David Gaider on Narrative Design

Dragon Age: Origins/Dragon Age II (and presumably Dragon Age III: Inquisition) lead writer and longtime BioWare veteran David Gaider has been detailing BioWare’s own narrative design methods and idyosincracies, covering subjects such as quest design, naming things, and more.

Suffice to say, David didn’t skimp on the word count for the subject, so the best course of action would be to go on the blog and read it directly from the source, but here’s a snippet anyway:

Because it does happen every now and again. Sometimes it’s something I’ve done, and other times it’s something one of my writers has done, but every now and again something just clicks. You have that brilliant idea that wins over everyone immediately, and it just falls together because no earthly power can stop it. There’s that plot or that character which seemed. okay. and somehow it just ends up working so much better than you’d expected it to. And then there’s the things that are just inexplicable. (People liked that? Huh.)

Case in point: HK-47. He was the assassin droid in Knights of the Old Republic, who initially was just supposed to use (droid speak) (like T3M4 did, yet it probably would have sounded darker and meaner like an angry car engine that just won’t turn over, I guess). I’d just finished writing Jolee Bindo, something I was incredibly happy about, and had done so early. So James Ohlen, the Lead Designer, asked me to write some actual dialogue for HK-47. I protested you want me to write something for the stupid droid with the automatic rifle name? (Which is not where the name came from, incidentally, though I didn’t even know it at the time.) COME. ON. Yet there it was, new task assigned. my punishment for efficiency, I guess.

OK, FINE. I had a little over a week to do it, and thus he’d have to be smaller than the other companions, but I guessed I could give him something. Inspiration came in the form of the (Littlest Hobo), a Canadian TV series that used to replay constantly on CBC about a dog that goes from owner to owner helping them improve their lives before moving on.

You might say, (Huh? HK-47 has absolutely nothing in common with the Littlest Hobo!) But you would be wrong. He’s the anti-Littlest Hobo. He moves from owner to owner, helping them engineer their own self-destruction before moving on. This thought amused me enough to form the kernel of an idea. The whole (meatbag) thing just came in the middle of writing, when I tried to imagine how an android that found humans disgusting would actually view their organic bodies (60% water seems like a lot of sloshing around, to me). I liked that enough that I used it to excess. Cue the one-note character. I chuckled, got it done on time and left it at that.

(There! Are you happy James? I finished the stupid android.)

Thing is, his voice actor did a grand job. He really transformed the character, which a good voice actor is totally capable of. So. great! Then he went on to be well-received, won (Original Game Character of the Year) at the 2004 Game Developers Choice Awards and a bunch of other accolades, and I understand he appeared in Star Wars: Galaxies (in which I imagine he runs around waving his arms like Robbie the Robot going (Meatbag! Meeeaaatbaaaag!) before he rushes off-screen probably not, but the image pleases me).

So I’ll still scratch my head about that. It’s not that I begrudge the character or anything, but complex he was not. Not that a character needs to necessarily be complex in order to be enjoyed I suppose there’s a lesson in that it’s just that I wasn’t expecting anything at all.