Dragon Age: Origins is the quintessential BioWare game. Serving as the bridge from classics like Baldur’s Gate and NeverWinter Nights to flashier efforts like Mass Effect and Anthem, it took the sense and sensibilities of the widely lauded ‘old BioWare’ and reappropriated them for a modern iteration of an iconic studio. Whether you personally prefer Shattered Steel, Jade Empire, or Star Wars: The Old Republic is largely irrelevant – Dragon Age: Origins represents the most pivotal moment in BioWare’s storied history.
Even outside of BioWare’s wheelhouse, Origins changed the entertainment industry. It was in development before CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher, it launched two years prior to Game of Thrones airing on HBO, and it proved that not all fantasy had to be derivative of readily palatable “high fantasy” tropes. Without Denerim and darkspawn – seemingly ordinary now, but only because of how successful their subversion was then – video game fantasy would look quite different. Elves would eat leaves and dwarves would eat rocks. Kings would be paragons and evil would be absolute. Things would be boring and predictable and homogeneous to the point of purposelessness.
Related: Interview: Allegra Clark On Going From Dragon Age Livejournaler To Dragon Age Star
That’s why now, 12 years later, we’re telling the story of how Dragon Age: Origins was made from the perspective of the developers who made it. This brings us back almost two decades, given how long Origins was in development. Still, those long years were indicative of the studio’s modus operandi back then: nothing was done until it was done, and a development in flux was a development where ideas and innovation could truly shine.
BioWare: A Family
BioWare in the early 2000s was a very different place. You were part of a family and were expected to uphold the family business. People who joined the studio didn’t learn how to write, code, or animate – they learned how to BioWare.
Daniel Erickson, lead designer on Dragon Age: Origins:
One did not simply walk into BioWare as a lead designer. BioWare was at the top of its game – this was before the outside investors came in and long before EA would come do the EA thing to them. Located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada – I’d often explain it to people as “just north of where Santa lives” – BioWare nevertheless could be, and was, extremely picky about its talent, and talent was beating down their walls to get in.
Ian Stubbington, lead environmental artist on Dragon Age: Origins:
BioWare at the time I joined was growing from a small company into what was a relatively huge one. In many ways it still retained that small company mindset. This can be good and bad. On the good side, there was a family atmosphere and it was not uncommon for [BioWare co-founders] Ray [Muzyka] or Greg [Zeschuk] to just randomly pop into your office to see how things were going. On the other side, communication has to be worked at harder as companies get bigger – gone are the days when you can assume everyone knows what's going on because they were all in the same meetings.
Kevin Loh, assistant producer on Dragon Age: Origins:
I recall times when [Ray and Greg] would know every staff member – and sometimes [their] family – by name, and chat about matters and details pertaining to that individual. We called them 'the good doctors.' Perhaps being medical practitioners, that healing and holistic nature carried through into their game production practices too.
Daniel Fedor, lead technical artist on Dragon Age: Origins
The vibe at the studio when I joined was still pretty plucky. It felt like a small studio. Homebrew. Almost everyone knew each other. It had a sense of unity and fun. I think the DA team, and BioWare in general, experienced some growing pains as we shifted into a large studio. Some tribalism and resentment crept in, and my role as a departmental diplomat got a workout. Interproject relations also seemed to decline. Eventually, I recall the DA team’s morale being one of dogged exhaustion. We had been on this thing for years, and we just had to get it done. Did I enjoy my time there? Absolutely. It was, and still is, my dream job. I ate up every moment of it. It had hard times, for sure, but I consider myself blessed for having had the experience.
Erickson
BioWare, at the time, didn’t have a generic design track. They had writers, who were more powerful there than I’ve ever seen at a company since, and they had technical designers, who did basically everything else. The first thing BioWare had you do when applying as a writer was ask you to craft a module in their previous RPG, NeverWinter Nights. So I made the module. Then, because it was a senior position, I had to do another one in 48 hours. Then I had to do another impromptu writing test in the building on interview day when I flew into Edmonton and was interviewed by approximately half the population of Alberta.
Okay, so there were a ton of hurdles to get over to get a job at BioWare. Once there, though, it was… more hurdles! BioWare had the most comprehensive and elite training program I’ve seen in game development. Basically, the first three months you were there you didn’t work on a game at all. Instead, you learned how to BioWare.
