It's finally, FINALLY HERE! Sorry again for the delay.
Writer David Gaider explains exactly what was cut from Dragon Age Inquistion
Some the highlights include:
How Solas ending was suppose to happen....
The Architect was suppose to show up!
Every Cameo in the game!
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TRANSCRIPT:
VGS: 2 is done. It's finished. When did the conversations start happening about Inquisition, and when did you start hammering down this is the story we want to tell?
We knew the broad strokes of DAI before we even started DA2. The initial story we had planned was much longer. But when we started looking at what we actually intended to do, we kept hashing it out and hashing it out, and it was like, there's something that just feels weak. And I think at some point I was like, okay, wait. I just cut it in half. I was like, look at this arc here as a complete arc. How does that work? And they were like, yes.
That felt better. When we finally sat down – I think it was toward the end of the DLC process for DA2. We had been intending to do an expansion for DA2, a full expansion, and that got cut. And I went home angry, and I took a month off just to cool off. I was like, I need to take a month off. And they were like, why? Because otherwise, you're going to have meetings about the next game, and I'm going to be that guy at the end of that table with his arms folded and a giant frown on my face, and I don't want to be that guy. So, let me go cool off. And they were like, okay, go. So I did. And I came back, and I was like, alright. Let's tackle this. And it felt good.
The story we had in the expansion, we had that story, and then the story we had planned for DA3 originally. And, here's what they were together, and that was too long. So, here's what we could do with what we have left, and that felt right. It was still the arc we had always intended, and it still hit the pace of lore reveal for the world. And I'm not going to spoil anything, but the stuff that you get to at the very end that's like, oh, okay, we're looking at larger developments in the Dragon Age setting.
Everybody else I think was still working on the second DLC or had just finished. I don't remember now. Somewhere around that period. We were in transition. So this is us. The writers always have to be in there first working on the concepting. We were sitting down with a concept artist, and having lots of meetings. Because they were talking about having exploration be a much bigger element. And how are we going to fit the story in that? Because lots of exploration wasn't really something that Bioware focused on. That was more an element of open world games. And so, are we having open world? Is this open world? No? It's something similar? Okay, so, how do we have a narrative that exists along side the open world?
And, of course, the answer was, no, they can't be along side. They can't be separate. You can't be, like okay, I'm going to go run around an open world, oh, now I'm going to do – and that's even wrong because I guess in a way that is how it works. But how do we keep the two tied together enough that it doesn't feel like you are doing two entirely separate things? And how do we make it so that the progression of the crit path plot is tied to your progression in the exploration.
So, you deciding, well, I'm going to do the main plot now, doesn't just come from you making that decision. There are things you do in exploration that not only narratively tie to what you need to do next in the main story, but that is required. That there is a purpose to it that leads into the main story. Those were all challenges we had to talk about and figure out how we were going to do that because it was new.
Were there any things, again, because you mentioned before that your original story plan for Inquisition was twice as long as what players ended up with...
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. So, it's now in Patrick Weeks hands. Good luck, buddy! Good luck going the rest of the distance! And we'll see how he does that.
I'd love to know if there was other story arcs that you were exploring that you just decided didn't work from what you'd been developing.
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.
The specific way – and spoilers for anyone who has not completed the game – the wink with Solas and Flemeth. One question that I think has been asked across the board – in terms of storytelling, why did you believe that little addition was needed? Why did you add that in?
If I think of the one cut that did occur, there was a playable epilogue. You had a search for Solas kind of epilogue. Somebody is going to hear that and their going to lose their mind because they're going to picture it being something that it totally wasn't. It was too much. It felt like your end battle didn't have a conclusion, so it felt sort of misleading.
But we wanted to preserve the – what do you call it? Sequel bait? We wanted to preserve the sense of acknowledgment of what Solas was, so that when the player hits that moment and thinks back about the totality of their relationship with Solas, they can think back and go, oh, okay. It totally spawns more questions than it answers, of course. And it was meant to do that.
On it's surface this is a very villain appears, you defeat the villain, you save the day, right? That's the progression. But there was more happening under the surface than maybe you were aware. And I think that we wanted to preserve that moment of the player being able to go, oh! And maybe even look back and play through again and talk to him or listen to things Corypheus says and let the fan theories go. That was intentional.
I think part of the issue was could we do it in a way that as we scaled down what we tried to do and boiled it down to what we need is this one particular piece to be thrown to the player so they could go, oh, okay? So we would boil it down to that and put that in their mind so that last thing that makes your view on what happened before tilt about forty five degrees. That's what we wanted. And I think it succeeded.
I would be remiss if I didn't ask what that quest for Solas epilogue looked like even in the early stages.
It went through several versions. I prefer not to speculate because I don't think had we actually proceeded that it would have looked anything like what we started off with the original designs. That's the problem. If I say, well, we had several versions and they were like this. The things that people listening will automatically intend is they'll picture something that will be like, oh, my, god! I can't believe you cut that.
