He's not a romance, but he's, you can hang out with him and be your bud and have that same kind of depth. I think friendship is … I actually regret that in Dragon Age 2 we didn't have essentially that kind of bromance with Varric. Mark Darrah: Friendship I think is … I think we've become trapped by that, the word romance. I was going to ask if some of that thinking also applies to friendship as well because obviously it's a type of relationship that people have with the companions that's not necessarily binary. PC Gamer: I read, recently, I think it was something that came out of PAX about diversifying the types of romantic relationship in the game. PC Gamer: Right, so someone graduates from being a quest-giving NPC to being a companion. We typically promote secondary characters between games. We introduced her, but there's just a lot more to be done with that. Isabella between Origins and Dragon Age 2 is a good example of that. The other thing that causes us to bring someone back is someone that we're just simply not done with. It makes him an interesting character to have because he offers a nice counterpoint to a lot of other kinds of characters. That makes him a very attractive character. He's a very good character to have because it's good to have someone in your camp no matter what. Alistair comes back because we can do cameos and have them have an influence on the story.īut additionally, some characters, Varric's a very good character because one of Varric's primary motivations is he's the guy that's got your back. We often don't bring back characters, at least not as followers, if they were previously romance options. You can start to cross off a few characters because of that. How dare you?” I think there's validity to that. “But they're in love with my previous character forever and ever and ever. You're not going to have a romance option come back and certainly not have them be a romance option again because there's a lot of baggage that comes with that. If you've had a character in a previous game that was a romance option typically we won't bring them back because they carry a lot of extra baggage with them. You want a certain amount of balance between the genders and then a certain amount of balance between the romance options. You want a certain degree of balance between the classes. There's a bunch of things that we're trying to do for balance. But also, we look for a certain amount of balance between the character. Some of it's based on just what the writers are excited about writing. Why would Varric make the cut and not somebody else? What is your criteria for determining which characters do come back? Actually, not simply from the dead, but I mean from game to game. Yes, this is an opportunity for us to give a little bit more context and explain what's actually going on. I'm not sure that we've provided enough information as to why and what's happening, what went on there, why that's possible. Leliana is brought back to life even if she dies at the Temple of Sacred Ashes. Mark Darrah: Yes, there will be a little bit of that. PC Gamer: In addition to fixing that stuff, do you have freedom to clarify? I suppose in some cases what fans are looking for is not necessarily for this singing or dancing cut-scene resolution to something that's been hanging, but just something to explain how this happened or how that came together? This lets us go in and finally get those states in just something that's actually correct. That wasn't an intentional retcon on our part. Zevran is a good example where you can kill him in Dragon Age: Origins and then in Dragon Age 2, those flags aren't set properly in the Origins saves, so the game doesn't realize that Zevran's dead and just basically brings him back to life.
In Origins in particular are messy and full of bugs. One of the big reasons for creating the is the save games of the previous two games. Mark Darrah: There's a couple of other things though. Well what if they're dead? We'll let you bring them back to life. We decided, if you want to play awakening we should let you use your warden. There's a couple, the zombie warden was just a stupid decision on our part I'd say. Is that something you've addressed in Inquisition? You mentioned one earlier, the state of the warden, who can be dead, and obviously something that has come up with fans quite a bit, in Awakening-the zombie warden scenario.