The majority of people who make games for a living naturally have a♒ love for the craft - why would you pour your heart and soul into art if it was something you didn’t really care about?
Still, you don’t just wake up one day and say, “Hello, I would like to make a video game please.” You need to be motivated by something, inspired to put your own mark on a medium you love. For a lot of people in the games industry, that “something” was 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dragon Age.
“I played Dragon Age: Origins for the first time after leaving my first college after♋ three semesters,” Sony Santa Monica producer Shayna Moon tells me. “I was adrift and didn’t feel like I knew myself, and a lot of things I cared about all of a sudden didn’t matter anymore.”
After experiencing Origins, Moon was inspired to study digital animation and game design at university. They soon discovered they were more interested in production and started “inhaling developer diaries and stories about the games [they] love𝓰d and how they came together.” Unfortunately,𝓀 they were laid off with half of their QA team after just six months in the industry - but that wasn’t the end.
“I was driven by just how good it felt to make games, and how it felt like where I belonged, and what my brain was particularly suited towards,” Moon explains. “I also had a ton of people, friends and family, lifting me up and helping me when I was at my lowest points.” A few years later, they went on to work on a little game called 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:God of War.
co-founder Sara Alfageeh tells me she “came out of the womb with an N64 controller.” Despite growing up with a love for video games, it wasn’t until she played Origins at 14 years old that she started to seriously consider it as a viable career path. “Dragon Age made me realize I love interactive storytelling,” she says. “It also helped me understand my own queer identity at such a formative age and gave me the safe space to navigate that. The only queer people I knew at that young age were Leliana and Zevran. It’s hard to articulate how much confidence BioWare games gave me when it came to that part of me. I’m 🦩creative director a꧟t One More Multiverse, working to give people the tools they need to see themselves in their favorite stories - like Dragon Age did for me.”
Origins was also a crucial reason behind Heidi McDonald joining the industry. After spending a few years away from games due to college and having kids, she became hugely invested in BioWare titles. “The game that changed it all for me was actually Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic because it made me FEEL THINGS, and I was floored, because, wut, a game that gives you feels?” she says. “[It made me] a BioWare fan for life. When Dragon Age: Origins came out, wild horses would not have kept me from that title.” McDonald went back to college at 39 after her youngest child started kindergarten. Here, she was assigned a paper on an༒ aspect of a creative medium she enjoyed - “which, duh, games.
“Right around that same time was that flap on the BioWare forums where a guy calling himself ‘straight white male gamer’ expressed outrage that there were gay relationships in Dragon Age 2, saying, ‘I make up the majority of players, so I'm the one you should be aiming your content at…’” McDonald recalls. “Dave Gaider came down from above to answer this guy and was like, ‘Hey dude, that content is all optional, our games are for everyone, and if you have a problem with that, go buy a different game.’ I wondered how true it was, did players really want that?”
After asking hers🦹elf that question, McDonald started to think about how and why people romance🎃 characters in video games - what do they want to achieve from these relationships? And so, she decided that’s what she would do her paper on: romance in single-player RPGs.
“I embarked on independent ethnographic research to try and find some answers,” she explains. “That paper turned into a journal article, and a conference talk, then more papers and more conference talks all over the world, and a book published in 2017, . I'm now known for having been a person who's been studying romance in games for ten years, and I owe a big part of that to Dragon Age and the conversations surrounding it.”
It’s interesting that McDonald mentions Gaider, because multiple people I spoke to referenced him specifically as a key reason for their joining the games industry. Valheim community manager and game artist Lisa Tveit Kolfjord discovered Dragon Age at 17 years old after seeing tons of Tumblr posts about Dragon Age 2. After looking into it in more detail, she learned that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Inquisition was due to launch that same year - being particularly intrigued by the promise of romance and beating up dragons, s💟he decided to give it a whirl. This changed everything.
“A friend of mine from high school was a few years ༺older than me, and when he graduated he started studying game design at a university in southern Sweden, and it was my plan to do so too,” she explains. “A couple of months after my own graduation, I saw David Gaider mention that he was coming to a game conference here in Sweden, in a small city called Skövde.
