As a developer, what do you do if you've already created a handful of
the most beloved roleplaying games of all time? How can you ever top
games that are already considered the best of the best. The folks at
BioWare Edmonton had to deal with those questions, and more, when they
began work on Dragon Age: Origins. With the release date of Dragon Age
quickly approaching, a number of questions still remained in the air
for eager fans. Ten Ton Hammer sat down with Lead Designer Mike Laidlaw
in Edmonton to try to hammer out some of the lingering questions.

Ten Ton Hammer: What
drove you to make this game so much darker than Neverwinter Nights and
Baldur's Gate? They were D&D based products and you were
constrained a bit by the license, but why did you decide to make it so
much darker?



Laidlaw: To
be quite frank, what we're seeing - and what we recognized in ourselves
- is a maturation of the gamer. As a company, we've gone from a bunch
of young bucks working in a garage to a group of adults in their 30s
with kids. With that in mind, I think there's a shift in thinking where
people want something a bit more mature to chew on. They want something
challenging in both the gaming and decision-making sense.

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interview, click here!