BioWare hopes "out of place" music for Origins videos "wakes you up"

BioWare's lead designer for Dragon Age: Origins, Mike Laidlaw, has commented about the seemingly out of place music associated with videos for the game.

Most contain heavy style rock/pop, and most recently, Marilyn Manson's "This is the New S**t" was used. This type of music is usually not something one associates with a fantasy title; however, Laidlaw says that there is a reason for this. BioWare wants to "shock" you enough so that you take notice of the game.

"I think part of the reason it's infamous is because people were surprised and just weren't expecting it," he told D'toid. "What they expected was a long string of flutes and some harpsichord, perhaps. Quite frankly, Dragon Age ultimately is about surprising the player in terms of their expectations of fantasy.

"It's going to shock them in a lot of ways. At the same time there's a deep RPG in there, and a great story, but what I think that particular campaign achieved is, it hit an element of the game, and the game's about eighty hours for average players, so you certainly can't make a three minute marketing spec that covers every friggin' element of that, so you pick a part of it and go, 'let's talk about violence for a while, and while we're talking about violence, we're going to play some music that, essentially, is pretty violent."

More through the jump.

"And if that wakes you up and shocks you and makes you go 'aurururgh,' is that really a bad thing? Because what it does, I hope, is make people go, 'y'know, what is up with this Dragon Age thing?' and they go digging a little further and discover that there's far more than just killing some people, but at the same time, killing people is a very real part of the game, there are many, many deaths.

"We have a persistent gore system, so there you go."

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