Yes. Except that I know that the reason we cut it is because we could not have followed through with that. When you boil it down to that one scene at the end, that ended up looking really good. And I don't think if we had drawn that out over a much longer period that it would have … there would have been too many issues with it. And it wouldn't have been to the quality that we thought it deserved.
Where do you put Dragon Age: Inquisition in terms of the stuff that was left on the cutting room floor in comparison to Origins and DA2?
About the same. There was lots of stuff that was cut from DA2. The difference between say, that and DA2, is that DA2 is the percentage of the overall content. There's still the same amount of turn on the content. Okay, we cut a bunch of stuff and it's gone forever or changed forever. I think that's the biggest difference between that and other games was that the DAI content went through a lot more revision as opposed to here's this giant piece that was cut.
Where you go to the ball in Halamshiral, for instance. That plot went through a lot of different phases. It didn't change entirely. You're going to the ball at Halamshiral, and there's the empress of Orlais there, and it's political. That was always the same. But in terms of its presentation, it changed a lot.
The assault on Adamant Fortress also went through a lot of different versions. There was a point were it didn't involve the Fade at all. You fell into the abyss and you ended up in the Deed Roads. You had to find your way out through the Deep Roads, and you encountered the intelligent Darkspawn from Awakening.
There were different versions of every story. I think the iteration was actually a good thing. Because when I think back at some of those things, well, I say that and you could think immediately, oh, I could imagine what that could have been. Just try imagining what it would have been, but imaging it kind of sucking because that's generally why it changed. The iteration was a healthy thing for the most part. There was less, let's cut this because we don't have time, and more, let's cut this because it's just not working.
You spoke earlier about the initial idea to have a cameo of almost every single character – major characters – or was it every single character, even some of the insulary coming into DAI?
I think initially we wanted to fit somebody everywhere. If you want to look at things we cut because of content, that would definitely be one. I would have liked to have done all of that. There's content there as well, but there's also just not working. And trying to fit in every single character just would not have worked from a creative standpoint, never mind a content standpoint. There's always going to be a weighing of scales when it comes to that kind of decision for sure.
We've talked about a lot of what each of these games gives players. For Inquisition, you're introduced to a whole lot of new gameplay features, a lot of new ways to live and experience this world. Narratively, how were you able to grab on to those features and still tell an exciting story that goes in line with the other two games?
It was a bit of a challenge at first just because the level of exploration was something we hadn't contended with. How do you space out the pacing? One, you can't have a ticking time bomb. You can't have, I can't go to this exploration area because the world's about to end in five minutes. So, that became something you couldn't do.
It became more about the growing of influence of the organization and how that was a fantasy fulfillment deal. We do that every game – we talk about what is the player fantasy that we are filling? And it's not necessarily just one. Sometimes we touch several. But, what kind of player would do this? That scratches an itch I didn't even know I had. The growth of an organization that you aren't just part of – because our games often have you're a Grey Warden or you're a specter, you're part of some organization. Well, what if you had one and it was yours?
Looking at it from that perspective and how even if you don't see the apparatus of the organization all the time – I mean, you do once you get to Skyhold – the feeling of being a part of something that by the end of the game has gone through its own journey. You start off and everyone is scoffing at the Inquisition. You're nothing to suddenly you are an organization that is commanding respect not just from people but from nations and has influence and you can feel that, not just in terms of the crit path but in terms of what you do in the exploration. When we brought in the operations on the war table, how that could feed into the sense of growth. That was all a challenge, and it took a lot of time.
We worked on this for about three years, and overtime getting a sense of how we wanted to impart that feeling to the player. It was an interesting challenge. Sometimes it seemed insurmountable, but overall it was a lot of fun.
Do you think ever the tendency to try and tell the story of being an Inquisitor and what that meant ever made it a little more difficult to tell the more personal stories of who the Inquisitor was in terms of their relationships and their interactions with these established characters? The one thing I noticed with Dragon Age: Inquisition is you are pulled in different directions in different ways that I didn't feel as much in the previous games.
I don't think it made it more difficult. I think it gave us a lot more to play with. We could touch on topics that we hadn't done before like the issue of faith and talking about the faith of the followers you are with. Having them react to the things you did in the plot as opposed to who you were necessarily. Here's this thing that perhaps you never asked for, perhaps you didn't even want. You're the inquisitor. Maybe you resent that, or maybe you embrace it.
And talking about the player's growth in terms of how they relate to what they've become. I don't think that made it more difficult. I think that opened up a lot of opportunity. This was different than we'd done before, but I think it allowed us a lot more avenues to talk about the characters. Rather than just having them say the exposition of this is who I am, you can look at how they feel about what you've done, about what's happening. And that tells you as much if not more of what's going on in their heads.
