible to script manually without it. Uh so it was a really powerful way to generate narrative across the world without that huge manually scripted cost. So the last example is actually the war table. For those that aren't familiar, this is the the physical representation of the Inquisitors or the Inquisition's power and influence within the world. It was the mechanic with which the player could could direct his or her forces in in the world. Um, so the nice thing here was we could

have a system that interacted with the world that then fed back into the system. In this example, finding a bridge in the wilderness that is broken. Head back to the war table, send your send your troops out, repair the bridge, then head back there. Now you have more content to go to. The player has access to to new a new area. It helps the player feel like they're leading a large organization. Yeah, it does. So this this example more than any other uh it really went back and forth between story and systems. The the writers really latched on to this one and and ran with it. So we created this one system and they wrote hundreds of missions. Uh one of the fun features that actually came from that were mission chains which weren't part of the original system design. An example of of this was one of our writers created what we called the wedding chain. So depending on your

choices through a series of missions, you would you would get two lovers together or not or you know I don't honestly I don't know all the permutations. Um but what was nice was after all of these you could go back in the world and actually actually see what the outcome of your mission chain was. What indeed? This moment is for you and your union. No one else. Thank you. You can't imagine how much this means. So, in this example, they ended up together and the the Inquisitor got to to be part of the wedding. Yeah. I think importantly for that example, had we just scripted that in the world, it wouldn't nearly have had any sort of impact that it did once you followed that mission chain the whole way through

the war table and understood the story and then had it realized in the game. And that's the end of the examples. Cool. So, we will move on to our takeaway section. Um, in the end, combining story and systems to to achieve these pillars that we we mentioned at the beginning of the game, I I think we hit that. Uh, DA provided a a very broad spectrum of levels where story and systems were combined to various degrees and and players had their favorite, right? Even even we had our favorites and didn't agree because Mark was wrong. Um, a really good example of this is for those familiar the Crestwood level. One of the one of the early later early levels. It was it was a very very narrativeheavy level where something like the Storm Coast that was more

systems driven. Not to say it didn't have a a story to it. It was just lighter on it. Yeah. By by marrying system and story. We keep saying marrying but it uh we create created that cohesive and immersive experience and allowed the player to figure out what they enjoyed most and where they would want to spend their time. Uh ultimately we believe that's what led to a lot of the the feedback that we got uh summarized as greater than the sum of its parts which we think is fantastic uh response but each individual part isn't necessarily spectacular. Maybe it doesn't even innovate. It's it's just we've just matched previous Dragon Age titles, but to get this sort of a result, we attribute that to the the immersion, the success successful combination of story and systems throughout the game. Um, and we're we're very happy with this reception, but we know there's there's room for improvement still. Uh, actually, while

we built this presentation, Kaylin and I discussed what we thought could have been done better. Uh, specifically from the examples we've already given. For me, it's the the dynamic banter. I think it fell a bit short of our hopes. Upon release, the the move to dynamically triggered banter left some players confused or even concerned that they were missing out on critical dialogue. At no point were we as developers explicit that the more generic banter had moved to these pools and the the specific scripted stuff really it still existed. It had been moved elsewhere and and trying to balance that much dialogue content AC out across the game. it didn't have the same recurrence that it perhaps did in the previous Dragon Age titles. So, I think with a more advanced system, considering more conditionals, more adaptive to what the player was doing, had done, might be intending to do next, uh it'd be less likely to be interrupted by entering combat or something as simple as mounting your horse or nugle or whatever you ride around the

right. And for me, I think the biggest the biggest thing was the world master system that we talked about earlier. I I really like the system. I just want to see more more types of content driven from it. Yep. The future. So again talking about this where where we would like to see story and systems and the combination move in the future we we have some difference of opinion here. Um my background is in in mods the text based MMOs almost. uh very verb- based gameplay with players generating most of the narrative content or even whatever narrative content exists there it's in loose strands that the player can string together and form their own story. I I love that and I I think with the sort of approach that we were taking

