BioWare knew the deepest secrets of Dragon Age lore 20 years ago, and locked it away in an uber-plot doc
As I write about the secrets hidden in Dragon Age’s mysterious Fade, and as I uncover some of them enjoying Dragon Age: The Veilguard, one query retains rising up in my thoughts.
How a lot did BioWare find out about future occasions when first growing the sequence greater than 20 years in the past? That is a very long time, and again then BioWare did not know there can be a second recreation, which is why Dragon Age: Origins has an elaborate and far-reaching epilogue. Why lay a lot lore-track forward of your self in the event you do not assume you will ever get there?
However look extra intently at Origins and there are massive clues suggesting BioWare did find out about future Dragon Age occasions. There are apparent indicators in the authentic recreation, comparable to establishing recurring themes like Previous Gods and the Blight and Archdemons. However there’s additionally Flemeth, Morrigan’s witchy mom, who’s intimately linked to occasions in the sequence now – extra particularly: intimately linked to Solas. Does her existence imply Solas was recognized about again then too?
There’s just one individual I can assume of to reply this and it’s David Gaider, the authentic creator of Dragon Age’s world and lore. We have talked earlier than, as soon as in a podcast and as soon as for a chunk on the magic of fantasy maps, the place we mentioned the creation of Dragon Age’s world. And far to my shock, after I ask him what he and the BioWare staff knew again then, he says they knew it all.
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“By the time we released Dragon Age: Origins, we were basically sure that it was one and done, but there was, back when we made the world, an overarching plan,” he says. “The way I created the world was to seed plots in various parts of the world that could be part of a game, a single game, and then there was the overall uber-plot, which I didn’t know for certain that we would ever get to but I had an understanding of how it all worked together.
“A lot of that was in my head until we were starting Inquisition and the writers got a little bit impatient with my memory or lack thereof, so they pinned me down and dragged the uber-plot out of me. I’d talked about it, I’d hinted at it, but never really spelled out how it all connected, so they dragged it out of me, we put it into a master lore doc, the secret lore, which we had to hide from most of the team.”
This uber-plot doc was solely viewable on a need-to-know foundation, he says, and solely round 20 individuals on the staff had entry to it – different senior writers largely. And regardless that Gaider left the Dragon Age staff after Inquisition, and then eight years in the past BioWare altogether, which means he did not work on The Veilguard in any respect, he believes – by taking a look at the occasions in the new recreation – his uber-plot lore “has more or less held up”. That is spectacular.
What’s much more spectacular, or thrilling, is that again then he additionally envisaged a possible finish state for the total Dragon Age sequence – a degree at which it would make no sense for the sequence to hold on. “I always had this dream of where it would all end, the very last plot,” he says, “which I won’t say because who knows, we could still end up there. But the idea that this uber-plot was this sort of biggest, finite… That the final thing you could do in this world that would break it was there as a ‘maybe we would get to do that one day’… There was just the idea of certain big, world-shaking things that were seeded in that arc, some of which have already come to pass, like the return of Fen’Harel.”
This is Morrigan in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and she stretches all the manner again to Dragon Age: Origins, and of course to Flemeth, which means she’s concerned in the deepest secrets of the recreation. | Picture credit score: Eurogamer / EA BioWare
You’ve got learn that appropriately: the thought to have Fen’Harel, also referred to as the Dread Wolf, reappear, was seeded all the manner again then, manner earlier than Inquisition – the recreation in which he does truly reappear. However the idea for Solas, as a personality who was Fen’Harel in disguise, was a more recent thought. “That spawned from a conversation I had with Patrick [Weekes] and a number of other writers,” Gaider says, “as an idea of ‘what if you had a villain that spent an entire game where he’s actually in the party and you get to know him?’ Now, the god version and his larger role in the plot, yes that was known, but not that he would be presented as a character named Solas.”
Fen’Harel being recognized about means the different elven gods had been recognized about, which suggests all of that stuff Solas reveals about his godly siblings – that they are not gods in any respect however evil elven mages he locked away behind the Veil – was recognized about again then too. “Oh yeah,” Gaider says. “Everything that Solas tells you [at the end of Inquisition DLC, Trespasser]: it’s all part of that original uber-lore – that was all in our mind.”
However why have a lot lore in the event you’re not sure you will get to ever realise it? Effectively, to create a plausible phantasm. By creating an “excess” of lore, as Gaider describes it, Origins made Thedas really feel like an previous and plausible place. A spot with historical past, slightly than a Western set that was all facade and no substance.