Stubbington
Many of the more senior employees had been with the company since its start and had never worked anywhere else, so they had never seen alternate ways of doing things. There was “the BioWare way” or nothing.
Loh
The people working at BioWare live and breathe RPGs and I think it really showed. Dragon Age: Origins combined a wonderfully crafted world, populated it with terrifying creatures, added a unique magic system, breathed life into individual characters and races, then made it all come to life while still handing control to the player. In the two to three years before ship, this all came together – not without lots of friction, problems, and difficulty – to bring the audience a title that we all know and love: Dragon Age Origins.
Origins
How Dragon Age: Origins, with just 18 months left until launch, rallied six years of chaotic development into a clear, cohesive vision.
Dan Tudge, creative director on Dragon Age: Origins:
In 2006, I began talking to Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk about coming onboard at BioWare. While started, Dragon Age had never really got off the ground, it was stalled in engine and tools development. I was asked to take over Dragon Age – we hadn’t added “Origins” to the title yet.
Erickson
Let’s take a moment to talk about the state of Dragon Age when I arrived. First of all, it’s not called Dragon Age. And there are definitely no dragons in it. Secondly, nobody can really tell me exactly what it is. It’s been in production more than a year and has a ton of story content, but nobody has ever written a one page brief or an IP summary.
Tudge
We had a lot of writing – David Gaider and his team had done a lot of writing.
David Gaider, lead writer on Dragon Age: Origins
I remember it as being a little excessive at 1.2 million words.
Erickson
David did not want to manage. He wanted to write, and he wrote a ton. That meant, however, that – along with the lack of any documentation about what the tone was supposed to be – the story and world didn’t always hold together as other writers tried to figure out how to fit in alongside Dave. There were Monty Python-esque scenes right next to Game of Thrones-style melodrama and the language was a bit all over the place.
Gaider
I worked with a lot of other people, so while I oversaw the writers and the game narrative docs, I wouldn’t say they were 100 percent my doing. I certainly had influence, that much is true. The only stuff which is 100 percent mine are the plots and characters I wrote. Of those, my favourites are probably Alistair in DAO and Dorian in DAI. The first because he was my first big character and a big success in terms of how his romance was received. The second because he was the first gay character I got to write, and his story was quite personal… and he had a big impact on a lot of our LGBTQ audience, the sort of thing you can’t ever quite replicate.
Jennifer Brandes Hepler, senior writer on Dragon Age: Origins
I used to describe my job on Origins as “Every day, I take all the words that are in my brain and I pour them into the computer until my brain is empty. Then I go home at night and try to regenerate enough words that I can do it all over again the next day.” Seriously, though, the vast majority of what I did day-to-day just involved writing massive amounts of dialogue. I was on Origins for one year to the day before I went on maternity leave – I came back to it after – and in that first year, I wrote about a quarter million words of dialogue.
Erickson
I made a number of suggestions for style guide approaches and became the enforcer of those rules. No in-jokes, no fourth wall breaking, and so on. I firmly believe top tier IP is borrowed from, it doesn’t borrow. Indiana Jones doesn’t make Star Wars references. Dragon Age has lightened up since my time but when I first played Dragon Age 2 and Isabela said "I like big boats, I cannot lie," I had to put the game down for weeks until I could forgive it.
Closing Baldur’s Gate
BioWare higher-ups wanted Baldur’s Gate 3; Dragon Age devs had other plans.
Jay Turner, writer on Dragon Age: Origins
Back then, writers would draw paper maps of the dungeons and such, and designers would build the levels, so in many ways it felt like making a module for D&D from the ground up. It was a fun atmosphere, but stressful, because there was a lot of pressure on us writers to write the next "Baldur's Gate" in a new IP that no one had ever seen before.
Erickson
Trying to express what makes Dragon Age: Origins work so well, I come back to a lesson I’ve learned time and again in this business: purity of vision is everything. To talk about Dragon Age, we have to talk about James Ohlen. James is arguably one of the most successful Western RPG creatives in history. Who? Exactly. He made Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2, NeverWinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age, and Star Wars: The Old Republic. All of them in the top creative role. Why don’t you recognize the name? Because James has never been excited about the media or the fans in the way that makes names in this business. He cares deeply about RPGs, making games great, and seeing that people enjoy his work – but from a healthy distance.