Why did you make the choice to go back to the created back stories of being different races, picking and choosing those characters? Adding to that the fact that you have to deal with two other games and all the choices made there and throwing that into the mix. Why go back to something that would make it even more complicated?
There's two separate questions, really. With us going back to the different races, I think we always wanted to do that. The only reason ultimately we didn't do that in DA2 was a matter of choosing which side was going to give us the most impact for the time that we had.
For DAI, we wanted to do it, and I think actually we weren't going to. We got an extra year of development time. I think that was it. Something came along, and EA said, yeah, go do that. And we said, excellent. This is what we will use that extra time for. I think that was adding in the extra races.
I think a majority of players will play humans regardless. But I think even to the ones who play humans, the fact that those other options were available, even if they don't chose them, has value to them. So there's people who just love playing elves and love playing dwarfs, or always wanted to play a qunari. That will be awesome. Thank God I don't have to be forced to play a human, as if that was something that was a restraint. But, even to the eighty percent that play humans, that the possibility was there to play other things, has value.
So, I think, looking at it in terms of a bang for your buck, in terms of development time, it was something we wanted to do. But, of course, it's a big challenge because now it's like, so writers. We want the ability to play any race. So now go through your plans and accommodate that. All right. Roll up our sleeves, and get to work, right? That was essentially it.
And in terms of now let's accommodate the collective past two games worth of choices, that's a whole different bowl of wax. It wasn't something we could just drop. Like romances. It's our third game, it's established that this is something that Dragon Age does. We couldn't – well, I guess that's wrong - we could just say, we're putting out this game, and now there's a canon. The choices you made before? No. This is the story of this game.
You'd get a lot of people rending their garments. And, how could that be? That could never be! If that's what we'd done, ultimately, it would have happened and they would have accepted it or not. But we thought there was value in. That's how we sold Dragon Age as a series. We talked about the series being one about the world, but it's about a world that reacts to your choices, you're cumulative choices.
Part of the issues of trying to write to that narratively is that it's not something that's going to work for everybody. As soon as you say it reacts to your choices, they imagine that every single choice they've ever made is a divergence that is its own plot. You're going to have some choices that cause major changes. And you're going to have some that that's the choice you made, and it's acknowledged that it happened, but it doesn't really develop into anything.
And they're angry because they're like, but I imagined it being so much bigger. Well, that's fair. That's completely fair. It's not going to fulfill every fantasy. But I think the feeling overall that this is an outgrowth of your choices, and that things are different because of your choices makes the player feel more invested in the current state of the world. I think that was the ultimate deal.
But the actual process of trying to figure out how we're going to accommodate that, and how much content we can apply because it's all minority content essentially. Minority content is content that applies only to a certain amount of players and the majority of players would never even see this content.
It doesn't mean that content is worthless. To the player who encounters something that is very specific to their particular playthrough – so, they made Loghain a Grey Warden at the end of Dragon Age: Origins. He never died. And you go to Adamant Fortress and you encounter Loghain the Grey Warden and he's a major part of that plot. For the player who did that, they're like, oh, my god. That's awesome!
So, encountering some things like that along the way will make it more worthwhile. But the process of trying to figure out what is and what isn't going to be and what we can do and what we can't do, that is a headache. The number of choices you make becomes exponentially harder to accommodate.
We had to do the Dragon Age Keep because we couldn't import the choices directly because we bought a brand new engine. I still remember when we started discussing it. If we're going to import the choices, we need an interface or something were here's the list and I pick all the choices I made. But at the time I said it, it was like, but you're never going to do that. And then it was like, well, here's the Dragon Age Keep. Here's how we deal with it. And I was like, okay, fair enough. I guess they were.
Actually, it's kind of neat. Did you use the Keep?
Oh, yeah. It's great to set choices that in your game play that you wouldn't do because you don't want to be, at least in my circumstance, a vile possessed abomination for the first game, and to see how that effects little things in the third. I think it really works.
That took a while. There's a separate small team that worked on the idea of the Keep and having it be its own little experience. And sure not all those decisions even play into DAI, but it's sort of a walk down memory lane. It's very stylistic and very neat. I rather enjoy where it ended up.
Looking at Dragon Age: Inquisition now you've completed the story, you've ended your time with Dragon Age at this point and moving on to new things. Looking at the main expression of the plot, are there any instances that you wish you could have added? Small things. You talked before the iteration made it the best it could be, but there's got to be that writer urge to explore those places that are just written down on a piece of paper.
Yeah. That's always going to be the case. It's never going to perfectly align. When we started Dragon Age: Origins, our pie in the sky, in an ideal world this is exactly where we would go. The thing with that is that's the difference between making a game and writing a book. Writing a book is pure narrative. If I want the plot to go in X direction, that's where it goes.