“I had never heard of Skövde before, but bought tickets anyway because I really wanted to see his talk and hopefully meet him. He had his talk early in the mo🀅rning, and I saw a couple of people wait outside. Since I was completely alone in a city I didn’t know, I asked if I could join their group. They welcomed me and I found out that they all studied game development at the university of Skövde. After getting to talk to David Gaider, other game developers, and students, I was more inspired than ever. I applied to game animation the next year. I graduated one year ago, and got a job as community manager and game artist at Iron Gate, and I’m so incredibly grateful that I saw that tweet from Gaider, because it’s thanks to that that I am where I am today.”
McDonald also had her own encounter with Gaider at GDC 2013. “I had to try to keep it together while texting my friends from the podium ‘I AM DED, SEND HELP,’” she tells me. “Some of the session feedback later said that I fangirled too much about Dragon Age, but in that particular case, I didn't care. After the talk, I came up to him while he was leaving to show my appreciation, and there was me and this other guy standing there with him, and as I was brand new to the industry and this guy is my narrative hero, I just kind of exploded into fangirl Heidibabble until he nodded all wide-eyed and excused himself and wandered away. I turned to the guy next to me and said, ‘Did I just fuck that up as badly as I think I did?’ The guy just said...OH yeah.
“That was eight years ago, I've calmed down, I'm now a veteran developer and I've always thought that I owe Dave a coffee or something for that, if I ever cross paths with him again. Incidentally, everyone should check out Chorus, the game he's working on now, because it's bananas in the best possible way.”
Speaking of which, Gaider’s partner on Chorus, Elie Young, also has their own Dragon Age story. They bought Origins on a whim because they needed to add an extra game to their cart to qualify for free shipping - seriously, I saw the receipt. Young initially found the world confusing, the combat clunky, and the voiceless protagonist boring - and yet they couldn’t stop playing. Their Warden died a virgin because they had no idea romancing characters was an option, and although they approached Dragon Age 2 with a better understanding of the game, they were “ninja-manced” by Anders and ditched by Isabela. It wasn’t until they experienced Dragon Age: Inquisition’s 💦infamous banter bug - which caused the usually chatty companions to stay utterly silent throughout missions - that the series finally clicked.
“It was this silence that facilitated role-play, particularly when it came to one charming mage,” Young tells me, referencing Dorian Pavus. “The princeling with the velvety voice somehow wormed his way into my heart. I never thought I’d feel so deeply about a clump of pixels, and yet here we are - I even joined Tumblr for him, for God’s sake. Somehow, David Gaider managed to encapsulate the perfect alchemy of a spoiled brat with just enough arrogance to be endearing, and a disarming vulnerability you only get to see in glimpses. I roman☂ced him six times.”
Young went on to organise a Dorian art book for charity featuring almost 40 different artists, and even “roped” Gaider into writing the foreword. “It was a massive success, raising over $20,000 for NCLR’s Born Perfect campaign to end conversion therapy in the United States,” they explain. “Dorian’s personal quest is one of pain and rejection but also of triumph and courage.꧑ I don’t think I can overstate how important this gay Asian character is to me, as someone who can relate to so many of his struggles and demons, and to LGBTQ fans who have found healing and catharsis through his story.”
Years later, Young is now working on Chorus with Gaider as an official co-founder of . The pair originally met at a Games Connect Asia Pacific conference in Melbourneꦓ and quickly realised how many similar passions and interests they shared. “What I had assumed would be a quick hello turned into a three-hour dinner talking about everything from games to movies to music over Belgian beers,” they recall. “I feel extremely privileged to be working with David on Chorus: An Adventure Musical. It gives me a front row seat to the magic he brings when creating a brand new world, bringing life to characters within the constraints of video games. We still use Dragon Age as points of reference every now and then. David has so much wisdom to impart as a specialised narrative designer, and I learn something new every day.
“Dragon Age is the only fandom I have ever participated in, and for which I have written fanfiction. I made an alt fandom🃏 Twitter the day after it was official that I would be wor꧃king with David, because the compartmentalisation is necessary for my sanity. He knows about my extracurricular writing, but is gracious enough to pretend it doesn’t exist.”