James’ take on [Origins] is pretty simple and straightforward, but not so sexy as far as marketing is concerned: BioWare fans want Baldur’s Gate again – let’s make our own Baldur’s Gate. Everyone seems to want to work on Mass Effect. It’s new, it’s Unreal Engine, it’s ambitious, it’s the future. James’ project is, in stark contrast, very clearly a throwback.
Tudge
The big thing was everybody wanted to get away from the Wizards of the Coast ruleset. We all wanted to be able to come up with our own rules – we didn't want six second rounds, which in NeverWinter Nights were tedious. At the time they felt great. But as you move forward it's tedious.
The other thing everybody wanted to do was develop our own world. We had an engine. We were short on quite a bit of tools, but we had a lot of people on it and there was nowhere to go. So I went through and realigned the leadership of the team – you know, moved some people on, some people off – and really zeroed in on the vision of the product, which we called the next generation Baldur's Gate. That was what we called it internally – we were going to be making, "What would Baldur's Gate 3 be if we were making it, where would we go?"
Erickson
James knew what he wanted to make and he held onto it against the waves of various interested parties who just weren’t dazzled by “let’s make the most popular BioWare game again but own it” as a vision.
Tudge
There were a lot of things we really liked about Baldur’s Gate. The expansiveness was exceptional. Party-based combat was huge for us – we didn't want this to be a single hero. "Go for the eyes, Boo!" Those kinds of memorable things. For me, having pause-and-play combat was really important. I felt that was a legacy BioWare had really pioneered – that RTS chess game with the enemies.
I remember going to my lead designer, Brent Knowles, and saying, "Hey, listen, there's no reason to play pause-and-play here. We can't ship a game with pause-and-play if it doesn't actually help you be better in a battle." And so we went back to the drawing board with our team, and we all worked on it some more. We got it to a point where pause-and-play mattered. A couple of months later I'm playing like, "Well, I gotta use pause-and-play or I'm not gonna get through this battle – congratulations, we've got this." So I think there were things we wanted to step away from, and there were things that we wanted to keep. We took the best and left the rest.
Erickson
Brent Knowles, original lead designer for DAO, believed – and rightfully so – that the magic of original IP was that when something didn’t work you could just change the world to make it work, at least for a first game. His shorthand for this when someone called out a conflict was to fly his hand over his head and say “dragons.” Which basically meant that if lizards can fly in this nonsense magic world, this issue – whatever it was – can be made to work.
Tudge
We were in a very sweet spot back in the mid to late 2000s. The bar wasn't so crazy, we could still leverage that expansiveness that you got with games like Baldur’s Gate 2.
Turner
I think at the time we all felt invincible, like we could do no wrong. We saw Jade Empire's relatively low scores as a bit of a fluke. We were mid-2000s BioWare!
A Song of Price and Buyers
It was one thing to escape the shadow of BioWare’s legacy titles – but what happens when the biggest fantasy author since Tolkien takes the world by storm with his own take on dark fantasy? The higher-ups saw Thrones as a ceiling to study; the team saw it as one to smash through.
Tudge
Of course back then we also had a lot of George R.R. Martin influence and we wanted to make a dark fantasy – we wanted to stay away from high fantasy.
Brandes Hepler
It was always conceived as a very large world, with Ferelden being basically analogous to England in Renaissance Europe, and all the other analogous nations available for future games. It was very much inspired by Westeros in A Song of Ice and Fire, although with a single protagonist we couldn’t do anything like the Daenerys storyline to explore the further areas from early on.
Erickson
I was a huge dark fantasy fan and campaigned vigorously that not only was it a great idea but that we’d already written the damn thing for more than a year and the genie wasn’t going back in the bottle. After I left this apparently was still being fought over and Jennifer Hepler coined the term “dark heroic fantasy” which the marketing team eventually went with.
