Dragon Age 2 - Interview with David Gaider @ Fantasy Magazine

Fantasy Magazine's Matt London talked with David Gaider. Lead Writer  and Heather Rabitech, Associate Producer.   They talk about how they got into the game indsutry, how they start writing their games, what their duties are, cinematic design in games, and much much more.

First a rather telling quote from Gaider about how the framed story in DA2 came to be:

Much has been made of the framed story in Dragon Age II. What was the inspiration for this addition, and how does it affect the experience of the game?

David Gaider: The framed narrative was Mike’s idea, and the origin of it came from a desire to tell a story over a larger scope of time. In the past, all our stories began at point x and you played in a linear fashion through to the end. Having a larger time period to play with allowed us to introduce long-term consequences to the player’s actions in mid-game rather than at the end, and also have the concept of the “unreliable narrator”—such as in The Usual Suspects where you’re not certain by the end of the tale whether the narrator was telling the truth.

Heather then explained her duties as Associate Producer in relation to DA2

Heather, as Associate Producer, tell us about your specific duties on the game.

Heather Rabitach: As an associate producer, I play a key role in setting up the initial game plan. We have to ask a lot of questions like: How much time do we have? How many people do we have? How long does it take to do certain game-wide passes? Who is affected if we move these dates? It’s a lot of communication and collaboration with the project leads at the beginning because we are all so interdependent on other teams. You need to be able to maintain order within chaos and think on your feet as the schedule ebbs and flows. Being slightly OCD doesn’t hurt either.

And, finally, a quote about Gaider's hard day

Tell us about something you wrote for a game that you absolutely loved, but for whatever reasons were unable to implement in the final game.

David Gaider: When I wrote Knights of the Old Republic, there was an ending written for the female Jedi player who got to the end both romancing Carth Onasi and having fallen to the Dark Side. I thought it was fantastic—the possibility of redemption combined with a bittersweet sacrifice. But we couldn’t include it, for technical reasons. It’s always hard when you have to cut something you love. That was a hard day.

Thanks to fightright2 in this thread in the Bioware DA2 forums for finding this.