This year, Dragon Age II turned 15 years old. In honor of this, writer David Gaider spoke with The Gamer and shared his memories of working on the project.
According to him, it was all "a big mess":
I had already started thinking about the plot for the sequel to Dragon Age: Origins. It had ideas about Solas and other things that eventually appeared in Inquisition. And then suddenly everything changed.
Gaider explained that the problem was not with Dragon Age, but with another BioWare studio project — Star Wars: The Old Republic. This MMORPG was eventually released in December 2011.
The launch of the project was constantly delayed, and the management of Electronic Arts did not want an entire financial year to pass without a new release from BioWare.
As a result, the original version of Dragon Age 2 was frozen, and the team decided to release an add-on for Dragon Age: Origins.
But, as Gaider said, he soon found out that they would be making a sequel, not DLC:
But already in the process of working, I heard: "No, this is not an add-on — this will be a full-fledged sequel that we are creating in the same time frame that was allocated for the development of the add-on."
This was followed by "14–16 months of grueling work" to release Dragon Age II. The studio was used to making large-scale games, so the plans were initially appropriate, but in the process of development, much had to be discarded and simplified:
The main problem we faced was that the BioWare team simply didn't know how to make small games. We always planned a big project. And when we were told that this would be a full-fledged sequel, for the first four months of work we assumed that it should be much larger. I had to go to the script room, where the walls were covered with stickers: here are the main quests, and here are the side quests, and here are the ones that the player can find during the game — and I was forced to remove half of them.
The resulting version of Dragon Age II to this day is capable of causing controversy, as if it was released recently. Gaider says that this is largely due to its "fearlessness" — although it arose from the fact that the developers simply did not have time to fear possible mistakes.