Brandes Hepler
There was a lot of argument in the early days of whether DA was “dark fantasy” or “high fantasy,” with the writing team generally wanting to write something dark and George R. R. Martin-esque and the studio wanting to make something that would slot exactly into whatever fans of Baldur’s Gate were looking for. It got to a point that they were thinking we might have to rethink the entire structure of the game, get rid of the Archdemon and the Grey Warden sacrifice and everything that made the world read as “dark,” because they didn’t think that players wanted to play a game that was dark. Players wanted to be heroes and if it wasn’t high fantasy, how would they ever feel heroic enough? Then I suggested we call it “dark heroic fantasy” to communicate that the world was dark, but the player’s role in it was heroic.
Inon Zur, composer on Dragon Age: Origins
From the get-go we did not follow any previous directions from movies like The Lord of the Rings or other classic RPG games. We tried to develop a darker, more aggressive direction that would separate this game from its predecessors. We aspired to come up with a new concept for a new story, and the music had to convey it in the strongest way. The starting point was a dark, twisted, and evil fantasy environment. So I employed some of the orchestration and musical tools familiar to the fantasy genre but twisted them, making the harmony way darker, making the melodies less harmonious, and making the sounds eerier and somewhat disturbing. This is how the new musical style was established.
For the underground world I chose to use low and raspy brass alongside deep and powerful drums. Adding some sledgehammers to the mix definitely ramped up the tone for depicting the rough underground miners, tough warriors, and loyal camaraderie. The forest was accompanied by airy flute sounds and strings, so the orchestral palette was dramatically different. However, introducing and rearranging the same motifs throughout these areas helped maintain the continuity of the score.
Erickson
When this was brought to the powers that be there was an interesting reaction of “Do we want to make a dark fantasy game? Is there a market there?” Remember this was pre-Game of Thrones on the TV and even the first Witcher wasn’t out yet. This was considered niche.
Gaider
I think ‘generic’ fantasy is more popular as a genre than people like to believe. I use ‘generic’ in quotes because people who are tired of fantasy tend to use that word in its negative sense… when, really, it’s more about there being certain common rules throughout the genre. The Lord of the Rings movies really led a renaissance in that respect.
When the game went out, however, Electronic Arts was not big on it. It wasn’t sleek and sexy like Mass Effect, which they assumed would be a much bigger hit, and I suspect the general view was that DAO would go out to recoup its long investment and would never earn another sequel. Hence why we ended up writing the DAO epilogue casting far into the future and wrapping everything up entirely. We kind of assumed this was it. Lo and behold, DAO became a big hit – arguably bigger than Mass Effect. People were bigger on an “old-fashioned” fantasy RPG than EA could have ever expected. Personally, I think it was down to the writing and the characters, how they really spoke to people and energized the fans, but of course I’d think that.
Trouble in Paradise
BioWare finally had an established vision for the world of Thedas. Unfortunately, the problems with Origins were only just beginning. Development was long and arduous, entire departments were behind, and the lack of a concrete engine shrouded prototyping and implementation in an opaque veil of uncertainty.
Tudge
There were two project directors – one was in charge of the game, one was in charge of the engine. The engine was winning out and they weren't getting anywhere with the game – a lot of people had renamed it internally to “Drag-on Age” because it wasn't going anywhere. All they had to show for well over a year was a video that was done apparently in engine, but there was no gameplay whatsoever.
Stubbington
Dragon Age was rather special during this stage as it was very much in flux even during the production phase. The engine was still a work in progress through all of production, and the design was changing during this stage also.
Erickson
We had issues with the art pipeline. We were waiting for a new engine from the tech department that would never really arrive. At one point, someone upstairs thought we should be a multiplayer game. This is the usual chaos of game development that most people never get to see.
Brandes Hepler
The entire time Origins was in development, it was definitely the neglected stepchild of BioWare. Most people viewed it as an obligation project, something we had to do to appease the Baldur’s Gate and NeverWinter Nights players, but it was widely seen as safe, boring, and uninspiring compared to the big, shiny behemoths of Mass Effect and Star Wars: The Old Republic. And when it came out, the comments on the BioWare forums were almost universally complaints. The first time I saw anyone on the forums say anything positive about DAO was after Dragon Age 2 came out, at which point it turned overnight from the worst game BioWare had ever put out into a timeless classic that DA2 was insulting with its very existence.
