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[david gaider] There was a huge amount of writing for this game, the most I think I’ve done since Baldur’s Gate. The characters talk amongst themselves, they talk to you, they comment on the world as you travel. The idea is that these are full-blown companions, there’s an epic plot to follow ... I hate to use the word epic, but it’s there. It feels that way because it’s so big! I had the largest hand in creating the world to begin with, and so I have a lot of emotional stake in the game.

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A long time ago mages used to rule the land. They reached a point where they basically decided to open a gateway into heaven and usurp the rule of the gods. I should say, as an aside, that this is what the priests of the world say, this is their line ... anyway, the mages stepped out into heaven and – since Man is an imperfect creature – they tainted the place and turned it into a place called "The Black City." They tainted themselves in the process, and became the first Darkspawn. The Maker threw them down from Heaven to Earth, to suffer for their crimes. The Darkspawn couldn’t stand the light and burrowed down into the earth to get away from it.

They began a search for the Old Gods, essentially. Long before the wizards, people used to worship dragons as deities, but the Maker shackled them under the earth supposedly to sleep for all time. The Darkspawn search for these Old Gods, and when they find them they extend the taint to the dragons. The dragons are transformed into an archdemon, and when one rises from below the Darkspawn come with it as sort of a blight. They’re almost like locusts in that way. When a blight occurs they come to the surface and spread, corrupting it as they go.
Humanity realizes they have to defend themselves against these things, and that’s sort of what’s going on as the game starts.

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We’ve taken a few things like the digital actors to add to the game. We like that. We like that when you talk to somebody you see their emotions on their face, there’s much more nuance. The uncanny valley is always a problem, right? I think we’re getting over that now, with the animations doing the nuance of eye movement. It’s much easier to empathize with that kind of character.

Where we differ with Mass Effect is that it did have a much more cinematic style. It gave voice to your character, for one, which was appropriate for the game. You were Commander Shephard, a military man or woman, and you had a voice that was really appropriate for that character. In Dragon Age we’re focusing much more on character customization. You have a choice of gender, of race, one voice wouldn’t cut it.

There’s so much writing that if we had just one option for each gender/race combination it would be so much voice recording we’d need to include like two more DVDs. There’s the physical limitations, then, and then there’s also the fact that players give their own voice to characters they create. We said to ourselves, "the worst thing that could happen would be to have a voice that doesn’t match up to the one inside your head."

Mass Effect also had the dialogue system where they just gave the intent of the choice as opposed to the full wording. The idea is that you can pick your dialogue option before the character stopped talking, and have a cinematic flow to the conversation. We’ve gone back to our Baldur’s Gate–style discussions with Dragon Age, where you see exactly what kind of choice you’re making. The idea there is that the player has to have full control over the voice in his head.

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Dragon Age is a huge game, much like Baldur’s Gate. I don’t know that we’d ever make a game as big as Baldur’s Gate again, though. That game was just ridiculously huge. That said, there is something to making a game that is substantial like that. The word "epic" is thrown around like there’s no tomorrow, but in some ways epic does fit with the scope of the game’s story. It’s a long story that takes your character through this large arc. It’s appropriate for what we’re doing.

It is also similar to Baldur’s Gate insofar as how much we focus on character. You have all your party members, and I would say almost a third of the writing that’s been done is just for the members themselves. The amount of talking they do may in fact be sort of endless. I think for a lot of players that’s really important. To this day in any given forum, people will still bring up characters from Baldur’s Gate. Some of them are quite beloved. I would like to think as a writer that Dragon Age is the next step from there. Not to knock the Baldur’s Gate characters, but these are the characters you’ll be interacting with at length for a long period of time ... they’re important to the story.

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There is one series of books that is required reading for any Dragon Age fan. It’s not to say we copied him, but it’s required reading for what it represented when I was thinking about the game. I sort of got tired of the same old fantasy-style stories. I read The Belgariad and Wheel of Time back to back, right? And they both started the same way, with a "chosen one" with a boy in a remote village who is carried away just as his village is destroyed ... they both started the same way. They’re both decent series, but they’re very high fantasy titles.

Then I picked up a series of books by George R.R. Martin called A Song of Ice and Fire. It’s a low magic world there, and ours is a bit higher. Dragon Age is lower than the normal fantasy world, though, because magic is sort of rare and mages are very distrusted. As I described how Darkspawn came to be, people kind of have a bad opinion about them as a group.

For me, it was the tonal shift that really changed for me personally. It was such a dark story, and sometimes I think he may get too dark ... but it was focused on politics and civil war, dark and gritty, and there was the possibility that characters you loved might die. I went from being kind of "meh" on fantasy in general to really excited because of these books. We didn’t go out to copy his works, but that sort of shift, that darkness, that seriousness are all elements we’ve embraced for our game. That’s the tone of Dragon Age.

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