Making a game is a collaborative effort. It's good in the sense – well, it's awesome in the sense that you are working with other people. It's a collective product of their efforts. You have all this art and game play. It's an experience for the player. But it's not completely narrative driven.
So, things are going to have to change. You're going to have limitations put on you that you normally wouldn't ordinarily need to do. Sometimes big plans are going to change, so we roll with it. We try to preserve the heart of what our original plans were. And that remained the case. The big picture for how Dragon Age is developing never really changed.
But for those stories that are left by the wayside – I've been lucky in the sense that I've gotten a chance to write a few books where I've been able to take a story that never got told. I was able to go somewhere by myself and get that out of my system and get into a novel. I've been fortunate in that sense.
But yeah, there's a few. And there's somethings that went away. There was a plot in the DA2 expansion that got cut or a few I wouldn't even want to mention just because they're so tragic. Just that they went away and they only ever made sense in the context of the story they originally appeared in, so you couldn't resurrect them. You couldn't change them because what made it cool existed in entirely in the context of where it appeared. Once that was gone, it's gone forever. Those are the ones you morn.
I've got to ask though. I've got to ask what that could be.
I can't. I can't. There's a couple that if I told it would just set the fandom on fire. I know that they really want to know. No, they don't.
When you say they don't want to know, is it really just because these things that you really love and this kind of idea, like you said, wouldn't work in the current climate of the game?
Sometimes the things that I loved – see, that's the thing. It's something I loved, so it generally involves pain and hardship. So, I almost got to do this one thing, and they would have really hated it and that would have been awesome. So, that's just me.
It was a cool idea. And if I told them now, in order to explain why it was cool it required an explanation of the entire context around it. And that's a trip that I don't know if it's necessarily worth it. It requires so much context to discuss it.
Even if it was something that was cool, it's also a shame if their reactions were, it's wrong that you didn't do that. Well, we can't do everything. That's something ultimately being in the game industry you have to reconcile with. There will always be things that are put away in the trunk of the could-have-been and you just have to resign that that's where they will have to remain.
And sometimes it's like people, tell me all the things that were painful about the process of writing X game. Do you really want me to do that? You might want me to do that. I don't want to do that.
Well, looking forward now, your favorite characters in Dragon Age: Inquisition, ones that really resonated for you and achieve what you set them out to be.
That's a difficult question because at various times I've been asked this question. And I can come up with different characters. Who's your favorite character? Well, today it's X. Next time somebody asks me, it will Y. Because I love them all for different reasons. Obviously, some more than others.
And there are some fans that just hate it when I do that. You love Alistair! Yes, I do. I do love Alistair. He was one that was very dear to me. He was fun to write. He was easy to write. I had a very clear idea of his voice. I knew instantly when he was talking about something that he would or would not say. So, yeah.
Well, that's why you use him so often. Probably. I tend to write Alistair a lot because I like Alistair. Yes. But it's unfair. Fair enough. If you want me to write about characters that I don't enjoy, fair enough. But it's not as if there's anybody that I didn't enjoy. Maybe they meant something different to me. There's different things I enjoy about them. And there's ones that stand out.
I will always love Morrigan. Anybody who knows me knows I don't have to dig down too far to reach a very cynical sarcastic place. That's sort of the realm in which Morrigan lives inside of me. That part that stands off to the side and makes biting sarcastic commentary about everything that you're doing. But I didn't want to make her mean, so what lies beneath that shell? Some people say, that's the ice queen trope. Anybody could do that. Well, fair enough. Anybody can try. I think I did it and I did a pretty good job. So, at the end of the day, I was happy with where she ended up.
I really enjoy what happened with Cassandra. Cassandra in DAI was a character that I was worried would be inherently unlikable. It would be too easy to have somebody whose main focus is their faith, who could come across as being too strident and self-righteous. Those are very unlikable qualities for the most part. So, is there a way that I could make a character that discussed faith without coming across as overly critical that your faith maybe differed from hers? Or that you didn't have faith, that she could still acknowledge that and that didn't threaten her faith? I wanted to see if I could approach that from a standpoint and make her an endearing, strong character. I was very happy with where that went.
Dorian was another challenge that I really enjoyed. He's another example of a character that instantly had a voice for me. It was very easy as I was writing him. He could just chat away in my head and rebel every time I tried to get him to say something he just would not say. I think for any writer, that's a sign that you have successfully created a character. You've got this split personality going where they're sitting inside your head and you can just step into their shoes and immediately have a sense of how they feel about everything. Every writer understands what I mean when I say that.
Looking at Dorian in particular, his instances and the missions personal to him were very raw and I think those instances, at least for me, were some that hit the highest points. Influence wise, was that a difficult process to dig and find that story or was it something that flowed out easily?