there, it would be possible for that to be happening in the in the near future uh with a lot of the the systems that we explored in Inquisition that we've started to see appearing in other games. And I I actually completely agree with with Mark on this except on the opposite side of the spectrum. I I would like to see a system similar to that but but a more procedurally driven or no sorry procedurally generated characterdriven um yeah the complete opposite of what Mark said but the same system. So, Shadows of Mortar and the Nemesis system is actually, I think, a a good start at what I would like to see and the direction for that sort of success we could we could have there. Actually, Ken Lavine gave a great talk at last year's GDC called Narrative Legos, which speaks to a lot of those concepts. Uh, so if you haven't watched that, definitely watch

that. Okay, so we're at the end. We're winding down. So, we just kind of want to go over the the the three main learnings we had, what we how we feel about story and and systems. The first thing, they they need to coexist. This may seem like it could go unsaid, but you you'd be desri surprised at some of the discussions that that happened around this. Uh yeah, it it need needs to happen. It needs to be said. needs needs to be embraced. Uh for us, combining story and systems led to better immersion. Uh so the the what and the why math. Yeah. The the final the final point um that we kind of alluded to throughout throughout the talk is that story is everyone's responsibility. So if you want your

story to carry weight in a game, it everybody needs to be involved. Yeah, this even with the the split into specialist groups, Kalin's team wasn't exclusively concerned with the narrative of the game to to achieve the combinations that we did and and the the response and the the success, I guess, that the game did. We believe that it only happened because everyone on the project cares about the story to some extent and that artists and animators and programmers and QA everyone is suggesting additions to that the visual storytelling that we did or or changes and and ideas for how what could be in that next vault that the asterium unlocks. Uh story doesn't have to be this horrible constraint. It can be the the inspiration that guides your design process, right? So this this talk wouldn't have been possible without a few people. Um so we'd like to thank them real quick. We're just the most handsome developers.

So we're the ones that got to present. Yeah. Cool. Uh so yeah, we've looks like we've got some time for some questions. Uh so we'd like to open it up if anyone has anything they'd like to ask. [Applause] microphones in this. Cool. Sure. Go for it. Hi. Um Edward McCrae, um narrative designer for Path of Exile. Um so I'm just interested by your generated dialogue between the party members and how you made them non situational. Um, did you kind of how did you work around the fact that uh different situations may still jar with the fact that the party members are talking with each other with when there's a giant say 20 m away or that kind of thing. Did you kind of take that into consideration? Right. So the the

question if I understand it's about the dynamic banter system and and what sort of consideration we we did actually implement for the dialogue going on so it didn't feel or look really silly with the surroundings. Exactly. Yeah. Right. Uh so we did have some rudimentary conditionals in there. If if there were enemies within a certain range, I think 75 or 100 meters, uh it would suppress the system. Um some some of these conditionals actually led to that result of no banter plays for half an hour, let's say, because you're wandering straight between combat to combat to combat, and we didn't want this dialogue just to always be cut off by the next thing that you engaged with. Uh, so it did try to look for those lulls by suppressing itself when you were doing or might do something. It it just wasn't as smart as it could have been there. So the the most obvious example is if there were nearby enemies, it would suppress it from trying to find dialogue. Uh, an interesting flip side, I I was reading a

post where someone I think Dorian had just had a moment. I won't spoil it just in case. He'd had a moment on in his personal plot which was kind of a breakthrough for him and uh the players gone back out into the world with Darian and Iron Bull there and just had a massive slaughter just just butchered to Vinta everywhere and it finishes and the dynamic banter systems triggered and it was Bull talking to Darian. It's like so uh yeah h how you feeling guy cuz just surrounded by bodies of tinta and No system we built did that. So the the randomness there really paid off and that's that's a really personal experience for that player that they've shared as something thrilling regardless of whether or not it was scripted or intended. Uh so there is power to that as well I guess. Great. Thank you. Hello. Hi. Yeah. One question. Um I want to ask why do you choose Frostbite as

your engine? Because uh as you said before, Frostbite was built for FPS. So it must be a huge pain progress to refactor it for your um RPG game. So what is the advantage for using force sprite to make you willing to go through that painful process? Right. So yeah, why did we use Frostbite? It's a good question. I actually started on the team about 3 weeks after it was like, "Hey, we're using Frostbite." So I arrived and that was the first thing I was told. So that was exciting. [Music] Um, I think ultimately I I can't answer. I don't I wasn't in the meetings where that was decided. Uh, and I'm sure many developers asked that same question during the project, but I don't think we could have ended up the game with the game that we did without that engine. Uh, a lot of the even early prototyping and visual scripting, the Eclipse engine, the previous Dragon Age engine, it it didn't have that support really. uh and Frostbite. I think there was actually a talk going on at the same time with one of the the tech guys from

