Dragon Age II Interview

ZAM was able to corner BioWare’s David Gaider during their time in Edmonton for a brief Q&A about creating the Dragon Age world, the sequel’s use of a framed narrative, novel writing vs. video game writing, and more. A snip:

ZAM: In comparing Dragon Age 2 to Dragon Age: Origins, it feels like Dragon Age 2 is purer in its conception and creation. I was talking to Mark Darrah (DA2’s executive producer) earlier about how it took five years to make DA:O, versus one year with DA:2, and how easy it is to wander astray the longer you take in creating something. What was the big difference in DA:O’s creation versus DA2, aside from the time taken?

David: With Dragon Age: Origins, we spent a lot of time spinning our wheels. We had to figure out what kind of game we wanted to make, and you’d be surprised how much time you can spend doing that. So you’ll do something, and then you’ll decide that it’s not quite what you want to do, and then you’ll redo it, and then three years later you’ll come back to it and decide that it’s old and you’ll want to change it. You could potentially make a game forever.

Dragon Age 2’s one year creation was still tight, no matter how you look at it, and it helped that we hit the ground running. We knew what kind of game we wanted to make and we’d already identified the tone that we want. I think that’s one of the most important things; the tone is how you judge everything, it’s the bar. Once you have the tone of the story, it really helps in deciding what’s “Dragon Age” and what’s not. So going into Dragon Age 2, we knew our tone and we knew the story we wanted to tell. We have a lot of our ongoing story for Dragon Age, as a world, already mapped out. So we knew this story we wanted to tell, we just didn’t know how to tell it.