Aside from failures like Anthem, Bioware has created some incredibly memorable RPGs that are also defined by their fascinating characters, companions that the player takes with them around the expansive worlds.
But how were characters like Varric, Vivienne, Solas and Morrigan designed? It is now explained by the series’ creative director, Mark Laidlaw, in a new roundtable interview with PC Gamer where he, together with other creative minds from the industry, talks about the process behind the Dragon Age games and Bioware in general.
Laidlaw explains that the series was primarily conceived by a writer taking on a specific character, and then in the studio’s writers’ room working out how each of those characters would react to each other and to the events set in motion over the course of the game:
“We were firmly in the (camp of) ‘You own this character, you are the voice holder for this character. I imagine that’s fairly common—then you have someone do a pass at the end of the game to go through the character and make sure it fits. But we would typically sit in writing rooms, and the writers would shout out, you’d have Mary (Kirby) owning Varric and Lukas Kristjanson would be like, ‘Hey, what would Varric say to this thing that Sera says?’ She’d be like, ‘He’d probably be annoyed.’ And she’d throw in a line or something like that.”
It’s a pretty fascinating insight, and you can listen to the whole talk here.
