“Sexy sorceresses” and “bare-chested fighters”: Dragon Age’s original artists wanted to base it on Conan the Barbarian, much to the outrage of the designers

Buried in the vast and sooty-fingered Summer Eternal anthology, there’s an interview with former BioWare developer and Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider, who is now creative director at Stray Gods outfit Summerfall Studios. The interview is a podcast-length account of BioWare’s transformations over Gaider’s career, stretching back to Baldur’s Gate 2. Amongst other things, it explains why the Dragon Age games feel so different from sequel to sequel.

Gaider discusses the original trilogy’s fortunes under RPG-phobic parent company Electronic Arts, commenting that 2009’s Dragon Age: Origins made it to release partly thanks to “sunk cost” thinking after EA bought the studio. He also talks about Dragon Age’s lack of a properly defined vision, early on, which led to a lot of overcorrection between releases. As regards Origins, there was something of a faction war initially between departments over what exact flavour of fantasy fiction the new RPG should draw on.

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