Erickson
We never got that shiny new engine. We never did a multiplayer version. There were probably another half dozen changes of direction and ideas thrown at the train as it was trying to get up enough speed to cross production, but at the end the game is an elegant, simple, beautiful execution of what its original intent was, done with an immense amount of love.
The Pirate Ship
In February 2021, a Mass Effect developer told me that if the ME team was run like a Navy Ship, “the Dragon Age team was definitely more of a pirate ship at the time.” Speaking to Dragon Age developers from the early ‘00s now, it’s easy to see where they were coming from.
Stubbington
Haha, that pirate ship analogy is not bad – maybe a little extreme, but close. It was definitely an iterative process in all areas. There was a lot of freedom for sure. That freedom is a two-edged sword, however. For example, if you are making levels and assets for, say, the Unreal Engine, or Unity, you know for the most part how to create those assets. But for Dragon Age, we were creating the engine at the same time as the game, so as the engine developed, the methods for creating levels changed also.
Tudge
When we started Dragon Age: Origins, we were an independent company. We were Elevation Software, the independent company with Pandemic. We didn't have the stock market to pressure dates, and so there was much less of a sense of urgency. There was more of an old school, ‘it'll be done when it's done.’
It was a great company to work for. Even under EA there were a lot of great people. I was sad to see Mark [Darrah] and Casey [Hudson] leave, because I think they were the last two big pieces of the DNA that made BioWare BioWare, Casey especially. There are companies to go to work for now in Edmonton, whereas there weren't before. Now Trent Oster has a great company with Beamdog and Aaryn Flynn started up Improbable. Casey is starting up a studio now too.
Fedor
I think the work culture evolved a bit over the project’s life. And I mean, how could it not? Over nearly a decade of DAO development, the studio grew tremendously. Project leadership changed two, maybe three times. The studio was acquired twice, first by Elevation Partners, and then by EA.
Erickson
I was likely supposed to be asking [James Ohlen] about where the bathrooms were and sharing writing ideas, but instead grilled him incessantly on process, organization, and procedure. Note that our executive producer at the time was a first-timer at his job, having come in through engineering and was the first of at least three people who would be in that seat before DAO shipped. Everyone was doing their best, but this was not a tightly-run ship and after EA’s strictly run schedules it was hard for me to get my head around how it would ever get out the door.
Tudge
I've never seen bigger bug counts on a game in my career. It was pretty brutal. The lead team would be there day after day after day, just triaging bugs. What should we fix? What should we not fix? We were about 160 people at the end there, not including QA. It was enormous. I really felt like a snake swallowing and trying to eat a watermelon all at once.
Fedor
I recall one time when working with physics joints, there was a bug where the wrong physics properties were applied to Duncan’s head. When I spawned him into the engine, his head fell to the ground and rolled around, the ponytail causing it to flop around like a fish. I also remember a- was it an animation test? Or maybe it was a cinematic test. Anyway, the devs had mocked up this sweeping shot of dozens of DA characters on a cliffside, singing and dancing to “C Is for Cookie” by the Cookie Monster.
One thing I often wonder is what Dragon Age might have been like if we didn’t switch engines mid-development. Around the time I joined BioWare in 2004, Dragon Age was being demoed at E3 using a prototype they built in NeverWinter Nights. I was on a separate project, the Technical Architecture Group (TAG), working on a next-gen engine for BioWare games. Not long after, the Dragon Age and TAG teams merged, and work began on rebuilding DA in the TAG engine. I can’t help but think that set us back a long time. There were a number of battle-tested things the NWN engine did that we lost, like multiplayer and dungeon-master modes. And seeing what CD Projekt Red did with the NWN engine in The Witcher was really inspiring. Would DAO have come out sooner? Would it have supported multiplayer? Could we have reworked the rendering in NWN’s engine to meet the demands of the time? It’s easy to ask these questions now, in retrospect. But I’m sure at the time, these were really difficult decisions to make.
Tudge
While working on Dragon Age was some of the best times in my life, it was very stressful – I got most of my grey hair during that time.
Turner
Peer critiques were particularly stressful for me, because feedback was given out loud in front of the whole writing team, and they sometimes had a tendency to become more like a roast than a peer review.
