BioWare's David Gaider Talks Dragon Age, Character Romances, and More
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David Gaider's personal Tumblr page has been a beacon of information over the past week or so about the writing he did for Dragon Age: Inquisition, the characters he helped create, and the future of the Dragon Age storyline in general, so I thought I'd point you to a few of the more interesting morsels. On Iron Bull and Dorian's relationship:
Are there people who consider Dorian and Iron Bull's potential relationship to be (cute)? Huh. That's not a term I would use.
I'm not going to go into detail on what I think about it most of their relationship is left undetailed, after all, and the player is only catching the very edge of it.thus I think it's a matter best left to headcanon but I'd say that it has a real potential to either be a very passionate affair or the kind of epic mistake that one or both of them regrets later. Maybe both. I'm uncertain when it was dictated that relationships depicted in game had to only be of the safe and positive kind, but in this case I don't think that Adoribull (heh, I do love that moniker) is really either of those things.and that's not necessarily bad, in my view.
Poor Dorian. There's nothing like discovering you actually like Fereldan beer. It's like having all your friends talk about how awful Coors Light is, and you're quietly sitting there remembering how you chugged back a full case of it just the other night. So sad.
On fan theories:
There's so many of them that, like a shotgun, at least some of them have to hit the mark (to a point). I'm not going to say which, of course, but there's a couple I've read where I was like (oh, that's pretty close.not too bad.aww, and here you go right off the rails. Tsk.) Fan speculation is fun.
On writing Dorian's personal quest:
I'm not sure I can discuss the process of writing Dorian's personal quest, to be honest. It was difficult, and involved the exorcising of some personal demons, and that's all I'll say about it.
I knew when I wrote it that not everyone would appreciate it. Depending on one's level of empathy or cynicism, they might roll their eyes or call it an After School Special.or, hey, maybe I'm over-stating it. Maybe they'll just consider it badly written. Wouldn't be the first time.
The thing is, I didn't really care. I knew who I was writing that for. I knew who it would touch, and I believed it was something that needed to be said. Not every story involving a gay character needs to be about them being gay, but I think it's a missed opportunity to declare that none of them should be.and, in this case, I felt it underlined parts of Dorian's makeup which, up to that point, had been left to inference. Dorian's life is one of rebellion, and while being gay in and of itself doesn't dictate his personality, the conflict that arose from it is certainly a big part of it.and I think that kind of conflict is important when talking about the gay experience.
If, in fact, that's something you intend to talk about. Which I thought I might try, since here I had myself a gay character for the very first time. How successful I was with that is up to the individual player, but I'm glad I did it.
And on the techniques he uses to track dialogue trees:
It depends a bit on the writer, but the first thing I do is write a stub version of the dialogue.essentially I write the tree in conceptual form, with each line being a description of the info being communicated rather than the actual dialogue. That way I can ensure that every particular path taken through the conversation gets the right info across.
Then I go back and start filling in the lines. That will often change the structure a bit as I get a (feel) for the flow, but so long as I maintain the original links I should still maintain the needed information.
After that, I simply read through the conversation from beginning to end out loud, to ensure I catch the awkward stuff as much as possible (the editors will later do this as well, but I don't like to rely on them). So long as I go through the different paths, I can ensure they all sound natural.
All this is only for the really big, complicated dialogues, of course. Smaller ones, and especially ones that have no real information flow (because they only impart one piece of information, or are simply for flavor), can be written almost as-is. A bigger one (such as the end game scene between Morrigan and Flemeth, for instance, which not only had an incredibly complicated information flow it also had three separate versions) may take days to write and require a lot of careful editing and tweaking.
