Dragon Age: Inquisition Retrospective Video Interview

The folks at Video Game Sophistry have published the third and last part of their long retrospective interview with David Gaider, the former lead writer of the Dragon Age franchise. During this part of the interview, Gaider talks about Dragon Age: Inquisition’s development, from its very start to the finished product. Here’s a link to the interview:

Playing Dragon Age: Inquisition I personally felt the storyline was too truncated to be really effective, so it’s very interesting to hear that the developers were originally planning a story arc that moved through the paces much faster and would have reached a point that has now been moved to later games. In Gaider’s words:

(The length of the plot arc. It wasn’t like we had twice as much content. The amount of ground we were going to cover with the story was twice as long. And the rest of that plot arc still exists

The end of the game was actually redone quite a bit. We wanted to be very careful with the exact kind of note we hit. So, there was a lot of revision. I can’t point to anything specific because it was mostly about the presentation of how we were doing it.

When I look back, I kind of wish that I’d brought the main villain personally into the story more, previous to that. There was a couple of cuts where that was the case. So ultimately when I look back, if I fuss about it, the overall arc and the way things rolled, I think that’s one regret I have. But in terms of the ending, the ending always looked like that. It was always your epic battle with the two dragons in the sky fighting each other. And there were various ways that happened, but it always looked that way.)

During the interview, Gaider also discussed the themes of faith and religion in the plot, the many iterations some plotlines went through (including the epilogue of the game), the process of writing his characters and why he ultimately decided to make homosexuality an important part of Dorian’s character arc, how he felt about Patrick Weekes’ treatment of Cole, a character he had originally written in a novel tie-in, why he never played a complete version of a Dragon Age game, and more.