Frostbite. There's a lot of convergence between studios. There's there's initiatives for different uh types of games going on. So the support network for there was a lot of support for the engine is huge, right? It's not it's not just Boware Edmonton, you know, there's Boware Montreal that work on other features for us and just all across EA really. Yeah. the the Frostbite team in in DICE in in Sweden definitely helped out with some of the the core tech and features. So it it made sense. Um Bware as a studio is now using Frostbite across their titles. Uh so Dragon Age just happened to be the first of that and we took on or bit the bullet. All right. Thank you very much. Bless you. Cheers. Hi. Uh Les Nalen uh game designer. I'm teaching at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. I had two questions. Uh, one, um, the ocular, were you

actually loading live parts of the world there because that would mean that you would actually need to load a completely different part of the world with different uh texture atlases and all that other stuff at the same time. So, I was just curious about that. Or was that kind of more of a a video at that point when you looked at those? Um, also other question, you'd mentioned looking at uh Red Dead and um uh uh Skyrim of course uh when when starting off uh pre-production. I was also curious if you uh looked at uh MMO storytelling. I've worked on a lot of MMOs and you know it's got a lot of these kind of open world challenges as far as uh storytelling goes. Well, that's that in order. The first question there, the the ocularara that that actually is when you look through that that that's just the world. Um the camera informs the renderer that we're closing the frame of field of view a little bit and we're looking at that particular area. The uh terrain the the art was all free streamed so we could

just do that. Um and during that point 4 second fade down and back up again it it loaded in appropriate uh loss and everything. It wasn't always populated in the same way as it would be when you got there, but a lot of that was determined by the world master system as you were going there anyway. So, there wasn't really any way for us to show what was over there in the far distance. Um, for the second question, which I've suddenly blanked on, so is he. You guys, if you guys look at MMOs, yes, absolutely. Uh, a lot of the designers, particularly the exploration designers, played a lot of MMOs. Um, I think Guild Wars 2 was actually coming out when we were doing a lot of the early exploration area design and that was definitely part of it. Um, it's it it was one of our first approaches like we mentioned the quest soup. A lot of that were were MMO style quests. Yeah, we we tended more towards like the Far Cry and Red Dead and Skyrim and those

sorts of things. Assassin's Creed, it tends to be more act activity driven uh missions, quests, that sort of thing. wherein uh whereas in MMOs there's a lot more yeah quest soup star quest it's definitely it was definitely valuable to us when we were trying to space out and pace out an exploration area and trying like for Crestwood or one of the more narratively driven areas having a flow through the area it was definitely valuable to look at those MMOs for that thank you thanks I was curious um do you guys have like an overall philosophy on how to give the player the most choice as possible without having a crazy amount of like content dialogue increase. And also if you could go into more detail on how the companions approval system works now. Sorry, companions work. That was the second question kind of but how the companion approval system works now with like the strongly and disagree and approve and everything, right? Okay. So to answer the the question about how the

how the companion approval works now to be honest it is almost the exact same system as DA2. So there are numerical values behind the greatly disapproves slightly disapproves. Um but we just added on we took out the number and added the text just just to give it a more human feel like humanize the characters a little more. When we were talking about adding that particular system to the deck, uh we thought it was a great one because it's such a simple change. All it is is to abstract numbers into words, but it completely changes how you feel as a player about that system and about the character and merging the two. Um and I've forgotten the first question again. Um it was do you have a philosophy on how to like give more choice but reduce content options? Right. Uh Mike actually has a deck. Uh so the creative director actually has a deck that he calls Fires in the Desert. Um but it's just basically

