We recently interviewed Mengtzu, acclaimed role-playing game author and RPG.net moderator, to discuss his experiences in creating Fragments of Ferelden and his future projects. As one of the first user-created modules to become a Featured Project on the Bioware Social Site, Fragments of Ferelden has garnered over ten thousand downloads and been the first “Other Campaign” many players enjoy using the Dragon Age engine.

Grey Wardens: What sorts of games do you normally play? Have you had any previous Bioware game experience?

Mengtzu: I play all sorts of games, but RPGs are my favourite and most frequent. I’ve played and enjoyed every modern Bioware game (ie from KotOR onwards) – I was too busy discovering JRPGs when Baldur’s Gate was new.

Most of my game time is spent raiding in World of Warcraft, which is a huge influence on me in terms of encounter design. I wasn’t comfortable enough with the toolset for that to really come through in Fragments, but the project I’m working on right now will show it off in spades.

You started working with the toolset shortly after it came out. Have you had previous experience with toolsets? What difficulties did you experience working with the DA toolset?

I played around a little with the NWN and NWN2 toolsets at various point but never got very far. I knew that DA would be launching with a toolset, and had a bit more of a concerted stab at the NWN2 one for practice a few months beforehand. I started on a module with a similar premise to Fragments, with similar quests to the ones you find in the Tower, so despite not really accomplishing much it was good preparation.

Ultimately having been a tabletop GM for 15 years and a web developer for 10 was my most valuable experience for getting the project done. Putting together fun gameplay is (should be?) second nature for a GM, and anyone with any kind of development or scripting experience should be comfortable with the toolset as an IDE.

My biggest difficulty with the toolset is the level editor because I am terrible at putting together a level visually. I skipped that for Fragments though so it’s not strictly relevant

Next up is the vestiges of older (NWN-style?) practices in the toolset that Bioware doesn’t follow anymore. There’s a bunch of fields that just don’t work, which Bioware didn’t notice/care about because they ended up using defined flags, plot scripts, event capture etc etc instead. Ultimately the new methods are much better, but they’re not at all obvious from the interface! That sort of thing is to be expected though, given the toolset is more of a bonus than a core part of the experience as it was in NWN.

There’s also annoyances with the DA game system (consumables, ugh), but that’s not strictly relevant to the toolset.

You mentioned on a forum post that this was the first video game project you’ve completed. What about Dragon Age or the toolset inspired you so?

Honestly it was probably nothing to do with the toolset per se and everything to do with my decision to reuse DA:O’s level layouts for my areas. Even in the much friendlier environs of NWN I found visually creating an area to be very frustrating and would quickly lose interest. By skipping that for Fragments I was able to focus on my strengths and started making significant progress straight away, and my gameplay was framed by these amazingly detailed levels that had hundreds of man-hours poured into them.

The toolset is really intended for a working team, not a solo modder. I’m not intending to join a modding team because internet people are flaky (me especially), but they have a powerful advantage if they can assemble people with differing skill sets. I wouldn’t want to do my day job without the amazing UX guys or Java devs I work with, and creating content for a modern AAA game isn’t much different. I cynically expect many modding team projects to founder along the way, but the ones that make it will be amazing.

Conversely if there is anyone who can master all aspects of the toolset Bioware should probably hire them.

What made you want to break out of Dragon Age canon with Fragments of Fereldan? What elements of Dragon Age appealed to you, and what did not?

The real answer is that I quickly realised I didn’t want to use the level editor at all. For those not familiar with the toolset, what you might normally understand as a level (say Denerim Market) actually has two components – a level layout and an area. The level layout is all the static visual content for the area – buildings, trees, lighting etc. The area is the dynamic/gameplay content – creatures, interactive objects, scripting triggers etc.

It’s pretty easy to reuse an existing level layout for your own areas and put whatever content you like in them. I didn’t have to remove anything before putting my stuff in for Fragments. So if like me you’re terrible at visually building an environment but OK at filling it with gameplay, it’s a great solution.

So I knew all my levels would be exactly the same as they were in the main game. I wanted to make a standalone module because I didn’t want to accidentally mess with people’s savegames, and because I wanted to tune and balance my encounters. I needed a reasonable fictional excuse!

The Labyrinth is the setting for my home D&D game. It’s fun because it combines exploration (literally anything could be around the corner) with a history and relationships (you know your old allies and enemies are out there, but you don’t know where). I’d already used it for my practice module in NWN2, and it seemed natural to bring Ferelden into the Labyrinth and have an excuse for using those level layouts in whatever configuration I liked.

I don’t know how obviously it comes across in play, but there’s an implication that someone is deliberately trying to mold your Fragments PC in the image of the PC from DA:O. Right down to arranging the furniture of the tower in the same way the Grey Warden would have seen it (ie a total mess).

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