David Gaider on Characters He Didn’t Write

David Gaider, long-time BioWare writer and currently lead writer on the Dragon Age franchise, muses a little on the direction he might have taken with characters he didn’t write himself, and why, ultimately, it was a good idea to “let them go” to other members of the team:

Sometimes it’s a surprise, though. At the outset of DA2, my intention was to write Anders. He was my character in Awakening, after all, and the arc merging him with Justice (and how that led into his final act in the game) was my plan. Jennifer was real keen on him, however, and thus I let him go. I suppose a part of me will always wonder what he might have been like had I written him instead, though that would have meant not writing Fenris and I’m not sure that’s a tradeoff I’d have been happy with. Fenris was cathartic to write for personal reasons, and it’s possible I might have imposed a lot of the bitter rage I put into Fenris onto Anders instead.and who knows what that might have looked like?

Similarly, I was initially also supposed to write Merrill. Eventually I discovered I just didn’t have time to do that, so she was handed off to Mary who struggled initially to find Merrill’s voice, but she eventually did. And I’m happy she did. I don’t wonder what my version of Merrill would have been like at all. It would have been very different. Much more serious and even sinister, and likely not as good as what Mary came up with.

I guess it’s hard for me to wrap my head around wondering what my version of a character would have been as a compliment as in (I find that character so interesting I want to write them) as opposed to (I wonder if I would have done them better), which seems a tad presumptuous. If I had to pick a few characters which I always liked, and always wondered what I would have done with them? Maybe Imoen from BG2 I got to write a little bit for her in Throne of Bhaal, and I could tell I wanted to take her in a direction that I eventually took Alistair in DAO, which might have been neat. Looking at Mass Effect, a series I never worked on, I think I would have liked to try my hand at Ashley or Thane. Maybe even Jack. Those are the sorts of characters I would have gravitated towards, had I worked on that team.