Dorian's story isn't my story. I'm gay, but Dorian's experiences are not my experiences. However, for him particularly, there was some consideration of we have a gay character. Does he need to have a story that's about him being gay? No. However, there's no need also to avoid it. Like, Sera is also gay but her story doesn't have anything at all to do with her being gay. Do we have gay characters and avoid telling any story with them that involves being gay? Even though that's something that we can tell, that's maybe something we never had the opportunity to tell before?
So, it was an option. Here's a possibility. For Dorian, it was a matter of, I didn't have to dig too far. If I had a gay character and I'm going to tell a gay story – that sounds like an odd adjective. If I'm going to tell something that's relevant to my experience, then it's not exactly my experience but it's something I empathize with. And is everybody going to get it? No. But that's true of anything I've written into a game, so if I can tell something that's true and honest... It didn't need to be that way. Anybody could have written Dorian. But I think that I got that chance, then it's something special.
I think there are a lot of people out there that responded to Dorian's personal story in a very visceral fashion. Some of them were very effected by it. It felt very personal to me as something that I got the opportunity to do. It was one of those perfect storms of opportunity and implementation. I think I might have done it a little bit differently if I was going to go back, but it was one of those times where I had the opportunity to do something that felt like it was something of my piece of experience on the page as opposed to some character I had created from whole cloth.
You talked about faith and the use of that in Dragon Age: Inquisition. I love that there is one circumstance that if your Inquisitor is righteous and entirely believes the faith in which he is tasked to represent, he's given new opportunities in dialogue and other instances like that. Why did you make that choice, and how do you believe the game deals with faith? What do you think players should get on the notion of faith on Dragon Age: Inquisition?
Not everyone's interested in dealing with faith. We wanted the option for the player go, well, I don't care about that. We didn't want to force an opinion. One of the things was, if we're going to involve faith as a central theme of the game and it was, what it really has to involve was letting the player come to terms with how they feel. And at one point, checking in with them again, and saying, hey, has your opinion changed? And wherever they've landed, challenging that view. That was part of the point. Because you're not only challenged by the people in your party, you're challenged by events.
Let's say you decide and you accept this and say, yes, I am the Herald of Andraste. I believe that this is fate. And then later in the game you learn the truth of how that happened that you. Did that change your mind? Let the player think about it and give them options. That right from the get-go was how we wanted to deal with that. And let the player, if they want to disbelieve, then disbelieve.
As soon as we introduced elves and dwarfs as a possibility, elves especially, you have to open the possibility for the player to say the Maker is not a thing. I don't agree with that. So, it felt very natural. We just didn't want to get a point where we were forcing beliefs on the player. Their experience with faith, let them come to terms with it themselves. Never present faith in only one way. If we're going to deal with faith, let's deal with faith honestly. Let's show how faith can be a positive force, as well as how people can abuse faith. There are organizations that do terrible things in the name of faith. But in that same organization there are people that believe wholeheartedly and sincerely and do good things.
We didn't want to be purely cynical in our approach, but neither did we want to give a definitive answer. At the end of the day when you play through, now matter how you decided your character felt about it, could you say for certain that you weren't the Herald of Andraste? That the hand of God did not in fact pick you to play this roll? If the answer to that is well, ultimately there's no proof one way or another, then, yes, that is exactly what we intended.
You've been a part of this, like you said, for over ten years working on this franchise. You're moving on to new stuff. What are you taking from the work you've done and what do you hope to bring to the new stuff that you can't let accidentally slip while you're talking to me right now?
Leaving was a difficult choice, obviously. At the end of the day, ten years you've put into it, I was reaching the point where it was time for me to move on but I don't want to let go. It's like, I don't really want to do it anymore, but I don't want anybody else to do it either.
Well, we're talking to Patrick next. I'll make sure to tell him that.
Oh, he knows exactly how I feel. It's part of the process of letting go, and just trusting that I've been in charge for three games, I put them out there, I've laid enough ground work that it's real. I trust the members of my team. They are all awesome writers. Some of them know it better than I do. My memory is terrible. I always let the details slip and generally the editors have to remind me. You know that thing you put in here, that was cut two games ago. I'm like, gez, I didn't remember we did that.
That's my problem. I've been around so long. I've been there from the beginning where all the names of everything were different and things have been removed from the world. And then two years later, I'm like, wait, I seem to remember this thing. Was that a thing? And they're like, no, you cut that. Remembering too much is almost an issue. Somebody talks to me about Empress Celene, and I'm like, well, that time she was in Denerim during the fifth Blight. And they're like, no, that's not a real thing anymore.
Having worked on this, having laid down the ground work, it's real for my writers. They can run with it. Patrick is more than capable. They have their own ideas, and I have to reconcile with the fact that it's going to be different. But that's good. I've laid enough ground work that they understand the spirit of what it was and they will make it awesome.
