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The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry

Session Name: Worlds Collide: Combining Story and Systems in Dragon Age: Inquisition
Speaker(s): Kaelin Lavallee, Mark Wilson
Company Name(s): BioWare, BioWare
Track / Format: Design

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Overview: Dragon Age: Inquisition required BioWare to re-think their approach to creating story content.Knowing that the Inquisition would visit more than one cave, the challenge was to populate BioWare's largest 'open world' with only a handful of designers.To achieve the desired content scope and density, the team split and experimented with two opposing techniques. The first group aimed to create discrete narrative content, while the second planned to implement standalone systems. The former found their content scaled poorly, and the latter discovered their content had a disconnected impact. A truce was reached when it was suggested that the solution for DA:I was somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.

GDC 2015

Kaelin Lavallee

BioWare

Mark Wilson

BioWare

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Design

Design