Building a proper "open world" game is no easy feat.
Attend GDC 2015 and you'll hear firsthand how creating Dragon Age: Inquisition drove BioWare to re-think their approach to design; 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.
In a talk entitled "Worlds Collide: Combining Story and Design in Dragon Age: Inquisition", a pair of BioWare leads will explain how the first team 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 Inquisition was somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Sharing examples from Dragon Age: Inquisition's development, BioWare's Kaelin Lavallee and Mark Wilson will demonstrate why 'story' is everyone's responsibility, and how the challenges of populating BioWare's largest game were overcome by combining story and systems.
Full details on this and all other announced talks is available now in the online GDC 2015 Session Scheduler, where you can begin to build your conference week and later export it to the up-to-the-minute GDC Mobile App, coming soon.
GDC 2015 itself will take place March 2-6 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. For more information on GDC 2015, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.
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