In the final interview from his visit to the BioWare offices, Senior Staff Writer Chris "Pwyff" Tom sat down with Dragon Age 2 Lead Writer David Gaider to talk about the creative process of game writing.

ZAM: In comparing Dragon Age 2 to Dragon Age: Origins, it feels like Dragon Age 2 is purer in its conception and creation. I was talking to Mark Darrah (DA2's executive producer) earlier about how it took five years to make DA:O, versus one year with DA:2, and how easy it is to wander astray the longer you take in creating something. What was the big difference in DA:O's creation versus DA2, aside from the time taken?

David: With Dragon Age: Origins, we spent a lot of time spinning our wheels. We had to figure out what kind of game we wanted to make, and you'd be surprised how much time you can spend doing that. So you'll do something, and then you'll decide that it's not quite what you want to do, and then you'll redo it, and then three years later you'll come back to it and decide that it's old and you'll want to change it… You could potentially make a game forever.

Dragon Age 2's one year creation was still tight, no matter how you look at it, and it helped that we hit the ground running. We knew what kind of game we wanted to make and we'd already identified the tone that we want. I think that's one of the most important things; the tone is how you judge everything, it's the bar. Once you have the tone of the story, it really helps in deciding what's "Dragon Age" and what's not. So going into Dragon Age 2, we knew our tone and we knew the story we wanted to tell. We have a lot of our ongoing story for Dragon Age, as a world, already mapped out. So we knew this story we wanted to tell, we just didn't know how to tell it.

ZAM: What inspired this whole idea of creating a framed narrative for Dragon Age 2? (A narrative within a narrative).

David: Well, every time we start a project, we think of what we want to do differently. Admittedly, we do a lot of things the same, and we have a certain style - that's fine - but we didn't want rest on our laurels. So one of the things we were talking about was the way we told a story. In a standard RPG, you have what's known as a "walk and talk," where you're in every footstep of the character and you have a set time period, which is generally very short. Well, we've always had relationships that grow unrealistically fast within these time periods, and a lot of stories get told over years, as opposed to weeks or months. From here, we came to the idea of trying time jumps within our story; that was our original idea.

I think it was Mike Laidlaw (DA2's lead developer) who brought up the idea of the movie, The Usual Suspects, with its framed narrative - the story within the story. When he brought that up, our initial reaction with the team was to shoot it out of the sky, but the more he talked about it, the more we started to get excited about it. We started to think about what we needed to do differently within a framed narrative, like time jumps and having an unreliable narrator. But then we realized that there was really nothing wrong with having these things, and there were a lot of interesting possibilities we could explore. So changing it up a bit was our inspiration.

ZAM: All right, and our time is getting pretty short for this interview, so I'll end it with a more general question: you were the author of the Dragon Age: Origins prequel novels; what are some of the big differences between writing a novel or writing the story for a Dragon Age game?

David: The main thing that's different is that with a novel, I'm the only person who's in charge. I write the story and if I want horses, I get horses. If I want cloaks and I want to go to Orlais, then that's exactly what I'll do. There's a lot of freedom there. On the other hand, however, I did miss a lot of the collaborative elements that you get in writing the story for a game. With a novel, it's only you, so you're out there drawing on your own energy. When you're working with a group of people, there's a sort of zeitgeist that gets created when you have a group of people who are all on the same page, and they're feeding off of each other's creative energy. There's a certain degree of momentum in creating with a group, and that momentum can carry you along, while writing a novel means that you're the only person who can push it forward.

Outside of that, there's a lot to the concept of having an interactive element. When designing a video game, you have to tell the player's story. Even though it's your story and you created it, it still needs to feel like it's their story and they have the agency to influence it (even though they don't). Screenplays and novels are far more passive. With a novel, it felt like I was the player, and people were watching me play the game. Video games need to be designed in the reverse.

ZAM: That's a fantastic answer. I think we're actually out of time now, but thank you very much for shedding a lot of light on your craft and the creation of the Dragon Age universe! I'm sure there will be a lot of players like me who are looking forward the new story of Dragon Age 2 more than anything else.

David: I hope you all enjoy it!