BioWare additionally did one thing canny with the lore it did relay then, too: it shared it via the voices of characters residing in the world, making it inherently fallible. In doing this, Dragon Age veiled its truths behind biases. The church-like organisation of the Chantry proclaims one reality, whereas the elves and dwarves proclaim one other. Sidenote: you possibly can expertise this your self via completely different racial origin tales in Dragon Age: Origins. This fashion, there is no one, goal, irrefutable, reality.
“To get the truth, you kind of have to pick between the lines,” Gaider says. So regardless that elven legends are coming true via the existence of Solas and The Veilguard’s antagonist gods, it doesn’t suggest that is the one and solely reality. There’s reality in what the Chantry teaches and what the dwarves say, he tells me, which ignites my curiosity intensely.
The ending of Dragon Age: Inquisition DLC Tresspasser, in which Solas reveals every part (and units up The Veilguard).Watch on YouTube
BioWare has additionally been tricksy in how it’s rubbed out the lore the additional again in time you go. “In general, the further the history goes back, we always would purposefully obfuscate it more and more,” Gaider says – “make it more biased and more untrue no matter who was talking, just so that the absolute truth was rarely knowable. I like that idea from a world standpoint, that the player always has to wonder and bring their own beliefs to it.”
It leads right into a founding precept of Dragon Age, which is doubt – as a result of with out it, you possibly can’t have religion, a very essential idea in the sequence. It is the place the entire thought of the Chantry’s Maker comes from and with it, the legend about the fabled Golden Metropolis – now the Black Metropolis – at the coronary heart of the Fade. That is the very centre of the lore internet, and, I think about, it’s near the sequence endpoint Gaider imagined way back. All secrets finish there.
Did Gaider know what was in the Black Metropolis when he laid down Origins’ lore? That is the query – and it startles me how casually he solutions this. “Oh, yeah,” he says. “What was in the Black Metropolis: that is the uber-plot. I knew precisely.
“Was it as detailed in the first draft of the world?” he goes on. “No. I had an idea of the early history because that’s where I started making the world. So the things that were true early-early: I knew exactly what the Black City was and the idea of what the elves believed, and what humans believed vis-a-vis the Chantry – that was all settled on really early. Then I expanded the world and the uber-plot bubbled out of that.”
Gaider reveals me the authentic cosmology design doc for Dragon Age: Origins as if to show this – or slightly for the recreation that might turn out to be DAO. The world was referred to as Peldea again then. I am unable to share this with you as a result of I see it by way of a shared display on a video name, and as a result of Gaider would not need me to, largely as a result of the concepts are so previous they’re nearly unrecognisable from what’s in the sequence now. However I can let you know it’s a doc that is simply over a web page in size, and that there is a round diagram at the prime exhibiting the world in the center and the spirit realm ringed round it. And on that doc is reference to the Chantry’s beliefs a couple of God situated in a citadel that may be discovered there.
Gaider says BioWare knew about Fen’Harel (the Dread Wolf) 20 years in the past when it was growing Dragon Age: Origins, and that he’d at some point reappear. | Picture credit score: Eurogamer / EA BioWare
The Fade wasn’t referred to as the Fade again then, both, however as the Dreaming, as a result of it’s the place individuals go after they dream – an concept that lives on nonetheless. And if that sounds acquainted to any followers of The Sandman amongst you, it ought to. “I’d say The Sandman series was probably fairly prominently in my head,” says Gaider. “I liked that amorphous geography that was born from the psyche of collective humanity. I’d say yes, if I was to point at something specifically, that’s probably where the very first inspiration of it took root.”
It is quite a bit to take in, however it reinforces the admiration I’ve for Dragon Age. Simply as I’ve when listening to about the creation of my different favorite fantasy worlds, comparable to A Tune of Ice and Hearth, I start to grasp the magnitude – and the deliberateness – of the plotting that went on.
I ponder if at some point the Dragon Age sequence will finish in the manner Gaider first imagined, albeit barely altered by the many different pairs of arms shepherding it alongside now. What a curious feeling it should be to know, so many years in advance, the place issues may go.
The place that finish is, I do not know, however I do know we’ll take a major step in the direction of it in The Veilguard. In spite of everything, we’re coming into contact with gods who had been there at the recorded starting of it all. “Yeah – we have access to people who can tell us the truth from first-hand experience,” Gaider says, “though once more, it depends upon what the writers did with it. But when they continued the custom of Dragon Age, you by no means know for certain if Solas is telling you every part, or what you are studying is the total reality.
“But yes, some of the big mysteries are being solved. I mean, will they one day definitively tell you about the Maker? Will we crack the big mysteries of the world and just make them answered finally? And does that ruin one of the central precepts that Dragon Age is founded upon? Maybe,” he says.
“Ultimately, that lore, when you make it big and you hint at it and hint at it and hint at it, it becomes a Chekhov’s Gun of sorts. Eventually you got to pony up.”