Dragon Age II Interview

The guys over at Sarcastic Gamer have gotten around to posting an interview that they conducted with Dragon Age II lead writer David Gaider during their trip to BioWare’s Edmonton headquarters. A bit of what to expect:

I have seen DA described as the spiritual successor to the Baldur’s Gate series. What made now (or rather November 2009) the right time for BioWare to dip their toes back in the fantasy realm?

Well, I wouldn’t say that we see the Baldur’s Gate series is an albatross.[MM: But is it seen as a weight around your neck?] Yes but there are two ways to look at that. Yes, we have fans from that era but in some ways we have moved on. We still have a lot of people here, including myself, that worked on the Balder’s Gate series and I think there was always an element of us wanting to go back to party based RPG’s, the closest we had got before was with KOTOR but I don’t think of three people as a party, four is about the minimum. Having more people in your party causes all types of pathfinding issues. People ask (Why don’t you have horses in DA?) You want path finding issues? Try programming for creatures that are longer than they are tall! We always start every project saying that we are going to do horses and then it turns out to be so much hassle that someone says (Is this really worth it? Does it help tell the story we want to tell?)

As we see more DA titles will we see more and more of the land of Thedas?

Do you know where the name Thedas comes from? [MM – No] When we were initially designing Origins we came up with a temporary name for the world that we all hated [MM – Can I ask what it was?] I don’t remember.it started with a P.it was something that someone suggested and my rule is that if you can not think of anything better then it sticks.but we did say at some point we would change it. We did not announce the name of the world publicly, as we only had a temporary name and so people on our forums started referring to it as The DAS or The Dragon Age Setting. Because we did not like the temp name we had, we started to refer to the world with the temp name that our forums were using. When we sat down to finally work out the name, we sat around for ages before one of my writers just said (Can’t we just call it Thedas?) I guess we can, that works.