I don't know why, but at points during our lunch I picture dialogue options just at the bottom of my peripheral vision.Īt half eight on 3rd February, 2003, a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 28-year-old Mike Laidlaw walked into BioWare's Edmonton office to join its writing team. He will sometimes look to the side and smile, then chuckle as he remembers something important, something that's worth remembering, and then speak of it with the seriousness it deserves. He remembers people, what they have said to him, what he learned from them, the mistakes, the regrets and the joy. He remembers much about his time at BioWare, the fabled role-playing game developer that has been twisted and turned this way and that over the years. The introduction sounds more like informing the audience an old friend has arrived for dinner, rather than an explanation for why they should listen to him speak.Īnd Laidlaw is a stickler for detail. Laidlaw's introduction is by a man who sounds very much like a friend, or at least someone he has known for a while. He is a confident speaker - I had expected that after studying his performance during his GDC talk on team and project management to a packed audience of video game storytellers - and, clearly, he is well-known within the video game writers circle. I get why they do not, why developers are hesitant to say too much, because when they do, the fans sometimes come calling - as they have at Mike Laidlaw at points during his career. He is willing to talk about things, which might sound like an odd thing to mention, but in this business, it is a rare joy indeed to speak to people who are willing to talk about things. Laidlaw is instantly affable, entertaining and interesting. We're upstairs at Zero Zero, a pizza and pasta place just a 10-minute walk from the begging mothers and the babies they cradle who sit on the sidewalks that connect the buildings that host GDC, the world's largest gathering of video game developers, a place thousands come to share, to learn, to network, and, occasionally - although I sense through gritted teeth - talk to press people such as me. They said, 'you can't quit two days before Christmas! If you quit you'll never work here again!' I said, 'that is pretty much the plan, yes.' So I walked out, and a bunch of people high-fived me because - yay! - I got out." Mike Laidlaw, ex-creative director of the Dragon Age franchise at BioWare. "I went in and said, I'm sorry, I'm quitting. Later, he got promoted to lead a team on the phones, "which was somehow way worse than being on the phones," Laidlaw told me last March, the day after his star turn at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. When Laidlaw first joined Bell's call centre, he worked the phones. Laidlaw was used to answering the phone at the time he was working at Bell, Canada's largest telecommunications company, in the province of Ontario. He even remembers the date he answered the phone and found out he had got the job: 23rd December 2002. Then the rouge one.Mike Laidlaw can still remember his first day at BioWare, even though it was over 15 years ago. I rather have a warrior or mage save that is already maxed out. You should see that there is now TWO TIMES AS MANY (2x) items in the stack then what you sold. Now pull the Left/Right Trigger to go back to the Buy menu, and pull the Left/Right Bumper till you come to the Re-Purchase section. Now press the (Y) button, and immediately press the (A) button. The one stack of items you have in this section will be selected. Pull the Left/Right Trigger to go into the Sell Menu, and pull the Left/Right Bumper till you come to the Valuables section. Move any 1 (ONE) stack 2+ Crafting Material that you have into the Valuables section. Make sure that there is nothing in your Valuables section. SAVE FIRST!!! That way if you mess something up, you can reload. It is the same dupe glitch that was in DA:O.
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