The following is an excerpt from Dragon Age II by Charlotte Reber, published by Boss Fight Books.
It was the start of 2010, and the Dragon Age team had just over a year to develop and ship DA2. But to his writing team, David Gaider presented an even harder challenge: The writers needed to write the game’s entire story, down to every last line of in-game text, in just a few short months.
“[The writers] were the source of all work,” Gaider told me over video chat. “Everything we made created work for other people.” Every line of dialogue, interactive conversation, cinematic cutscene, and codex entry that the writers created had to be built, animated, recorded, and translated. The writers were a bottleneck for much of the work the other departments did, which meant their deadline needed to be earlier to give the rest of the Dragon Age II team time to build what they’d written.
The first thing Gaider did was sit down with his team to make sure they understood not just the concept for the game they’d be writing, but the challenge of the deadline, and the limitations that meant for them as a writing staff. “We have only this amount of time to do this,” Gaider told his team. “I’m not going to have time to give everything you make the attention that we would normally give, or that maybe it even deserves. So I am going to have to rely on all of you individually just to do your best work, and to figure it out.”
“And the writers did it,” he told me. “They all brought their A-game.”
Including Gaider, the DA2 writing team was just five people. The most veteran among them was Lukas Kristjanson, who was the first full-time writer ever hired at BioWare back in 1996 for the development of Baldur’s Gate. Kristjanson’s longevity at the company led to his affectionately being nicknamed “Writer Zero” and “Old Man Luke,” and he wrote for nearly every BioWare release, creating a number of fan-favorite characters including barbarian Minsc (and pet hamster Boo) from Baldur’s Gate before joining the Dragon Age team for Origins and its DLC Leliana’s Song.
Jennifer Hepler was a game module writer in Los Angeles until she and her husband both landed jobs at BioWare Edmonton and made the cold move north. Hepler was the first woman to join the Dragon Age writing team’s ranks, and soon proved herself to be one of the team’s fastest writers. On Origins, she created most of the game’s dwarf lore and its Dwarf Commoner origin story, and by DA2 took on a senior writer role that also included managerial quest-wrangling and project management.
Sheryl Chee grew up in Singapore as an avid BioWare fan, eventually becoming a self-taught modder in college partly as an excuse to play more video games and partly to learn how they were made. When an open writing position was posted at BioWare, Chee submitted a mod and earned first an interview and then an offer to move halfway across the world to Edmonton, Canada to write for Origins (including writing fan-favorite character Leliana) and later Awakening.
Remarkably, Chee was not the only BioWare writer to catch the company’s attention through modding. In 2006, BioWare held a contest inviting fans to build their own story modules for Neverwinter Nights, the prize for which included a BioWare travel mug and a job interview. Writer Mary Kirby submitted a module and was a finalist in the competition, but sadly didn’t win an interview or a mug. But not long after, the Dragon Age team needed a staff member to fill in for Jennifer Hepler while she was on maternity leave, and someone on the hiring committee recalled Kirby’s submission as a good fit for BioWare. Kirby joined the Dragon Age team and proved her skills during Origins, staying on the team even once Hepler returned. (It wasn’t until years later that she finally got that travel mug, though.)
Although five people might sound like a small group, it’s actually fairly uncommon for game companies to employ a full-time writing staff at all. Usually, if such a role even exists, it’s on a contract basis rather than a permanent staff position. Not only did BioWare have a dedicated writing team for each game it produced, but the writers were one of the main driving forces behind the game’s story. While this didn’t mean they had creative control of the project—that responsibility lay with senior leadership—it did mean they had a key role in establishing the characters, tone, and story of the game.
While writing staff, like the rest of the developers, might hop between projects as needed, it was common for them to focus on a particular franchise and thus become deeply familiar with the game’s setting and story conventions. DA2’s tiny writing team was no exception. While some were relative newcomers to BioWare, they’d all proved themselves on other BioWare projects—and most importantly, they knew Dragon Age. “I was fortunate that everybody I had working with me, I’d worked with on [Origins],” Gaider told me. “They were all experienced. They knew the IP. They knew exactly what was required, and they knew how to write.” They were also very fast writers and already familiar with working together.
