Dragon Age 2 developers look back on the game during its 10th anniversary
Dragon Age 2 hit its 10th anniversary yesterday. BioWare’s sequel to Dragon Age: Origins, the game is set in the city of Kirkwall and follows the protagonist Hawke as they climb their way to legendary status. Alongside them they have a group of companions, who all have their own reason for being in the city, too.
On release, the game was generally well-received by critics, but there were some unforgivable elements to the game for some players. The repetitive environments and the lack of an open-world outside of the city felt suffocating. However, time has treated the game with kindness and while Dragon Age 2 may seem like the problem child in comparison to Origins and Dragon Age: Inquisition, it is still well-loved.
So it was a very nice surprise to see that some Dragon Age 2 developers were also taking the time to celebrate the anniversary by reflecting on the development of the game, as well as its cancelled expansion.
Mary Kirby, a writer for BioWare for 15 years now, celebrated the Dragon Age 2 anniversary by raising a glass for a plot in the expansion that she never got to write for.
“Wow, it’s the tenth anniversary of DA2’s launch? I don’t have an impossibly-broken flowchart for this one. But I will celebrate by raising a glass for the Pirates-versus-Qunari-versus-Zombie-plague plot I never got to write for the expansion.” She tweeted.
When further questioned by our very own deputy editor, Aimee Hart, Kirby revealed a little more about what the plot would have contained. Isabela fans, this is for you.
“I mean, its primary feature was going to be giving Isabela an EXTREMELY fancy hat. Also, I guess a fleet of some kind.”
We only know a few things about the Dragon Age 2 expansion. It was originally assumed to be cancelled by Dragon Age 2′s poor reception, but that is a false narrative that the studio’s ex-creative director Mike Laidlaw laid to rest. It was actually because BioWare “were already in the process of moving Dragon Age to EA DICE’s Frostbite engine” and as he explains to Kotaku, to work on both games would have made them both suffer in quality.
We now know that there was also going to be a focus on a plague, some pirate shenanigans and even more Qunari in the expansion. But the information doesn’t stop there. Alongside Kirby, Mark Darrah – who recently departed BioWare last year – tweeted about his own experience with the original game.
Dragon Age: Exodus was what BioWare had originally wanted to call the game, but due to EA wanting the game to be recognizable and somehow linked to Origins, the 2 was eventually used. It’s a shame, but fret not, there is a mod out there that makes the title change that Darrah wished they had stuck with. There really is a mod for everything!
We hope that some of the ideas mentioned in the developer’s tweets will make their way into Dragon Age 4, because come on, what could be cooler than a pirate vs Qunari vs zombie plague fight, topped with Isabela in a fancy hat? Not much!
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