Erickson
I wrote the entirety of two of the origin stories: The City Elf and the Dwarf Noble. For each of these I’d go off by myself and put together an entire pitch and outline, bring it to James and the other writers and they would kindly, and elegantly, kick the living shit out of me. Like BioWare training, it didn’t just make me a better writer, it made me a better professional and person.
Turner
We had an open ‘writers' room’ situation, which was great for bouncing ideas off each other but not ideal for focusing on the work when needed. The project was in development for so long that we could see things changing as the industry did.
Crunching in Thedas
Like most late ‘00s games, Dragon Age: Origins was made with blood, sweat, tears, and crunch. Some developers look back on that time with mixed feelings.
Tudge
We always used to eat the pizza from the bar down at the bottom of the building because we'd be working late at night. I remember my food budget per day was $2,500 for crunch food. We were there day and night towards the end.
Turner
Once Mass Effect finished up, and everyone saw the effects of horrendous crunch, Dragon Age decided to actively reduce crunch, keeping it to two nights a week of the dev's choosing.
Tudge
It was an issue we discussed a lot. It wasn't a natural thing like it had been before in the ‘90s and early 2000s. There was a lot of pushback on crunch and we didn't want to turn it into death march. Back then we were very agile. Say a team was doing 1,000 points of work every four weeks – in order to stay on track, we needed them to do 1,200 points of work. We'd say, listen, you've got to put in the extra effort. We will bring in food on Tuesdays and Thursdays, if people want to work those nights. Or if they want to go home at five o'clock every day and come in for one Saturday, do that, or come in on a Sunday because that's when their husband or wife goes to their aunt's place.
We stayed away from sympathy crunch, which was everybody staying late. It was more targeted towards, ‘We have this extra effort that's required, you guys figure out how you want to do it.’ We did have some everybody in nights, but that was when we needed to find more bugs – we needed everybody to play the game for three hours. We needed more eyeballs on it.
Fedor
For a while, the DA tech art team worked in one of the meeting rooms due to a growing lack of space. And I forget who, but someone made the comment that there was just no way we’d be able to fit another team member in there. We had these Ikea adjustable desks, maybe four to five foot wide and 30 inches deep. And the room was maybe 12’x24’, with two sliding doors as entrances on the long wall. Anyway, we took it as a challenge. I made up scale cardboard cutouts on a sheet of paper so we could Tetris the extra person’s desk in. Passers-by would duck into the room to try their hand at the puzzle. And eventually, we figured out an arrangement where the rows of desks could have their chairs staggered so they interlocked like a zipper, and we were able to fit an additional two to three people.
Stubbington
In the environment team, we were quite proud of the fact that we never had to suffer the death march of crunch that had consumed other teams and other projects. We carefully planned out what we could do and though we pushed to the limit and did some overtime, we usually limited it to reasonable levels. To me, crunch is a failure of management to plan, and a failure to listen to the team members when they explain what is achievable.
Tudge
I've been at studios where we've death marched. That's super diminishing, but if people need to put in a bit of extra effort to keep things on track, keeping on top of that early and saying, “Hey, I know we’re two years away from ship, but we're starting to see some things slip, let's put in some extra effort to make sure we're back on track.” Or we're going to cut some stuff too or maybe we're gonna do a combination of both. Looking at that progress early was something that they were really good about.
People who make games have dreamed about making games their whole lives. And when they get there, they have a hard time stopping. Nasty people can take advantage of that. I can tell you if you do it for too much and too long, you're not as passionate about games as you used to be – it can get wearing. You need a break in order to get that passion back. But a healthy balance is always better. Figure out how you work – this team's got to do 1,000 points. If they're tracking to do 700, they have to find a way to make up the 300. But if they're tracking to make 1,200 they can decide, you know what, we're gonna start cutting out early on Fridays. That rarely happens, but it could.
Origins In Retrospect
Nowadays, Origins has established itself as one of the best and most beloved fantasy RPGs ever to hit store shelves. But what do nine ex-BioWare devs think of their Dragon Age debut today?
