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.

In a recent interview with TheGamer, Dragon Age creator David Gaider confirms that the writing process for DA2 was absolutely brutal. Especially given the studio’s prior RPG pedigree making some of the longest RPGs imaginable:

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“The big problem we faced is that BioWare as a team did not know how to make a small game. We planned for a big game. And when we’re told this is a full, full sequel, initially for the first four months of work, we’re assuming that it was going to be much bigger.”

Then, when that wound up not being the case, Gaider remembers having to operate like a butcher on the cutting room floor:

“I had to go into one writing room. We had all these sticky pads that were breaking up all the quests, like, here are the crit path quests, here are the side quests, and the ones the player could pick up as they go around. I had to take out half of them.”

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.

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“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.”

This, he tells TheGamer, led to a “raw” writing style he believes had its ups and downs: “You start sanding down the edges [on second and third drafts], and that can be a good thing, but you also sand down some of the good edges as well. So, you find a lot of raw storytelling in DA2 that you don’t find elsewhere.”

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.