David Gaider Interview

Gamasutra recently had the chance to sit down with David Gaider and chat with him about landing a job at BioWare, the Dragon Age novel he recently published, writing party banter for Baldur’s Gate II, and much more.

Even just beyond just having interactivity, there’s also of course a very strong tabletop RPG influence in BioWare’s games, down to specific rulesets and so on. Dragon Age is still in that vein.

DG: Every BioWare game gets compared to the last one that comes out. And there’s potential that when Dragon Age comes out, it will get compared a little bit to Mass Effect. But I hope that the people who do that keep in mind that we’re going for something that’s a little different here.

Mass Effect is great — it’s more cinematic — whereas with Dragon Age, we’re definitely going to something that’s a little more traditional. There’s nothing wrong with traditional. We’re looking at our Baldur’s Gate roots.

I know they whip that out in the marketing a lot, but Baldur’s Gate II was my first game. I think nothing compares to your first. For me, it was this wonderful experience where we were working with a tried and true engine, which is a great place to be because you can start creating content and test it right from the beginning.

We haven’t really been in that situation since. Mass Effect 2 is there now, which is good for the team. Hopefully, for Dragon Age, we’ll get there, too. But [with Baldur’s Gate II] we were in this great place where we could just generate content and be a little bit experimental in terms of what we tried. We tried romances — we just said, “Can we do that?” Or, “I like working on this Drow setting. I’d like to try this.”

It was very permissive, allowing the writers and designers to have ownership over what they were working on. The idea was that a lot of the story was told through your followers, the ones you had in your party.

That party-based dynamic is something for which I think Baldur’s Gate II still serves as a benchmark in a lot of ways.

DG: Yeah. Well, to this day, there are people who still talk about the followers. And we haven’t really done a proper party since. When you only have two followers, there’s a limited possibility of banter. Here, we have three, which allows a bit of exchange. For me, writing that banter is some of my favorite parts — back in Baldur’s Gate II, they’d talk to each other and tease each other and develop their own relationships. I think for a player, that’s great.

From a writing perspective, when you have these followers, and you get a different range of their own morality and their own agendas, you get to use them almost as a cipher through which the story is told, because we’ve taken away the morality bar.

KOTOR had of course the Light Side and Dark Side meter. D&D games, of course, have alignments. And as soon as you attach a gameplay element to that, you need to put it into the gameplay and the writing. You need quests that have a very sharply delineated good option and evil option.

Taking that away allowed us to have different options for the quests and the dialogue, but we don’t need to always have “evil” and “good.” We are allowed to put in options that are just logical. They can be very different. You can think there’s a good reason to do all of them. They can be a little in the gray area.