uh there was a lot of iteration on this. A lot of the the early exploration areas were just far too many different options for the player to take. Uh and then some of the reaction to that was just to have one activity like the the FAT group was in response direct response to just here are a whole lot of different activities and we don't really know what the player wants. back down to there is a single activity to do in this area built on a single theme and it was kill the undead as they come out of the water because otherwise they'll kill you. And I think the closest we have to a philosophy on that is to to provide a spectrum. So, the hissing wastes, the the really vast desert level, um it does allow the player just to take that breather, jump on them out, go for a ride through the desert, engage with things as they see them pop out at them. Uh versus some of the more narratively dense levels where it's like there's not really an opportunity to jump on your mount because there's that next quest to do a next thing. And yeah, internally, externally, there was a lot of uh

diverse reception to those and why didn't you do this is clearly the right way to do it. Why didn't you do 10 of this type of level? And then the next guy is like, no, that level sucked this way. So providing a spectrum um of opportunities um at the macro level. So on the on the whole area providing that sort of the balance there um rather than worrying about moment to moment how many of the activities the player have and trying to maintain that across the game was more successful for us. Okay, great. Thanks guys. I think it I think it depends to what story we're trying to tell and does choice need to be part of that. Um, a lot of the the world stories are just telling the story of of the level you're in, not necessarily giving you options to to um experience it differently. Yeah. Thanks. Cool. Thank you. Over there. Yeah. Hi. Um, with a game as large as

Dragon Age Inquisition, um, there's a there's a massive ramp up time and the player plays for a long time. So, how do you test the game? I mean, how do you bring in people and test the fidelity of your mechanics? And second, how do you use level design to keep the mechanics fresh? Uh, so the level design team the so I'll say the exploration level design encompassed the whole group. Um, there was a lot of experimentation. So when we say that the we specialized in the systems designers and the technical designers and narrative designers, it didn't stop the narrative designers from experimenting and prototyping systems. And a lot of the innovations and additions came from those tests. So the court approval system was entirely built by one of the narrative designers. He's like, "Hey, I've got this idea to to make this abstract concept more real in my level. Can I try it?" And just built it. And uh we obviously

built onto that eventually, but a lot of that evolution there is just it's it's not here is your box, sit in it. It's it's um these are your primary responsibilities and being able to explore beyond that was freeing I think for a lot of the the level designers. And what we did was I I I'm going to speak for the the critical path levels anyway was we took a lot of the existing systems the the base systems that we had in the game and then tried to put new spins on it just to keep like you said keep things fresh. Another example in that same level with the court approval halam shar has doors where you need little statuettes to unlock them. uh 90 to 95% of the logic behind that is identical to the Asterium vault doors like once you unlock all the shards. We just replaced out the part and a very minor bit of technology. Um but that again came from a suggestion between narrative and tech trying to work together to make a very big game with not a very big team. Um to the

first question about how do you test a game that big? Not easily. Not easily. Start very early. Um, it it actually it wasn't part of this talk, but it did require us to completely evolve the review process. Very early on, we'd find reviews with 20 people sitting in there, and they'd start at the start of the level, and as we found as we went through the project, everyone had a different idea on what they wanted to do and what was fun for them. So, there's one person driving and 19 people going, "You're doing it wrong. Like, there's that thing over there that we have to be doing." And so, and after an hour review, they've made it about 30 m into the level and just everyone's disagreed on what was good. Um, so to specifically solve that, it it ended up being people were we scheduled an hour review, but at everyone's desks. Everyone would go play for an hour and then we built surveys and evolved on that process. And it was was kind of as long as we're providing opportunities to majority of not even not in all cases

majority but to a group of players substantial enough that it was worth pursuing. Um that that was really the only way we we could do it right because everybody like Mark mentioned their own their own play style. They would want something different from the level. Yeah. So to to get to get reviews and and the correct kind of feedback on that, people had to play their way and everyone played the game. Um some of the writers, if you follow them on Twitter towards the end of the project when they're kind of locked down, they're they're on their fourth or fifth playthrough. And this one I'm going to be like always annoying inquisitor. Like we'll pick every annoying option and just make sure that they sassy inquisitor. Sassy Inquisitor. Get all the dislikes. They'll minmax on the everyone dislikes me and see see what happens and try and romance people that really dislike them and yeah h having the team play the game all the time it for a game of this size was was critical. Thank you. Cool. Thanks. I don't know who was next here

