Corinne Busche wasn’t looking for a job when she sat down for lunch with BioWare’s leadership team in 2019. She had been a fan of BioWare games since Dragon Age: Origins and wanted, in her own words, “to meet my heroes.”
“So I went to lunch with a few people from the leadership team at BioWare and we started talking about progression systems and skill trees and the economy, and we just really clicked,” Busche recalls. “And to my great surprise, they were interested in me joining, and that was a question I didn’t have to ask twice. It was such a dream come true, and being able to walk into that space, to visit the studio, to see my favorite characters on display on the walls, I was sold right away. Right away.”
Busche was coming from a job at Maxis, where she helped design systems for various The Sims projects. In taking over Dragon Age: The Veilguard, she became part of a broader stream of talent flowing from Maxis to other parts of the gaming industry. It’s a stream that includes people like Eric Holmberg-Weidler, who is credited with refining many of the systems that make up The Sims 4 before spearheading the revamp of Professions in the Dragonflight expansion for World of Warcraft. Justin Camden, who also worked on The Sims, is one of the technical designers on Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
Systematic discoveries
At first glance, The Sims might not seem like it has much in common with RPGs like Dragon Age, aside from the fact that both involve romance in some way. Going back to its 2000 release, The Sims has earned a reputation as a casual, often silly lifestyle simulator; a game where you remove the ladder from the pool and watch your destitute little Sims drown. Under the hood, though, The Sims is a elaborate web of systems, progression, and relationships. Sims have jobs. They learn skills. They fall in love.
“Maxis is a great place for designers to hone their skills,” says Busche. “There are so many projects happening across platforms and service models at the same time, which is a rare opportunity to have a broad experience. What people might not realize about The Sims, given its fun exterior, is that the core systems and mechanics are deceptively deep—especially as a developer. One of the coolest parts of growing up at Maxis as a designer is the experience you get from simulation, emergent gameplay, and emotionally believable player experiences. Being part of these teams is just a really unique opportunity, and these are skill sets that can benefit a lot of different games and genres.”
Busche’s background in systems design is evident throughout The Veilguard. It includes deep skill trees with subclasses tailored to different weapon types and playstyles, and the choices you make also resonate deeply throughout the story. You can also develop relationships with specific factions and shopkeepers, which in turn open up modern opportunities to acquire unique gear, and characters bear long-lasting scars based on the choices you make. Systems are layered throughout Dragon Age, deepening the player’s interconnectedness with the world and the characters who inhabit it.
In The Sims, characters go about their daily lives in an idealized world filled with strange but charming characters like Bonehilda (Dragon Age, it’s worth mentioning, has her own living skeleton in Manfred). While Dragon Age’s characters are still narrow by the demands of the story, BioWare is going out of its way to make them feel more alive. As we mentioned in our hands-on preview last week, Dragon Age is filled with little messages that mention things like how you “exchanged verbal barbs” with Solas. As we’ll discuss in a future article, both platonic and romantic relationships are a massive part of how characters develop in Dragon Age.
And of course, as anyone who has played a BioWare or Sims game knows, both games have a touch of seduction to them.
How Dragon Age Learned from The Sims Character Creator
Ultimately, though, it’s the character creator where the similarities between the two are most apparent. Dragon Age’s character creator is extensive, allowing players to customize physical attributes, including the size of their chest, the curve of their nose, and whether their eyes are bloodshot, among other things. While custom characters are a time-honored BioWare tradition dating back to Baldur’s Gate, The Veilguard borrows from The Sims in everything from body customization to the fluidity of the UI.
This kind of cross-pollination is common at EA, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard draws from a number of other sources as well. That awesome hair technology, for example, started in EA’s sports games, meaning your Rook could have a luscious mane like Lionel Messi. But the character creator is probably the biggest crossover point between Dragon Age and The Sims.
“Character creators are incredibly complex, and in many ways even more personal. It’s really important for players to feel like they can be represented and feel proud of that representation as they go through the creation process,” Busche says. “I remember in particular that we were struggling with some of our iconography and we turned to each other and said, ‘How did The Sims 4 handle this?’ Even though the technology and the user interface are quite different, the underlying goals and lessons were quite similar.”
He adds that Maxis has “a huge amount of expertise when it comes to representing gender, identity, and the surprising amount of localization issues that come with that when you release in different regions and languages.”
“It’s always nice to learn from that past experience. See what worked, what didn’t, and how expectations have evolved. The coolest thing is that we can now pass it on and share our knowledge with other teams,” says Busche.
Of course, depending on the moment, The Sims and Dragon Age are two very different games with very different goals. One is a single-player action RPG, the other a lifestyle simulator. As studios, BioWare and Maxis are in very different places right now. The Sims has been a massive franchise for over two decades, and EA is trying to expand its reach with a modern movie. BioWare, meanwhile, is trying to rebuild after stumbles with Anthem and Mass Effect Andromeda.
But when creator Will Wright first decided to focus on the people inhabiting his games, the world he created wasn’t all that different from the one found in Dragon Age. Both operate unique systems to create reactive, imaginative worlds filled with engaging choices, filled with characters with their own inner lives. It’s a philosophy that’s always been part of BioWare’s legacy; now, in The Veilguard, it can finally be fully on display once again.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard arrives on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox on October 31. Be sure to stay tuned to IGN this month as we continue our coverage of IGN First.
Kat Bailey is IGN’s news director and also co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? DM her @the_katbot.