#he sounds surprisingly young in bw

[transingthoseformers]

Fuck i hadn't remembered Scorponok sounding like that

[felassan]

In this September 2023 episode of The Corner of Story and Game (“a podcast about the stories inside of games, the games that writers play, and the writers that create games”), it’s an interview with David Gaider. he talks about his early days at BioWare, a bit about Dragon Age development (including about an idea they had at one point for a Revelry demon or similar), about Stray Gods, creating a musical RPG, and crafting branching narratives in games in general.

A few quotes and notes are under the cut (due to length.)

Host: “Looking back, if you could give one piece of advice to young David before he started down this road, what would that piece of advice be?” DGaider: “That’s a hard one. […] I worked for BW for 17 years. I think my advice would probably have been, don’t give your loyalty to a company. It probably sounds a little depressing, but I mean, I think I always threw myself into my work as if it was my life, and I think that in the long run that was detrimental. Because, I mean, companies are companies, they put themselves first. You are ultimately expendable. You can give everything to them, be intrinsic to making them successful, but they’re never gonna give you that kind of love back, so. I think that would’ve been good advice to hear. It’s like, they called me ‘The Machine’ [because of how much he wrote so fast]. I did sooo much work to the point that it affected my health. I burned myself out. I had like three different periods of burnout while I was writing and they were each progressively worse than before. I always looked on it at the time as like a personal failure, like oh my god, I can’t write anymore, maybe this isn’t what I’m supposed to do. It stressed me out, it affected my health, I gained weight, you know, it really affected me on a personal level because I attached so much of my personal self-worth to how good I was at this job. […] That was a lesson that was a long time coming.”

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DG: “The thing about Dragon Age, weirdly, was that every time a game went out it always sold better than anyone ever, on the publisher side, than anybody expected it to. We always expected it to be selling worse than Mass Effect for some reason, but it always sold better. [laughs] To my eternal amusement.”

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DG: “I really enjoyed working with the composer and writing the lyrics [for the musical scene in DA:I after Haven is attacked]. So having done that, I had this idea that sort of wormed its way into my head, possibly after watching the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The thing I liked, the musical element of it was diagenic, like it was in the world, it was happening and everybody knew they were singing, it wasn’t just a metaphor for them expressing their feelings, like they knew they were singing and it was weird. And I was like, oh, what if we did something like this, and it’s happening, and we have a dream realm, in the Fade, and what if the characters, like there was some kind of demon, a demon of Revelry or something like that that was making them sing.” The whole team, especially voiceover and localization, were very excited about this idea, but the bosses were like whoa, whoa [as to them it sounded like a lot of work to do], “if we sell 10 million copies, then yes we will do that DLC.” “which was sort of their way of saying no, because there was like, no chance, but we got pretty close, surprisingly.” “But they kind of pooh-pooh’d it, I think the main worry was they thought it wasn’t a very commercial idea. I mean like, I don’t think you understand our audience, but okay.”

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The host asked "What would you say is the best compliment you've ever received on something you've created?" DG said that nothing really hit home as much as a fan's response to his character Dorian in DA:I. he related how this is the character he put most of himself into as a gay man, and how a lot of players were personally affected by Dorian and his story. one one occasion, a player emailed him and expressed that they had been contemplating ending things as they hadn't been able to come out due to their religious family. they were feeling conflicted, and played the game as a form of escape. "Dorian was a revelation" to this person and game them the courage to come out to their brother, stand up to their family and move out. the player told David "I just wanted you to know that your character saved my life."

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internet discourse started mainly around the time that DAII came out. around then it reached its height and they received a lot of hate, which was very concerning and distressing for DG personally. but moments like the one Dorian inspired were the kind of thing that made it worthwhile. "To actually touch someone to that point is like, wow."

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"I never thought back when I started that games could be anything else [than heteronormative]. that's just the way I assumed it would always be. I never considered the possibility of an alternative until Jade Empire. there was a different team, I didn't work on Jade Empire and I still don't know who to this day brought up putting same-sex romances into that game, but here I was working on Dragon Age when I heard that they were doing it and that the company was okay with it. I was shocked. I was like, can we do that? Can we put that into DA? Is that a thing we can do? The idea that I could also tell stories that took more personally from my own life, that was news, and powerful." it was a revelation for players and for the people making the game.

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[source and link to complete interview] <- pls note there's quite a bit more discussed in the interview than what is noted in this post.