In a recent interview with MrMattyPlays, former BioWare producer Mark Darrah talked about how player expectations for Dragon Age 2 as a full sequel to Dragon Age: Origins may have damaged the more experimental RPG’s reception at launch.
“In terms of the project I was most proud of, in a lot of ways I would say that’s probably Dragon Age 2,” Darrah said in the interview. “Not because it’s the best game I’ve ever done, but because it was done under such tight constraints, and I’m really proud of what we were able to do in the time we had.”
MrMattyPlays followed up by asking Darrah to expand on the mixed (but increasingly more positive) legacy of Dragon Age 2. “I do think that a lot of the problem with Dragon Age 2’s reception at launch is: We didn’t adequately prepare people for the change,” said Darrah. “That’s one of the reasons I feel like it’s been able to repair its reputation over time.
“When people come and look at it five, 10, 14 years later, they’re able to say, ‘Ok, I’m going to look at it with fresh eyes and let it stand on its own.’ It’s just when it came up and we called it ‘Dragon Age 2,’ and we said ‘Compare this directly to Dragon Age: Origins,’ and then people look at it and they’re like, ‘Well this sure isn’t Dragon Age: Origins 2,’ which it isn’t. But we didn’t do a good job of preparing people for that fact.”
Dragon Age 2 had an infamously clipped development time: No more than 16 months, which is blistering compared to the long gestation of Origins and three-plus year triple-A minimum of today.
This resulted in DA2’s extensive reuse of environments—you’ll fight evil cultists in the same warehouse at the end of the game that you beat up gangsters in at the start of DA2—and copy-paste, wave-based fights that underserved DA2’s actually quite strong character building and real time with pause combat.
But Darrah got at one of my favorite things about Dragon Age 2 here: It felt more like a Dragon Age side story, three seasons of a TV show set in Thedas, than another save the world epic quest like Origins or the later Inquisition and Veilguard.
You get to see the same places and cast of characters change over the course of 10 in-game years, and despite the limited real estate, Kirkwall remains a striking and believable videogame city, while DA2’s cast is one of the best BioWare has ever done.
For a studio whose main plots were almost always less interesting than the side stories and characters, making a game that was all side story and characters was a masterstroke. It makes me once again pine for the canceled Joplin, the codenamed first version of “Dragon Age 4” that would have focused on urban heists in the Tevinter Imperium.
Instead, Dragon Age: Inquisition chased after “Dragon Age: Origins 2,” while Veilguard ultimately tried for “Dragon Age: Inquisition 2,” with neither game quite measuring up. So many globetrotting, world-saving adventures spread the once-enticing world of Thedas too thin, killing the mystery and sense of scope it had with the keyhole views of Origins and DA2.
Elsewhere in the interview, Darrah talked about how Dragon Age wasn’t even planned to be a full series at its inception, as well as how Veilguard’s insane development cycle left it effectively “four games stitched together.”
