Dragon Age II Interview

Bitmob managed to secure an interview with BioWare’s David Gaider about the writing process he used on Dragon Age II, the challenges of writing within the scope of a short development period, and more.

How difficult was it to fit in content from Origins and Awakening into the second game so it all made sense?

DG: That’s harder than one might think, considering that the plot of the second game was only tangentially related to the first — it didn’t involve the same main character and didn’t take place in the same location. So we could refer to events that occurred elsewhere, and occasionally have characters appear, but didn’t want to force the connections to a point where it seemed unrealistic.

Of the things that we did fit in, it was a matter of trying to track all the different choices from Origins and Awakening and figuring out which choices we could or should accommodate. Accommodating them all just isn’t feasible, but neither is ignoring every decision and having no ties to the previous game just so we don’t contravene anything. It’s a tricky situation. Our primary mission was to provide bonuses for the player who did import their previous decisions, acknowledgment of their accomplishments, and some nods to characters and stories they were already familiar with, without giving anyone the impression that they had to play the previous game in order to understand what was going on.

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What were your favorite and least favorite parts of writing the sequel?

DG: The answer to both of these is the shorter time line we had to work with, versus the first game. The negative side is obvious: You have less time to do everything, less time to iterate, and less opportunity to do little extras or follow up on moments of inspiration.

The positive side of that probably wouldn’t be obvious to anyone outside of game development: When you have lots of time to work on a project, you can often use that time in a very nonconstructive way. You stop being objective about a part of the story because you’re spending so much time with it and start second-guessing yourself. When that happens, it is literally possible to spend years developing a game and yet never make any significant progress. And that’s not good, either. Somewhere in the middle would probably be ideal.