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[IanTheTexan]

Dear BioWare,

Let me open by saying that I love your games, thank you for your years of hard work and I am excited to see what the future will bring. I am writing out of concern for myself and what I am sure are a quiet minority of gamers in the hope that our interests can at least be considered as you develop future titles. 

I am an arachnophobe. Arachnophobia is the most common phobia, and it is often irrational. The image of a spider is enough to trigger a fear response, anxiety, etc. depending on the picture and the condition of the viewer. While I love Dragon Age II, it's not doing much to help fight these fears. If anything, it's made things a bit worse. Relax, I'm not suing you or suggesting that anyone should. I am asking that at the very least, when you are thinking up your enemies for these wonderful fantasy games, you come up with something a little bit more original than a scary thing on steroids. I think you can take the scary aspects of the world and use them without making them frightening. I am not afraid of bears, but crossing paths with one too soon in Oblivion was enough to send my character running in the opposite direction. That was scary and it was fun, and it's the kind of experience I look forward to in gaming.

There is an important difference in what I mean when I say something is scary versus something that's frightening. Something scary can be shocking, surprising, unusual, and in the context of the game threatening but not something that should create genuine fear. An example would be the alien xenomorph from the 'Alien' franchise. It's scary without being frightening. 'Frightening' is something that creates a genuine fear response, makes you look or run away or at the very least removes the player's ability to be rational. 

Playing off of arachnophobia is not new, Valve did it very successfully with their spider headcrabs in Half Life 2, as did Bethesda with their Spider Daedra in Oblivion (they would later drop the ball in a major way for Fallout 3, but that's another letter), and you yourselves did an excellent job with it in Mass Effect with the Rachni. Is it too much to ask that you take that same creative talent and apply it to this fantasy setting? There must be a way to incorporate scary villains that aren't frightening. Tension, setting and music can do just as much or more of the scare work, but there is still a reason why I have no problem facing down an endless horde of zombies at the drop of a hat, but a romp through a cave outside Kirkwall gives me pause. 

I'm asking as a gamer, and as a fan, please give us something more than just grotesques, and if you insist on them give us the option either in-game or through an optional patch/mod of disabling the arachnids so that we can have as much fun playing as our fellow gamers. I do not want to demean the hard work of everyone who brought those spiders large and larger to life in the game, but for once I believe you've done too good a job. If it would genuinely be too difficult at this point to add an option to change scripted spawn commands from spiders to darkspawn, and queen spiders to trolls, I understand, but as I mentioned earlier, at the very least consider this point of view as you move forward making the games so many of us sincerely love.

Faithfully,

A Fan 

[David Gaider]

To the OP:

Personally, I thought we overused the giant spiders a bit-- as an enemy, I agree they're not that original, and if there's any reason to use them less (I doubt we'll ever get rid of them *entirely*) that would be the biggest one. While I'm not sure we would ever add in a toggle to remove a creature we've added in, it's certainly worth noting that not everyone finds spiders scary in a good way.

Thanks for taking the time to write.