Patrick wrote a character that I created in the third Dragon Age novel called Cole. I was originally going to write Cole, of course. It was my character. But I also had plans for other characters. It's one of those, I want to do this, I want to do this, and I want to do this. Okay, I can't do all those things. Sitting down with Patrick when he came onto the project, it was like, what are you interested in? One of the things he said was, I like this character, Cole. My first reaction, of course, was [hissing noise]. Stay away! Stay away from him, you ******!
That was my gut reaction. And then it was like, here's the thing. I don't have time to do them all. At least, Patrick finds this really fascinating, and his treatment on Cole ultimately is probably... I don't know exactly what I would have done because I hadn't started planning his major arc in the game yet. So, I can't say how different it would have been. But, his version of Cole is a little different from what mine would have been, for sure. But, he was excited about it, he understood what Cole meant, and he understood the heart of Cole. So, what he produced is different from what I would have done, but I love it. I think it's great.
He's like, I don't want to ruin your character. I'm like, you did not ruin my character. He's super. Ultimately, it's the same for Dragon Age. He will take it. He will make it great. And I look forward to being able to play a Dragon Age game because I never have.
You've never played a Dragon Age game?
No. By the time it goes out, I'm sick of it. By the time the game goes out, I've played it hundreds and hundreds of times, mostly when it's broken, so it's not that fun. So, I've never actually played a version of the game that is complete from beginning to end. By the time it is actually finished and it is complete from beginning to end, I'm done. There is no corner of the story that is a mystery to me, right? So, there's nothing for me to discover except, oh, hey, here's that cut scene I never saw to the end, and here it's finished.
That would be kinda cool, but I just couldn't do it. So, I look forward to having a Dragon Age come out that I don't know inside and out. And I can play through it, and I can shake my fist at Patrick. Patrick! How dare you do this! Or, I can say, oh, wow, that's really cool. I love what they did with that thing. I don't think I would have done that. But they made it better. That's what I want. And meanwhile, I move on to something else, and that is fun and cool, and shall not be discussed.
What is a final message you'd have for the fans? You talk a lot about community and how you're involved. You see your name on the forums. You're there talking. Now you have an opportunity, they can hear your voice, you're leaving on to something else, anything you'd like to say?
I think I'm less involved now than I was before. That's probably a good thing. At some level, it's best to leave the fans to discuss things on their own. And it's less likely to get drawn into their arguments and stuff. I don't begrudge them any of the stuff they get up to. In a larger sense I look at it and it's amazing that they're so passionate about this.
This is a world that ultimately I created. It's not solely mine. There's a team behind it. But the genesis of it was mine. This was my baby for a long time, so when somebody takes something like that of yours and they have strong feelings about it, even if they gets to the point where it has a different life for them than it does for me. They believe different things about it. They have a vision of their own for where it should go, what it should entail, what characters to focus on.
That's all super. I would never want them to think that I begrudge them the sense of ownership that they have. I could pull the ball away, and I could say, no, this is mine. No. I made it for them. And if they love it, that's a compliment. And I love the fanfiction and the fanart that comes out. And the passion that they bring to it and the different ideas. It's very inspiring.
I like having a bit more distance now than I did before. Not make them feel like I'm stepping on their toes and suggesting that there is one particular way that they should feel about the characters and the game. We made it so that people can take it and interpret it. And I don't want to be the word of God that says, no, there's one way. In a sense, I can say, this is a fact. This is a thing. But do I need to do that? No.
They should feel free to interpret. And Patrick is really the custodian now. He can take it, and he can deal with the various things. But as tiring as ten years working on the game was, I think if anything kept me going and invested and as interested for as long as I was, I think it was largely the continued interest of the fans.
If I ever reached the point where it's like, I don't know if I can do one more story about demons, I'd read some of the discussions online and it would get me thinking and questioning. There are a lot of times where they're challenging even the way I would think about my own world. And sometimes I would disagree, but in disagreeing sometimes I was able to find something else that sparked an idea for me. So, in some ways they've been very much a part of the process even if they maybe don't think they were.
Well, thank you, so much for letting us be a part of this process and talking about the franchise you love so much and giving us hours and hours of your time. It was not only illuminating, but I think a lot of people are going to hear things about the series they love that they didn't know before hand. It's always cool to see from the other side. All the fans that are demanding that you put in the quest for Solas, for you to say, it wasn't what you'd think it would be. Someone has to make those tough decisions. It's nice to be able to talk to one of the people that has to.
I loved the word you used, catharsis. Because now that I've moved on, there's a little bit of catharsis. Looking back, sometimes I wonder if the way I remember things is exactly how it happened. Because that happens when you go through ten years on something that's so monolithic that went through so many twists and turns.
Sometimes I'll be like, I remember this happening. Somebody will come along after and be like, no. It was this thing. And, oh, right! I wanted to kill them! Looking back, ultimately, I love the fact that we made it. We made three really big stories, and some of them at the time seemed like they would never happen. I still remember the days when Dragon Age: Origins seemed like it would just get canceled out right. That was a thing. The fans do not know the entire story. They can never know. Being on the inside, the perspective is slightly different.