Gaider
Origins was probably BioWare at its height, as far as I’m concerned. I do wish we hadn’t dragged things on for six years. Like I said, the team chased its tail for a while, and there was a feeling of wanting someone higher up in the team to just make a decision already. But they did, eventually, and I’d say overall I remember it fondly. Especially working with the other writers. We had a grand time. As a group, we always felt like we were in our own foxhole, fighting to maintain DA’s creative vision and often oblivious to what was going on in the rest of the team. I’ll always miss that.
Erickson
I wrote every line of the [City Elf and Dwarf Noble] origin stories and worked hand in hand with technical design to implement them. There may be nothing else in my entire game career I can point to and as honestly say “that’s exactly what I wanted it to be.”
Brandes Hepler
I think the fundamental DNA of Dragon Age is that it is a fantasy world that takes itself seriously as a place that is populated by real people. Far too often, fantasy RPGs are all on the surface – elves are mystical and ancient, orcs are burly and evil, and dwarves are Scottish and drunk. One tabletop RPG I played a long time ago actually had a race that was described in the rulebook as “No one knows what gender the Whatevers are, or if they even have gender.” This was a playable race, so somehow you were supposed to be able to role-play as something that was just portrayed as alien and unknowable, and I think that’s often a huge issue with the development of fantasy worlds.
What I think we did differently in Dragon Age was to take the world completely seriously as a place that real people could exist. We looked at all the fantasy stereotypes first to turn them on their heads – what if, instead of being revered and powerful, elves were homeless former slaves? – and then to look at what that would really mean, both for those individual characters and the society they had to live in. This meant that our storylines could resonate with things that mattered to the real people playing them, not just be an escapist fantasy of smashing some orcs. And I think it’s that depth and richness to the world that gives it its staying power. The debate of whether mages need to be controlled because they are inherently dangerous is no less relevant 15 years later. So, while I think our characters are incredibly important to the success of the game, and are deeply beloved by fans, they could not have had the depth and detail they do without a complex and internally consistent world to live in. This is also why you can write a new game, with a new protagonist and set of followers, without a connection to darkspawn or Grey Wardens, and still have it feel 100 percent like Dragon Age.
Zur
I believe this game is a piece of art overall, and when it comes to the music, I think that the way it flows within the game, supporting it, but not standing out, telling the story without really stating it ‘in your face’, just organically embodied in the whole experience – this is truly what makes the combination of the gameplay and music work so well. There are elements like songs and the use of voices and made-up language which also were very new and innovative at the time, and no doubt added to the uniqueness of the experience as well.
Turner
I am the first to admit that the game has its weaknesses, and I feel like it's the last example of a kind of Western RPG that big studios don't make anymore, but maybe that's what gives it longevity among certain fans. I think it's deeper and more complex, story-wise, than later games like Mass Effect, and it definitely gives the player more agency to create their own character and affect the world. That, and the humor, the interactions among the companions, and the compelling plot of betrayal and intrigue and murder make it stand out among the rest. It's somehow both an epic and a personal story, and I don't think anyone has matched the sheer size and presentation since.
It was a kind of nexus between the older, super massive RPGs of the late ‘90s and early 2000s and the more cinematic action-y RPGs we see today. The budget and resources we need to make a game look and play well enough to compete today tends to crack down hard on massive RPGs with tons of quests and dialogue. It really was the first time we could see an RPG like Baldur's Gate presented like KOTOR or Jade Empire, and that was special.
Loh
The age of the engine kind of shows itself, and when comparing to more contemporary titles, you can see this. But really, what sings is the group combat, and all the reinforcing intertwined storylines, and of course the classic BioWare party banter. Slap that into the Frostbite Engine, Unreal, or Unity, and BAM, a brand new game for the audience who hasn't had the pleasure of playing DAO yet – a refresh or reboot. Of course the DA franchise is alive and well, so I do very much look forward to DA 4, 5, 6, and 39.
Stubbington
As an artist I like to tell people that, “Great art sells games, but great gameplay sells sequels,” and gives longevity to a game also. Amazing screenshots will get people to look at your game and investigate further, but it’s the gameplay. Once they have got past that, that keeps them coming back for more, whether that be DLC, sequels, or just continuing to play your game. Dragon Age can certainly take its place among the royalty of role-playing games, that's for sure.