Gaider isn’t the only ex-Dragon Age dev to have had an impact on people. Thérèse Lanz, who to this day maintains “Nothing fucks as hard as Dragon Age: Origins,” joined death metal band after BioWare lead artist Shane Hawco moved to Edmonton and left his vocalist position vacant. It was during this time they were inspired to look for a college offering game dev courses. “As soon as things got rolling, it felt like I was born to draw wizards for video games,” she explains. “I’m pretty sure I’ll be in this field in one capacity or another till I retire.” That is unless they fully commit to metal - “There are so many musicians, and specifically metal musicians, in game dev, that I like to joke it's our retirement plan.”
Lanz has since gone on to work at 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:NetherRealm, Ubisoft, and Hololabs, and notes that she has made some of her be🌜st friends at all of these studios by figuring out who in the l𒐪unchroom likes Dragon Age.
“My coworkers and I have ta🧸lked about a certain feeling that some kinds of good art leave you with, that has no name in English and probably a long one in German,” she says. “A great, haunting, mystical awareness of the immensity of the unknown, tinged with equal parts sorrow and dread, and wonder and awe. Dragon Age is the best at conjuring that feeling for me.”
So many people have been inspired by Dragon Age’s iconic writing in similar ways. writer Kris Wise tells me they launched their fiꦬrst game back in October 2018 and are currently working on their third and fourth titles. “I started off just really wanting to try and make something that would replicate the feelings that I’d personally experienced when I romanced Fenris and Isabela,” Wise explains. “I’d played a few otomes and visual novels and fell in love with the genre, and creating something within that space is kind of the perfect gateway into game dev for a writer like myself with hardly any money to actuall🅰y make a game with. I got together with a couple of artist friends and started plotting.
“I really connected with Hawke as a protagonist and the [Dragon Age 2] cast are still some of my favorite characters in fiction. I think that the found family story is something that resonates with a lot of people, and it was also one of the first RPGs where I really felt represented as a queer person in a way that felt natural to the world I was getting lost in. [Inquistion’s] Dorian is beauti❀fully, unapologetically queer, and his story really resonated with me in a huge way. Fenris and Isabela are some of the most interesting characters I think I’ve ever come across in games. They’re imperfect and probably quite easy to dislike, if you consider some elements of their personalities, but in getting to know them you 𒁏uncover so much and it really feels like you’re helping them find themselves a place in a world where they never thought they’d truly fit. In turn it also feels like they do the same for Hawke.”
Speaking of Fenris - whose romance inspired Wise to make an entire game - Lunaris went on to work with Fenris actor Gideon Emery earlier this year. “We hired him to voice the first character I wrote for our very first game, which we recently re-released,” th🌺ey explain. “So that felt like a really weird, amazing full-circle moment. He was also just as nice as I always imagined he would be and an absolute dream to work with. That was definitely a bucket list moment for me.”
Meanwhile, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Elder Scrolls Online social media manager Sarah Hecker tells me Origins was recommended to her after growing up with Nintendo. While she had always dreamed of working in the games industry - she used to draw Pokemon as a kid - Dragon Age was what convinced her that it wasn’t some kind of pipe꧂ dream like wanting to be an astronaut. And so, she applied for some jobs.
“They were all sort of ‘wouldn’t it be nice’ applications I kept peppered in between smaller local (read: realistic) opportunities,” Hecker says. “Eventually I gave up on those because let's face it, applying for jobs is exhausting, getting rejected feels like shit, and I had landed a steady job elsewhere that was paying the bills.” Initially, it didn’t work out, but after gaining some more experience and trying again several years later, it finally happened: Hecker landed a permanent role working on Bethesda’s iconic The Elder Scrolls series.
“That was three years ago, and it’s safe to say I was rig🍷ht: my job is 100x more rewarding when I get to work on something I really enjoy talking about,” she explains. “Working in community management amplifies that even more because so much of my responsibilities include interacting with players who are just as excited about games as I am.” Hecker cites Dragon Age 2 as being particularly important to her career - it’s her favourite of the three and she w🌳ill, in her words, die on that hill.
