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Like the fans of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, there are literally millions of fantasy lovers in today’s market, and BioWare recognizes the potential advantage in ancillary products of fantasy, and more specifically, Dragon Age material. With Les Mis, this meant a musical, posters, CDs, clothing, and a plethora of other memorabilia. With Dragon Age, it means novels, pen and paper RPGs, and game expansion sets.

“In our experience,” Darrah stated, “there’s a great breadth of fans,” and this opens up the opportunity to offer players more of the Dragon Age experience than just the game.

In addition, the swing of current gamer flavor needs to be considered, but not in the way one might think. “You have to be careful to not chase the trend of the day. Paranormal, werewolves, and zombies are pretty hot today. The problem is that with the amount of time it takes us to build an IP up from scratch, and introduce it into the market, the trend would probably be long gone. Fantasy goes through cycles, but there’s always an audience for it. There may not always be an audience for post-apocalyptic zombie worlds. It could be a popular genre right now, but in five years, who knows?”

Even without brain-eating zombies, BioWare seems to be aiming the title to a more adult audience than some other fantasy games.

“We really look at this as an opportunity to explore the edges of the fantasy genre,” Darrah continued. “This is a game that contains the elements of what you’re used to in fantasy, like elves, dwarves and mages, but everything is looked at in a slightly different tone. For example, mages are distrusted heavily, and elves are an oppressed race. For us, it was an opportunity to tell the stories we wanted to tell, but look at it in a more adult way.”

Though more mature, the targeted audience is still large, and the best way to target a large audience is to target several audiences.

“I think this is a game that manages to [target many types of gamers]. For the Baldur’s Gate player, there’s all that depth there if you want it. You can pause and play; you can dig into the tactics; you can be very careful and very calculating on how you play the game. For someone who’s looking for a little more action, you can play the game that way too, especially on the consoles where the controls are much tighter and much more designed for an action experience.  It feels like it’s a totally different game, and much more geared to the Action RPG player.”

It’s been ten years since we’ve played Baldur’s Gate II, but Darrah believes Dragon Age: Origins could hit home with those players too.

“It’s not the same game, but it still invokes the same feelings, the same depth of story and tactical element.”

And depth is a major reason players will keep coming back to a game. It’s what sets good games that trigger an emotional response apart from bland games that are forgotten five minutes after playing. So how does a developer drive an emotional response? There is a method to it, and Darrah explained.

“We tell stories that are real in a way. It’s in a fantastic environment, but it’s something you can imagine. It’s brutal, but you can imagine it really happening. I think that helps strengthen the emotions. Even though you may be suspending your disbelief by playing a dwarf, you don’t [have to try to believe] you’re a dwarf doing something really weird. What you’re doing and the experiences that are occurring seem logical. That helps anchor that emotion.”