Even so, not long into the project Gaider feared they were falling behind schedule and asked Laidlaw and Darrah for extra assistance. Longtime BioWare writers Ferret Beaudoin and Tony Evans joined the writing team on loan as pinch hitters, but with DA2’s breakneck pace, getting the new writers up to speed on the project turned out to be more work than having the existing team simply tackling everything themselves. Gaider had to shamefacedly return to Laidlaw and ask for the pair to be taken back off the project.
It’s perhaps a sign of how close-knit and insular the DA2 writing team was that they worked faster together as a small, familiar group than with a larger crew. And their workload was by no means insignificant: With the cinematics team, editing team, localization, and more all waiting on the writers, the team was under tremendous pressure to get the lion’s share of their work done in just the first few months.
But that didn’t mean they didn’t know how to have fun.
BioWare’s offices at the time were on four floors of an office building that adjoined a hotel, with a shared lobby and restaurant below. Offices were small and cramped, and staff had to frequently shuffle between various shared offices as roles and projects changed. The Dragon Age writers had been scattered among several rooms during Origins, but for DA2 they were consolidated into a single cramped office lovingly referred to as “The Writers’ Pit.”
Gaider, as lead writer, had a desk at the head of the room like a teacher’s desk, with the rest of the team’s desks circling the room, facing the walls. A massive whiteboard covered the far wall, partly to keep track of quests and story beats, and partly to keep track of less serious things, like a counter for how many days since the team’s last conversation about cannibalism. “It was always set to zero,” Hepler recalled, “because if anyone noticed and tried to fix it, we would see them trying to fix it and we would start talking about cannibalism.” Kirby finally hung a sign on the office door that read, “Not Safe For Work” to warn anyone who entered just what sort of chaos they were getting into.
“We were very notorious at BioWare for being the room of insanity,” Gaider told me with a grin. “People who weren’t writers were very leery of going in there, because if they did, they wouldn’t leave for a while, because we would suck them into some conversation. […] It’s where productivity went to die.”
“It was the most fun place in the world,” Hepler told me. She recalled once trying to watch an episode of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory, known for its supposed “geek” humor, and being thoroughly unimpressed. “I was like, ‘This is not as funny as half an hour in the Dragon Age writers’ room on any given day of the week,’” she said. “If you want geek humor, you should just be in the room with us!”
Even when the writers weren’t discussing important topics like murder, sex puns, or cats, it was rarely quiet in the room. “I assume there were some periods of silence when we were all typing, but I don’t remember them,” Hepler admitted. This wasn’t due solely to the cheerful chaos of the room. Most of the work the writers did was highly collaborative and required lots of back-and-forth chatter, and being all in the same room was a huge help.
“It became really useful for DA2,” Kristjanson told me. Anytime one writer had a question for any of the other writers, they could just call out across the room and get an immediate response, letting the team work out plot and character details on the fly.
“There’s a lot of back and forth—that’s why we have the Writers’ Pit,” Chee said in a 2020 Q&A. “There’s a lot of checking in with people, and talking, and having lunch together, and brainstorming, just coming up with things together.”
“More and more over time, BioWare started down this path of putting everybody into one giant office,” Gaider told me. “It’s a producer’s dream.” But Gaider made it clear to management that putting the writers in a shared open office plan with the other development teams wouldn’t be a good fit for the writers’ style of work. “Like it was a threat, I kept saying, ‘If you put us in the big room, we will disturb everybody,’” Gaider said. “Because the writers talk constantly. We have to. We chitchat about what we’re working on all the time. It’s very collaborative. So they left us alone for the most part.”
The collaboration was also great troubleshooting when someone got stuck in their writing. “There was a daily thing,” Gaider recalled, “where if I’ve hit a snag on whatever part, I would just turn my chair around to the room, and be like, ‘All right guys, huddle up.’ And we would talk it out. And sometimes I just needed a rubber duck.” The writers would then toss out ideas until something clicked, but even if nothing did, the simple act of talking through it was often enough to get things flowing again.
