Dragon Age 2-retrospektiv på BioWare Crunch

BioWare broke its established formula when it launched the sequel to its massive fantasy role-playing game. Players expected a legendary hero with multiple background options, a singular world-threatening villain, and a hard-earned happy ending. The team discarded those staples entirely to craft a human-only story set in a single city.

The studio originally planned an expansion focusing on an exalted march on the city of Kirkwall. Electronic Arts needed to fill a fiscal gap left by delays to Star Wars: The Old Republic and ordered a full-fledged sequel instead. The team had a timeline of 14 to 16 months of intense crunch to complete the project. I see a direct link between this shortened schedule and the game's famous shortcomings, like the heavily repeated dungeon environments. This forced timeline meant that the writers had to rely on first drafts to get the script out to the rest of the team. A report from Polygon details how the team initially planned for a much larger game before realizing they did not know how to make a small game. The developers had to cut half of the planned quests from the sticky pads in the writing room to fit the delivery window.

A wider open world and more exploration in the first act disappeared from the game. An article from TheGamer confirms that an entire story arc centering on the companion Varric and his relationship with the Carta criminal organization also faced the axe. Instead of a continent-spanning quest to defeat a singular ancient evil, the writers focused on a personal tale of a refugee family surviving across a span of seven years. This choice introduced time jumps that advanced the plot between major acts. The team cut about 80 percent of the planned environmental changes to the city across these periods because they ran out of production time.

I think the raw quality of the unpolished script gave the narrative a distinct edge that more heavily edited games usually lose. The developers could not afford to overcorrect the story in response to negative feedback during the process. David Gaider, the creator of the franchise, noted that the studio usually sands down the rough edges of a script and removes some of the good edges along with the bad. The game instead delivered a story about a refugee fleeing war to build a life in a city that is increasingly hostile to their presence. The developers also cut the complex character creator from the previous entry. Making the protagonist human allowed the writers to give the family a set backstory. The team even decided to make the primary romance options bisexual to save time, putting the limited cast on double duty instead of building separate paths for different genders.

"I sat down with near the beginning and said we're going to have very little time to review all this. I'll be lucky if I get to review your stuff, never mind other people. So I'm going to trust you. We're going to measure twice, cut once. Once it's cut, it's done, and we'll have to just accept the result."

— David Gaider

The game continues to generate regular debates among players concerning its themes of freedom versus security and the line between terrorism and liberation. The current state of the series remains uncertain after Electronic Arts either laid off or reassigned the remaining team members to other projects.

Read more from David Gaider’s interview: the game launched fifteen years ago under conditions that should have buried it because BioWare had roughly 14 to 16 months to deliver a full sequel to the original game. What emerged was a game built almost entirely from first drafts, stripped of half its planned quests, with dungeons reused out of necessity and an entire Varric storyline scrapped before it was finished.