Dragon Age 2 characters explain its recent acclaim, says dev

pcgamesn.com:

Just as news of Dragon Age 4’s full title arrives, a former series director’s deep dive video talks about how the once-maligned Dragon Age 2 “is very fashionable to like now because it’s the first BioWare game to intentionally put the characters first.” Mark Darrah, former BioWare project director on the RPG game, has released a video in his ‘Memories and Lessons’ development series talking in depth about the fantasy game’s rushed development and the achievements he’s most proud of the team for.

“Dragon Age II is a game that is about constraints,” says Darrah in the hour-long video posted to his ‘Old game dev advice’ YouTube channel. Following the closure of BioWare’s acquisition by EA in 2008 just before Dragon Age: Origins shipped, he explains, the publisher was eager to release BioWare’s MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic as a competitor to World of Warcraft. According to Darrah, that game’s pushback out of the 2011 fiscal year left EA “pretty mad at BioWare” and insisting that a game was shipped to “plug the hole” for that financial year.

This led to the decision to rework Dragon Age II’s design, which was originally planned to be similar in scope to what Dragon Age: Inquisition would later become, into a game that could fill those needs. While some work from what was originally a second expansion pack for Origins was rolled into the project, says Darrah, he is uncomfortable with language suggesting the game was “built out of an expansion pack,” because almost no assets or levels had been created beforehand and he feels it minimises the team’s accomplishment of building the game in less than 15 months.

Characters are “BioWare’s secret sauce,” notes Darrah, and they are fast to write and rarely require too many