(A supposedly common practice among programmers and engineers is to keep a rubber duck on your desk. When you get stuck on an issue with your code, talking through the issue to the duck–or, really, to anyone–can often cause you to realize where you went wrong and how to fix it. You can do this with cats too. I find that if you let one on your desk they tend to cause more problems than they solve.)
As a team lead, Gaider also appreciated being able to use the space for private discussions with his team. “It was a sign, if I had something serious to talk about, I would go to the Pit door. I would close it and stand at the door, and everybody would be like, ‘Uh-oh.’”
The writers had a mischievous streak, especially when it came to getting a reaction out of fans. Gaider recalled that when he first had the idea for the Origins ending in which central character Alistair sacrifices himself to save the player, the first thing he did was to run to tell Chee and Kirby, at which point all three cackled with glee. “My writers are absolutely brilliant,” Gaider said in a 2012 interview, “in that they love working in this world, they love writing these characters, they love torturing the fans.”
The writers’ sense of mischief wasn’t always centered on torturing fans, though—more often it was about writing funny or absurd content into the game. Gaider felt that BioWare’s other flagship series, Mass Effect, always took itself a little too seriously. (He’s also, rightfully, a little smug about the fact that Dragon Age historically sold better than Mass Effect did.) The Dragon Age writers, on the other hand, liked to lightly poke fun at their world and characters, often through the mouthpiece of the characters themselves—although they were careful not to slip into the territory of parody or breaking the fourth wall.
“You need to balance the grimdark with the light,” Gaider told me. “I think the dark works better when it exists in contrast to light. So you need moments of levity and humor.” Sure, other fantasy RPGs might include a dark plot about sex workers and demonic possession, but how many would lighten the mood mid-quest by having one of your party members muse aloud, “Apostate prostitutes? …Apostitutes!” (And good luck entering any brothel in a Dragon Age game without someone in the party innocently asking whether they serve broth.)
DA2’s prologue, as told by Varric, follows Hawke and their family as they flee the destruction of their hometown, Lothering, by the darkspawn invasion—an incident which returning Dragon Age players would recall taking place during Origins. Throughout the prologue, the Hawke family encounters two other refugees: Aveline, a tough warrior who will become one of Hawke’s companions, and Aveline’s husband Wesley, who dies of darkspawn-inflicted injuries soon after his introduction. The player also learns that Hawke’s father was a mage who died some years ago. And in a shocking moment, a fatal encounter with an ogre results in the death of one of Hawke’s younger twin siblings, either Bethany or Carver.
My first time playing the game, I chose to play as a female warrior Hawke; when the ogre attacked, it was Hawke’s sister Bethany who survived. When the prologue drew to a close with Hawke’s arriving as a penniless refugee on the docks of Kirkwall, there were three other characters at her side: Hawke’s mother Leandra, her sister Bethany, and her newfound ally Aveline. Carver, Wesley, and Hawke’s father Malcolm had all died tragically on or offscreen to give the remaining characters emotional drive. Four exhausted, tough women were alive; three men had been fridged, a term popularized by comic book writer Gail Simone to refer to storytelling in which a character is killed off to serve as motivation for another character—typically a woman dying to motivate a male hero. And I wasn’t even to Act I.
In 2015, I’d never played a video game opening so full of interesting women. To be honest, I haven’t played anything like it since. I wasn’t sure what this game was, or why it was making such daring narrative moves. But I do remember thinking, Whoa. This is different. This is going to be interesting.
It is, of course, entirely possible to play Dragon Age II’s prologue and have a completely different experience from mine. The player may choose to play as male Hawke, for example, or may arrive in Kirkwall with Carver at their side instead of Bethany. My starting party was a happy accident of design. But it’s the sort of happy accident that was more likely to happen in a Dragon Age game than anywhere else at BioWare, or indeed anywhere else in the games industry, for one simple reason: The writing team wasn’t entirely straight white men.
“Some of the other teams call us ‘Estrogen Brigade,’” Gaider said in a 2012 interview, simply because the five-person writing team was the only department that wasn’t majority male. While the term wasn’t intended to be flattering, Gaider felt gender diversity was “totally the best thing” as it brought a mix of perspectives that were sorely missed elsewhere.
