Lindsay "geektr0n" Ferguson hosts ZAM's latest installment of Friday Update Arcade! Topics discussed are:
It was only about two weeks ago that BioWare invited us over to their development offices in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, to check out Dragon Age: Origins. If you consider it, you'd think that waiting for two weeks, for the NDA to lift, to tell all of you about our hands-on experience with the game isn't a very long time to wait.
You'd be wrong.
In reality, I've been itching every one of those days to sit down and tell you all about what an amazing game this is, and why I truly believe that Dragon Age: Origins is the next step forward in RPG gaming. And now that I can, you can finally hear about ZAM.com's hands-on preview with BioWare's latest foray into the fantasy RPG world.
FilePlanet has released a character creator for Dragon Age: Origins that allows you to toy around with the creation process before the game launches on Nov. 3. According to the announcement, you can "experiment with the different classes, races, and create multiple faces for the 6 Origin stories and save them to your hard drive for safe keeping."
You can download the character creator or pre-order Dragon Age: Origins through Direct2Drive on FilePlanet. For more information on the game, check out our interviews with the co-founders of BioWare and Executive Producer Mark Darrah. Also, keep an eye on ZAM.com for our hands-on preview and initial thoughts on the game.
Today marks the last part of ZAM.com's interviews with some of the top minds of BioWare's Dragon Age: Origins. Next week we'll have a full hands-on preview of our initial thoughts on the game, but for now, you can enjoy our chat with Mark Darrah, Executive Producer of the Dragon Age franchise and all around guru when it comes to the theories of game development and how the industry is evolving. Read on for some great insights into the creation of Dragon Age and where it's going to be in a few years.
ZAM: We're here with Mark Darrah, the Executive Producer of the Dragon Age franchise. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do?
Mark Darrah: I'm actually in charge of the creative direction of not just Dragon Age: Origins, but of all of the products associated with the brand. At the moment, it's just Dragon Age: Origins and the one released book, but this also includes more novels in the future, a pen and paper game being developed by Green Ronin, a comic book and any future expansions to come.
Just recently BioWare invited us down to Edmonton to check out their latest foray into the fantasy RPG world - Dragon Age: Origins! While the game itself has no multiplayer to speak of, Dragon Age still manages to really evolve the RPG genre as the team makes its first attempt at blending high fantasy with dark heroic themes. The result is a fantastically immersive game that truly is a spiritual successor to previous blockbusters like Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate II.
ZAM.com managed to sit down with Ray Muzyka And Greg Zeschuk, co-founders of BioWare, and we got their input on inspirations for the game, why they chose to fully omit multiplayer gaming, what they aspired for in creating Dragon Age, and much more!
ZAM: We're here with Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeshuk, co-founders of BioWare, to talk about what went into the creation of Dragon Age: Origins. I'll start off with the one question that's been on my mind from the very beginning. You've made it clear that Dragon Age: Origins will not have a multiplayer option on launch; why not? Why did you move away from that?
Ray Muzyka: We wanted to focus on a really strong, emotionally engaging narrative that felt like your personal narrative, and we felt that the best way to do that in Dragon Age: Origins was to focus on the single player experience. We have a ton of online features through player developed content and showing your hero's journey through the social networking pages we're building. In a way, we have a lot of online functionality, but we decided to focus the game play, the storyline, around a really personal, emotionally engaging narrative.
