Dragon Age creator says he ‘had to take out half’ of the quests in Dragon Age 2 once he found out they only had 16 months to make it: ‘BioWare as a team did not know how to make a small game’
Dragon Age 2 is a bit of a controversial entrant in the series—we rated it highly when it first game out, perhaps infamously so, but fan opinion bends towards it being more of a cult classic than a straight-up classic like its predecessor.
That’s partially because it was made at a blistering speed and had to cut more corners than a pair of scissors trying to make a circle. 16 months was all BioWare had to put it together, which is almost nothing in RPG development time.
Gaider’s only got positive words for how the writing team followed the shift in priority, though, stating that “they were all veterans … I sat down with them 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, nevermind 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 … They knew what was on the line. They all wrote like the wind. There was nobody who wasn’t firing on all cylinders.”
That’s certainly an opinion shared by our own Fraser Brown, who called Dragon Age 2 the “boldest” of BioWare’s RPGs back in 2021—particularly praising Anders, the series premiere trash fire who “causes a lot of problems”. It’s easy to imagine a less rough-around-the-edges Anders in a Dragon Age 2 that wasn’t made in 16 months, so hey—Gaider’s probably onto something.