Again, thank you, so much for taking the time. David Gaider, former writer on the Dragon Age franchise. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
snip
I really appreciate your work and effort. Thank you!
Man, i always get a bit sad when i read about cut content. Still i want to thank David Gaider for the Dragon Age lore! I remember finishing DAO the first time and instantly falling in love with it. Since then, i'm constantly lurking in the forum and the wiki, reading about the lore.
Welp, I know what I'm doing for the next hour! Thanks for all your hard work, Capone666!
Thanks for this. The behind the scenes stuff is always interesting to me.
Gotta agree with DG on Corey having a little more involvement. I think Corey needed to launch a surprise attack after Haven, lure us into an ambush or send us out red herring, but a lead we have to chase down, and give us a beat down, have us escape by running for our lives wondering how we're going to bounce back from that. Ah well.
Also thanks BW for including the multiple races. My play throughs have all been either Elf, dwarf or Qunari. Playing those different races makes it a lot more interesting for me.
Personally i think that would've been better, maybe its just meWhat this actually tells us is what we always should have though: Corypheus was a decoy antagonist. Half the game is just the point where we realize Solas is the bad guy (well, sort off). That's like JE and Master Li.
"That time Empress Celene was in Denerim during the fifth blight." "No, no, that wasn't a real thing."
Great insights, thanks for the video. 
I would preferred focus on humans, like DA2. Spend that extra year on storylines instead. Extra races doesn't add value to me, if it's half-assed. He can believe that, but it's not true in my case.
Great insights, thanks for the video.
I sincerely hope you all enjoyed it. 
I get why game developers have to dodge so many bullets and give vague answers, but part of me is like DAVE SPILL GOD DAMN THE TEA.
Alas, some things will have to remain a mystery.
I would preferred focus on humans, like DA2. Spend that extra year on storylines instead. Extra races doesn't add value to me, if it's half-assed. He can believe that, but it's not true in my case.
That's because they were only added in the last year of development. Up until then DAI was meant to be a human only game.I agree. It is clear that this game was meant to be played as a human. Playing as a Qunari and Dwarf is even worse probably. It seemed like Bioware added these extra races in without giving them substaintial unique content to make a Dwarf playthrough different from an Elf, which is different from a Human and so on.
I am glad MEA will be human only.
I would preferred focus on humans, like DA2. Spend that extra year on storylines instead. Extra races doesn't add value to me, if it's half-assed. He can believe that, but it's not true in my case.
It's always added value for me, even though I never played anything other than human in any RPG before Inquisition. It's allowed me to make a choice about who I play, just like every other choice I get to pick in the game has added value for me even though I only play through the game a single time, getting to see a single choice. I wouldn't want all those other options I don't see to be removed.
It is clear that this game was meant to be played as a human. Playing as a Qunari and Dwarf is even worse probably. It seemed like Bioware added these extra races in without giving them substaintial unique content to make a Dwarf playthrough different from an Elf, which is different from a Human and so on.
Having played all four races now, I'm glad they put race selection in. More reactivity is always better, but even with what's there I found playing as a dwarf, qunari and elf MUCH more satisfying than my human run. Playing a human noble is so boring for me. You're exactly what everyone expects the Herald of Andraste to be, and I really missed all those moments where people were all '... a dwarf? Really?' (No, it's not because I was getting sick of the game four runs in - human was my third play through, and I had a lot more fun as an elf during my fourth. Itching to start my next qunari Inquisitor, but I have to wait until I get back from holiday.)
I mean, maybe I'd have been less bored with a human mercenary or criminal, but I'd rather play a qunari or dwarf. If people find the game insufficiently reactive to their race choice, it's not like they don't have the option of sticking with human, which most people will do anyway.
So it was not just as i suspected,the main story was not cutted,but literally splitted in two.Honestly i do not like this formula,is just show that BioWare primarily care to pursue the story of some npc in this franchise.These stories are not "self contained" since DAO.
Lolwhat
Where do you put Dragon Age: Inquisition in terms of the stuff that was left on the cutting room floor in comparison to Origins and DA2?
About the same. There was lots of stuff that was cut from DA2. The difference between say, that and DA2, is that DA2 is the percentage of the overall content. There's still the same amount of turn on the content. Okay, we cut a bunch of stuff and it's gone forever or changed forever. I think that's the biggest difference between that and other games was that the DAI content went through a lot more revision as opposed to here's this giant piece that was cut.
Where you go to the ball in Halamshiral, for instance. That plot went through a lot of different phases. It didn't change entirely. You're going to the ball at Halamshiral, and there's the empress of Orlais there, and it's political. That was always the same. But in terms of its presentation, it changed a lot.
