GamesRPGDragon AgeDragon Age IIDragon Age 2 lead writer says fan-favorite Fenris “probably deserved some re-examining,” even if he “turned out better than he had any right to” following the RPG’s tight turnaroundWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesRPGDragon AgeDragon Age IIDragon Age 2 lead writer says fan-favorite Fenris “probably deserved some re-examining,” even if he “turned out better than he had any right to” following the RPG’s tight turnaroundWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
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(Image credit: BioWare)
The former lead writer for the Dragon Age series, David Gaider, has been giving fresh insight into a bunch of the RPG series' beloved characters, and has admitted that he “probably shouldn’t have” written the one new follower he did for Dragon Age 2, even though “it’ll make his fans mad” to say it.
Sorry, Fenris fans, but it’s your favorite elven warrior. In anew thread on Bluesky, Gaider explains that when creating the RPG series' followers, he would let the other writers pick who they wanted to write first. However, Fenris didn’t seem particularly popular. “In this instance, it meant I was left with the angry elven warrior character who nobody else appeared to want,” he says. “It should have been my first clue that something was up. The second was how the artists had zero clue what to do with him.”
This in itself doesn’t mean that Fenris was “a bad character,” but Gaider describes him as “an idea that probably deserved some re-examining.” Unfortunately, given the rush to make the game in the first place (he says that the team had “just over a year and a half”), “there wasn’t time for any re-examining even if it’d occurred to me.” He speculates thathadthis happened, “maybe I’d have re-booted him as a templar. Someone pro-templar rather than anti-mage, who could give a personal hook into Meredith and give the templars some badly-needed humanity.”
(Image credit: EA)
Alas, this wasn’t to be, and he admits that he “struggled, at first” writing the character, and felt that Fenris being a guy who “hates everything, all the time” had “felt very one-note” to him. However, Gaider ended up focusing on Fenris’s trauma, noting that “I dipped into a more personal part of myself than I’d ever done before.
“It gave me the center of his story I was missing, but wow was it uncomfortable. In a good way, maybe. I likely wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t been so desperate. In a way, I think DA2 had some of our best writing because of the timeline. It was raw, with little time to sand down the interesting parts.”
WithDragon Age: The Veilguardout now, be sure to check out ourDragon Age: The Veilguard reviewto find out why it’s one of this year’sbest RPGs.
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