“Hawke is probably one of my favorite protagonists ever, even from games outside of BioWare,” she explains. “I often joke that Hawke is the disastrous bisexual I wish I could be, but really it’s only half a joke.” When I ask about who her favourite character is, she tells me that she just got Hawke’s face tattooed on her arm, so it would probably be lying if she claimed it was anyone else. “I tried to think of who else is up there that isn’t a protagonist but after I wrote out Morrigan♈, Zevran, Varric, Fenris, Anders, Sera, Solas, Dorian... You get the point.”
Dragon Age goes beyond just being people’s original inspiration, though. It has a kind of endurance that precious few o൩ther games are capable of matching. It is inclusive and thoughtful and teeming with opportunities that so many other modern titles don’t even consider entertaining. And, just like it once motivated these eight developers to work towards jobs in the games industry, it continues to inspire th🃏em to push boundaries today.
“I absolutely continue to be influenced by Dragon Age today,” Alfageeh tel🍬ls me. “I know how a🍌mazing it is to fall so deep into a story, and I want to give that feeling to as many other people as possible.
“It is also because I love the fantasy genre, I know I have to change where we pull our inspiration [from]. I want to give a platform to other creators who pull inspiration outside of Europe, embrace fantasy that pulls roots from other cultures and traditions. As mucꦅh as I lov൲e DAO, I’ve experienced fantasy stories that include Arab Muslims like myself only in the past few years, as an adult. I had no idea how much I could enjoy a story like that, where someone like me was explicitly included, acknowledged, and weaved into the world.”
McDonald echoes these sentiments of inclusion, noting that Dragon Age has always been a series that seeks to represent as many people as possible. “The world is bleak, but there are always people in it who still have hope… and that's inspiring for real life,” she explains. “Also, their inclusive approach is more reflective of the actual audience for games, and letting people see themselves portrayed in games, or letting them safely experiment with identity? These things are invaluable.
“Recently I said in a job interview that I believed the audience for Dragon Age is the exact opposite of the audience for Call of Duty. This series is my favorite ever, and was so formative to me in m🅘y career that I will always be grate🐟ful to those devs for the gift of it.”
Moon also speaks to this idea, demonstrating that Dragon Age is its own entity even among BioWare’s proprietary re🧸pertoire. “The draw of Dragon Age and Mass Effect are the characters, but I think what Dragon Age has that makes it unique is its emphasis on nations, institutions, and beliefs, and how all of those influence the characters you travel with,” they explain. “Dragon Age has also been the series that’s consistently allowed for more queer options, especially Dragon Age 2. You can feel Dragon Age’s influence across games, it’s very difficult to tꦑalk about romance in games without mentioning BioWare and the characters they’ve created.”
Still, even good representation is imperfect. When I ask Moon about how BioWare could improve even further on its formula for Dragon Age 4, it’s clear that thꦗere is always a possibility to do more.
“I would like to see Dragon Age as a series take a stand about the marginalized peoples it depicts, and to stop trying to ‘both sides’ the issues within the world,” Moon says. “I have a big problem with the way that Inquisition🦹 portrayed elf society - the elves in Dragon Age draw heavily on several marginalized cultures, and in Inquisition there’s a lot in the elf lore that comes up that almost seems to be trying to justify why the elves deserved to lose their kingdoms and lands. It just didn’t sit right with me.”
While it can definitely lean further into its identity as a progressive series, however, what’s there already is still special. “If you love characters and worlds with cool lore to discover, Dragon Age is for you,” Moon says. “If you like a combat system you can min/max and lots of systems that work with each other, Dragon Age is for you. You can have any combination of these two things and have a great time. Alternatively, sometimes I introduce it to people as ‘the gay dragon game✅.’”
Clearly, Dragon Age has had a tangible impact on people all over the world. It might not have the same kind of ubiquity or star power as its scᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚi-fi sibling, but one thing is for sure: Dragon Age ꦑhas changed games as we know them, and has played a quintessential role in pushing for a better, brighter, and more inclusive industry filled with people who were inspired by it - in turn, these talented developers can now tell their own stories and inspire the next generation to come.
