A nugget of Dragon Age info
Remember Dragon Age, Bioware’s gritty PC-exclusive take on fantasy roleplaying? It’s okay if you don’t, because we haven’t heard anything about it for quite awhile, but there’s a tiny bit about it in a Sonic RPG interview up at Gamasutra:
Did you adapt the BioWare dialogue tool? I saw it demonstrated at Austin GDC.
MD: We’re actually not using the one that was used for Mass Effect, because the Mass Effect one is really designed to do cinematic conversations. This is moving away, because it’s not really practical for us to do cinematic conversations, so we’re using a version of the dialogue tool that was developed for Dragon Age, where it’s able to deal with more traditional style of storytelling.
Now, Dragon Age has since layered on something like what Mass Effect has, in order to tell a much more cinematic story, but we don’t need that here, so we’ve got a traditional BioWare-style conversation system without the additional trappings of a complicated cinematic system.
It’s not at all surprising that Dragon Age is using Mass Effect’s awesome conversation interface, because it ruled. If I worked at Bioware that thing would be on everything from the vending machines to the elevators. But it’s nice to know that things are still progressing.