This lack of gender diversity was sometimes made glaringly apparent in ridiculous ways, such as on one occasion when the all-male all-straight art team rounded up all the women on the writing staff, along with Gaider as the self-described “resident gay,” and proceeded to show them a series of character designs in a frustrated effort to understand what features made male characters attractive. Gaider also recalled an occasion during group writing reviews in which Hepler pointed out that some elements of a scene written by Kristjanson might come across as creepy to female players—something Gaider wasn’t initially convinced of, until the rest of the women at the table backed Hepler up. “How many times would that happen in the industry?” Gaider wondered afterward. “It was nice to have other voices at the table who could point these things out.”
(Hepler recalled a later breakthrough moment when she sent a description of DA2 DLC companion Sebastian to the art team with the descriptor “clean cut,” and the art team nailed her vision on the first try. “We were like, ‘Clean cut! That’s the magic word that make artists do handsome dudes!’”)
“I’m sure there are some people, on the internet especially, who would come up and say things like ‘Dragon Age is too oriented towards women,’ or too oriented towards gays, or what have you,” Gaider said in 2012. “And my answer to that is, ‘Thank God there’s something!’ […] Dragon Age embraces more than just a hack and slash mentality [… The game] sees more things as important than just combat and glorifying the male power fantasy.”
As Gaider rightly concludes, “There is more to fantasy than that.”
DA2’s rushed development schedule placed a severe constraint on the amount of content the writers had time to create, but it also provided an unusual level of freedom in what they were allowed to create. Normally, all written content at BioWare went through a process of reviews, rewrites, and edits—sometimes as many as a dozen rounds—before even coming close to making it into the final game. But on DA2, there wasn’t time for that level of managerial oversight. “Early on, we had a review from the Mike Laidlaw or Mark Darrah level,” Gaider told me. Laidlaw and Darrah were already up to their necks supervising other work for the game, and so the writers were largely left to their own devices.
“We had the very tight deadline, and so decisions were made by whoever was the most senior person in the room,” Hepler told me. “It was a big company, but it felt more like being on an indie project because the decisions were made by who showed up, and we did what we had to do to get it out the door.”
“In many ways, the fact that we didn’t have time to iterate on DA2 was both good and bad,” Gaider told me. “There were a lot of rough edges that never got smoothed out, for sure.” But not having time for second drafts meant that the writers didn’t have time to second-guess themselves, either. “There’s an element, I found,” Gaider said, “that the more time you have, the more a team will gravitate towards the middle. […] We will go back and forth on ideas and get rid of the crap. But there’s also an element where we will get away from the more innovative, edgier, riskier stuff as well, because we have time to talk ourselves out of them.”
“This is what I love about DA2,” Hepler tweeted in 2021. “Personally, I greatly prefer something that’s rough and raw and sincere to something that’s had all the soul polished out of it. Extra time would have helped for art and levels, but it would have lost something too.”
“Right?” Gaider replied. “The rawness of the writing lent a certain spark that we usually polished out.”
That spark was truly unique to DA2, both in the Dragon Age series and for BioWare at large. “DA2 represents the purest pipeline from the Dragon Age writers to the game,” Gaider told me. “It didn’t exist in [Origins], and certainly didn’t exist in Inquisition. We just didn’t have time to do the rewrites and the iteration. So there’s rough stuff in there, but it’s in many ways the clearest intention from the writers. You got to see the rawest version of our writing.”
It was rushed, it was raw, but Dragon Age II was getting written. And it was shaping up to be a very different game from anything BioWare had done before.
Boss Fight Books, founded in Los Angeles in June 2013, publishes nonfiction documentary-style books about classic video games. Each of our books takes a critical, historical, and personal look at a single game.
Some books focus on the history of the game’s creation, some focus on particular elements like level design, story, and music, some investigate the subculture that has formed around a game, and some reflect on the game's role in the author's own life. Each book is written by a different author from in or out of the video game industry.