first. All right. Thanks. Okay. Um so my question is the systems that you guys have created and the fact that you created such a large world for this game. Did you find that the systems that you created were limited by the size of this world? I guess on a hardware side. So like you're using a new engine, which is good, but I mean like you have such this big world to maintain. How can you have events affecting the story affect someone say like all the way over there and all the way over there at the same time? Like how did you manage dealing with that? That's a good question. Yeah. I uh let's start with a little bit of luck and then a lot of hard work. Um the the level designers the the whole level design team needed to be in pretty regular communication about that and with the writing team and and it was a lot a lot of iteration to

to get that right balance. Yeah, it was incredible how quickly things could diverge without a week. You could you could tell in the week where someone was heads down working and then if something had just shifted slightly, it's like, oh no, the the the ocular the backstory changed slightly and now this whole thing you did doesn't make sense anymore. Sorry guy. But it it was like like we mentioned the the rapid prototyping that Frostbite allowed us really helped us nail that down early on so we didn't have to struggle with it the entire time. So it's just putting more time into it over and over and as you said increased iterations of it. Y yeah I I mean it's probably the case with every game made but if you could go back and make the same game again it would take probably half the time like a lot of those those um early learnings and early mistakes uh with systems we mentioned the ocular and the Australium involving writing very

late in that process. So in that time designers, artists, whoever was interacting with these things had different ideas on on how they were uh cemented into the world and what they meant to the player and we're building around that concept. So having a clear establishing that clearer idea earlier on will save you from a lot of heartache later on. Thank you. Cool. Thanks. I'm a little short. I actually have a related question. Um and it's a three-parter, sorry, but it's quick. Um so I wanted to know how much of the story was locked down before you started prototyping. Um, and then if you could speak a little bit to your day-to-day relationship with your narrative designers and then how um how are the narrative changes broadcasted throughout production and then how did you guys mitigate the impact that that had on systems? Okay, let's start at the beginning. How much of the story was locked down when we started prototyping? We had we had a rough structure. We knew the story we wanted to tell. So then at that point it was what is the best way

to tell that story. So it wasn't not every detail was there but but we knew what we were aiming for. So when I started uh late 2011 I guess uh the first thing I was told to do was read through the story and it was a couple of pages long but the major beats survived through the ship. Um, we need the Inquisitor had the unique relationship with the the breach. Like those sort of major concepts were there and I don't think any of the early major concepts uh changed throughout development, but a lot of the smaller ones kind of fell into place and were able to shift more as we went through. So that that was pretty successful, I think. Um, could ask the writers, there's a couple around and oh, so the rest of it was a day-to-day relationship with the narrative team and then how how um were changes broadcasted to the team and then how did you guys mitigate the impact that those had on the systems? Cool. So, uh, communication between the level

design subgroups absolutely could have better. We actually listed it initially as a negative to the the split. Um there was absolutely the benefit of expertise over certain areas. Um but Kaylin and I actually sat on opposite ends of the building for most of development and that definitely could have been easier to try and you know getting those like even one week oh we we changed this and this doesn't make sense. Ideally we avoid that. Um so the the relationship was back and forth with things like the court approval. There were success stories, but there were also drawbacks and things we could have done better by keeping people in regular contact or creating small maybe content pods where you had the same goal but not necessarily the same role. Uh we were generally grouped by what what role you filled rather than what you were working on. Um, so I think for the for the other narrative teams, like working with the writers and the sin designers, that was it was it was a really nice experience because everybody was working on the

same type of content like they were they were crossing over between exploration and and critical path. So there was always constant communication there. Everybody was was on the same page. Um, when major changes happen, that was usually depending on the scale of the change, you know, it could start out as as just an email and then go up to a a uh team meeting, right? Like all of all of Dragon Age team, come down to the ballroom and we're going to we're going to show you something. We've actually just been signaled. We've got 2 minutes left. Um, so we will head around to the wrap-up room at 3000 if anyone has other questions. Um, please fill out the feedback thing. We'd love to hear what you guys liked and didn't like so we could improve. Cool. And thanks very much for coming.