Gaider
Did Origins do stuff that hadn’t been done before? I’m not sure about that. I think its adherence to tradition was a lot of its appeal. It was very earnest in its approach to traditional fantasy. If we did anything that sort of pushed the envelope a bit, I suspect it’d be in the realm of how we handled the relationships with the followers. It was a big part of the game, probably more so than any BioWare game previous, and Dragon Age as a series kind of became a bulwark of LGBTQ content… more than Mass Effect, even. It garnered the game a lot of attention and love from its fans.
Certainly, there was a lot of talk about representation and social justice which really didn’t come to my or the team’s awareness until sometime during Dragon Age 2, which I wish I’d been privy to back when making the setting earlier on. I might have made some different decisions back then, though it’s hard to say whether James Ohlen would have felt the same. We slowly got there as time went on, though the transition might have been less painful if that kind of view was baked into the setting from the very beginning.
Fedor
It was certainly a labor of love, and I think players can tell. We made the game because we wanted games like that to exist for fans like us. And I don’t think anyone at the time felt like this project was going to be phoning it in. We wanted it to be big, and we tried to make it big. If anything, we were probably overambitious, and that might account for the staying power the game has had. What we built was probably too big for most studios to afford, including BioWare.
Tudge
I did feel, especially towards the end, that we had managed to create something magical. I am so proud of what we accomplished and the legacy we have created. There isn’t one specific thing, it is the sum of the parts: the story, characters, turn-based combat, the musical score…. It's how all the pieces work together in concert that makes it special. When you pour your heart and soul into creating a game it is hard to be objective and your creation isn’t fully validated until the players have played it. The whole team, and not just myself and the leads, is why Dragon Age: Origins came together the way it did. The team had largely come from NeverWinter Nights and many of them were Baldur’s Gate veterans as well. That mix of amazing talent and experience was what made Dragon Age: Origins possible.
Gaider
It set a bar we couldn’t possibly hope to maintain, going forward. But I do wish we’d stuck a bit closer to the traditional RPG aspects as the series went on, instead of looking on those as a lodestone limiting our audience. There was always this undercurrent that the ‘RPG crowd’ was small and thus could never translate into the kind of sales EA wanted without changing and modernizing it all. Personally, I always thought that estimate of the audience was mistaken, and that people will flock to quality above all else… because, yes, I’m a big fan of what we did in DAO. Whether my thoughts about the audience are correct, I guess we’ll never know.
Brandes Hepler
I loved working on Dragon Age. I have never laughed as much as in the DA writers’ room. We had a great dynamic between all of the writers and would end up on crazy tangents – mostly about who would cannibalize whom first if we all got snowed in during an Edmonton winter – almost every day. It was like all the best parts of college, if hanging out and playing RPGs with your friends was actually your major.
I’m also pretty proud of coming up with the Grey Warden motto: “In war: Victory. In peace: Vigilance. In death: Sacrifice.” I’ve seen people who have actually gotten tattoos of that motto and it’s endlessly amusing to me that someone would want something I came up with in five minutes between bouts of morning sickness permanently tattooed on their bodies.
Zur
I can tell you that there is no doubt that this game changed my career immensely and I was a different composer after completing the journey of composing for Dragon Age. I guess this has to mean something and speaks to the magnitude of this game, since I had already worked on so many games before it and since. I think this game was a major milestone for me personally, and for the whole industry as well. I’m so grateful I was part of it.
Turner
I think it's still popular for two reasons: 1) The characters and plots resonated with fantasy RPG fans, and 2) For budget reasons, you just can't build games like it anymore. You'll notice that recent similar RPGs, like Divinity and Baldur's Gate 3, all stick to an isometric view and tend to avoid cinematic dialogue, because at this point in time you have to make a choice between knockout triple-A presentation and epic storytelling of that sort. Dragon Age: Origins, for its time, had both.
Tudge
I'm the most proud of that accomplishment out of anything in my entire life – I'm the most proud of Dragon Age: Origins. I'm proud of the ability to have been a part of making something that so many people to this day talk about – something that has affected people's lives. I think as an artist, as somebody who creates something, having an impact on people's lives that they remember fondly is the best thing you could ever do. Nothing can top that, not money, nothing. That's why we make games: to impact people's lives. It’s probably my proudest achievement of my entire life.
Next: How Dragon Age Inspired The Games Industry's Next Generation
