Dragon Age: Origins writer really wants title to release

4:40 PM on 08.17.2009   |   Brad Nicholson

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Not long ago, retailer listings indicated that Dragon Age: Origins was pushed back by two weeks. The official response didn’t contain the reason. This morning it was revealed that the game experienced this slight delay so BioWare can “finalize” things. Indeed, this is polish business. Origins lead writer David Gaider told me at Gen Con ’09 that the game needed some extra scrubbing.

But that was only my follow-up question. When I mentioned the delay to Gaider, he looked up at the dingy ceiling of the Indianapolis Convention Center and said, “God help me if we don’t get this game out.” He resumed looking at me. “It’s like having this three-year-old baby still inside. The mother is like, ‘oh my God, why am I still carrying this?’”

Gaider has been working on Origins for over six years, so you can understand his faux-frustration. The writing for the core game is finished, though. Now Gaider and the other writers are busy writing for the downloadable content.

“I’ve been working on it for over six years now,” Gaider said. “I mean, at this point, the writers -- we’re off of it right now -- there’s a point where the writing’s done, you’ve got to lick it down so they can do translations. So, we’ve been working on the PRC -- the post-release content. So that’s what we were doing, but, even so, we were working on it for a good six years and we’re just ready for it to go out.

Gaider hopes reviewers will see the title as a labor of love and identify the scope.

“It’ll be in the playing of the game that most people will realize the scope of it and how good it is. I think that when the reviewers finally get a hold of it,” he added. “I think that’s the main thing they’ll realize: exactly what we were working on and how this has been a labor of love, and I think it will come across.”

It’s funny to think of a game being as aggressively marketed as a blood and guts rampage-style experience as a labor of love. But it is. Six years is a long time for anything, no less a man-and-development kit union.