Companions are a defining feature of BioWare’s RPGs. The bands of NPC followers who join your party in games like Baldur’s Gate and Dragon Age weren’t just a bunch of Jesus elves who quietly followed every decision you made. Sometimes they would go off to do their own thing. As such, nothing yet sparks more discussion among BioWare players than asking BioWare’s best and worst buddies. (Jacob Defense Corps, Representative)
So when a group of veteran RPG designers gathered for the recent GDC roundtable hosted by PC Gamer, the question arose of how the writers managed the cast. Obsidian’s Josh Sawyer took this opportunity to ask Mike Laidlaw.
Laidlaw was the former creative director of the Dragon Age series, lead writer of Jade Empire, and designer of the first Mass Effect. But the one he knows best is Dragon Age, and he responded by explaining how his room worked in his three Dragon Age games he worked on.
“We firmly [camp of] “You own this character and you are the voice holder of this character,” Laidlaw said. But we were usually sitting in the writing room and the writer yelled, [Kirby] Owning Varric and Lukas Kristjanson is like, “Hey, what would Varric say to what Sera says?” She’ll say, ‘He’ll be annoyed. And then she threw in a line or something. ”
Each companion had an area of the setting that needed to be expressed and had something to say. In the case of Varric, a dwarven chatter and rogue popular in Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition, Laidlaw explains that it meant “he’s a merchant and represents the dwarves.” But Varrick is not an option for romance, because its companion’s devoted writers are free to control certain aspects of who they are. I just don’t like writing .
Ensuring you have a companion to respond to each game’s themes and central conflict has been Dragon Age’s goal from the beginning. says Mr. “Seeing Jaheira, Ellie and Vikonia represent a not-completely but definitely very different elf experience made me want to do more of it. In a game?’ Mages vs. Templars, Freedom and Safety, Whether it’s an excess of power, or whatever sort of thing is being dealt with, we pretty much chart like, “OK, we need characters who represent different perspectives on these things.”
Having peers with differing opinions on all these issues gave me the freedom to write peers who didn’t espouse any particular philosophy. “In Inquisition, they form the yellow team. It was Serah, Bull, and people like ‘Oh whatever, just kill the shit.'” Both are valid, right? ”
Strix Beltran, Josh Sawyer, Lis Moberly and Paweł Sasko also participated in the RPG roundtable. You can read more about what they said, and here he can listen to the entire 80-minute conversation.
