Mature Themes Are an Integral Part of Dragon Age: Origins

One of the more unnerving sights of the last few months has been the marketing campaign for Dragon Age: Origins, the BioWare developed and Electronic Arts published role playing adventure set to arrive on the Xbox 360 and the PC on November 3.

The promos, which used to focus on the fantasy world and on the various RPG mechanics in it, were suddenly filled with a lot of blood, fights focused mostly on backstabbing and romantic themes all delivered to a new metal soundtrack that seemed to clash with the fantasy sensibilities of the potential buyers.

But Mike Laidlaw, who is the lead designer on the title at BioWare, has told Strategy Informer that maturity, especially the blood, has always been something that the team was interested in getting across.

He said that “From the very beginning we decided to create a game that was more mature. It spoke to the way and kind of culture of Bioware that has gone from the 'young bucks that are 20-year-olds and are ready for anything and able to stay up till 4 a.m.' to 'people with better scheduling so that they can live their lives and have kids.'” You know, it’s a whole better quality of life.” Maturity is not an effort to get people to like the game in spite of the RPG element but an aspect of its nature that the audience can now understand better.

The blood especially is a sign that the underlying world is based around people, from humans to elves to dwarfs, killing their kind or leaving them to their faith at the mercy of the Blight. The blood will persist through battles in order to show off how fierce the fighting is and to instill a sense of price in the player for making through it and will even show up in dialog scenes to show the grittiness of the overall setting.