The assault on Adamant Fortress also went through a lot of different versions. There was a point were it didn't involve the Fade at all. You fell into the abyss and you ended up in the Deed Roads. You had to find your way out through the Deep Roads, and you encountered the intelligent Darkspawn from Awakening.
There were different versions of every story. I think the iteration was actually a good thing. Because when I think back at some of those things, well, I say that and you could think immediately, oh, I could imagine what that could have been. Just try imagining what it would have been, but imaging it kind of sucking because that's generally why it changed. The iteration was a healthy thing for the most part. There was less, let's cut this because we don't have time, and more, let's cut this because it's just not working.
[snip]
Do you think ever the tendency to try and tell the story of being an Inquisitor and what that meant ever made it a little more difficult to tell the more personal stories of who the Inquisitor was in terms of their relationships and their interactions with these established characters? The one thing I noticed with Dragon Age: Inquisition is you are pulled in different directions in different ways that I didn't feel as much in the previous games.
I don't think it made it more difficult. I think it gave us a lot more to play with. We could touch on topics that we hadn't done before like the issue of faith and talking about the faith of the followers you are with. Having them react to the things you did in the plot as opposed to who you were necessarily. Here's this thing that perhaps you never asked for, perhaps you didn't even want. You're the inquisitor. Maybe you resent that, or maybe you embrace it.
And talking about the player's growth in terms of how they relate to what they've become. I don't think that made it more difficult. I think that opened up a lot of opportunity. This was different than we'd done before, but I think it allowed us a lot more avenues to talk about the characters. Rather than just having them say the exposition of this is who I am, you can look at how they feel about what you've done, about what's happening. And that tells you as much if not more of what's going on in their heads.
Why did you make the choice to go back to the created back stories of being different races, picking and choosing those characters? Adding to that the fact that you have to deal with two other games and all the choices made there and throwing that into the mix. Why go back to something that would make it even more complicated?
There's two separate questions, really. With us going back to the different races, I think we always wanted to do that. The only reason ultimately we didn't do that in DA2 was a matter of choosing which side was going to give us the most impact for the time that we had.
For DAI, we wanted to do it, and I think actually we weren't going to. We got an extra year of development time. I think that was it. Something came along, and EA said, yeah, go do that. And we said, excellent. This is what we will use that extra time for. I think that was adding in the extra races.
I think a majority of players will play humans regardless. But I think even to the ones who play humans, the fact that those other options were available, even if they don't chose them, has value to them. So there's people who just love playing elves and love playing dwarfs, or always wanted to play a qunari. That will be awesome. Thank God I don't have to be forced to play a human, as if that was something that was a restraint. But, even to the eighty percent that play humans, that the possibility was there to play other things, has value.
So, I think, looking at it in terms of a bang for your buck, in terms of development time, it was something we wanted to do. But, of course, it's a big challenge because now it's like, so writers. We want the ability to play any race. So now go through your plans and accommodate that. All right. Roll up our sleeves, and get to work, right? That was essentially it.
Thank you so much for posting this interview.
This section in particular, I'm very happy to have read. I love race selection, and I'm glad that the devs wanted to include it, and made time to include it because they felt it was worthwhile. (In a way, I also feel happy to hear that they didn't include race selection in DA2 because it was rushed to release, not because they felt it was Oh So Detrimental to the Holy Story they wanted to tell.)
I'm also glad to hear that the devs, or Gaider at least, don't consider more "blank slate" protagonists like the Warden and Inquisitor more restrictive to storytelling than pre-defined protagonists like Shepard and Hawke. That, if anything, just giving the players the freedom to react to actions they've made can, in some ways it, gives them "more to play with."
Again, I love race selection. I know not everyone likes it, but I just get so tired of so people making it the scape goat to everything they don't like about a game.
For example, they hear something got cut? They automatically point to race selection and say, "The resources they put into races would have gone toward making that Awesome Story Idea I just heard, therefore including race selection is the reason it got cut." When in reality it got cut or got changed on its own time for its own reasons. That "Aweome Story Idea" they tell themselves would have been so perfect actually wouldn't have been perfect, and that's exactly why it got cut.
At this point, I want to know more about the Exalted March DLC. I know Gaider doesn't want to discuss it, but this kept me wanting to know about it.
Very cool, so when's the Patrick interview going to be released?
Very cool, so when's the Patrick interview going to be released?
After I release "Deep Breath"
My Fallout 4 Interview on Character Development
Interview with the Writer of Tomb Raider on Feminism
Lead Designer of Deus Ex about Race relations..
AND THEN!~ Patrick Weeks on Dragon Age. To be fair he doesn't talk a lot about where the series is going.
This is totally going to encourage the "bring back the Inquisitor" people.
The Inquisitor could be an adviser through the sending stone. I don't think they should bring the Inquisitor back knowing that he/she is so easily played by Solas. The new hero should be crafty when dealing with Solas.
Posting my comments from reddit here:
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