Dragon Age without dragons - what could a game from Bioware look like?

TheGamer recently interviewed Lead Environment Artist Ian Stubbington for Dragon Age. The latter said that Dragon Age: Origins was not originally conceived as a game about dragons. In the direction of such a fantasy, the developers decided to dodge after the name generator gave them "Dragon Age". Consequently, the entire development process was determined by ordinary chance.

Early on, the game was in development with no name. The programmers decided to experiment and added some fantasy words to the generator and they got what they did. Many developers liked the name Dragon Age and in this regard, it was decided to develop a game in the setting of a mythical medieval fantasy with dragons. This decision was primarily influenced by the game's chief scriptwriter David Gaider.

David talked about how, at the very beginning, the world of Dragon Age: Origins was in a stage in which high fantasy was left behind. At the beginning of the game, magic disappeared from the world of Dragon Age, and all dragons were exterminated. The players had to fight with the new appearance of the creatures of darkness and all supernatural creatures, which by the beginning of the game should have been considered extinct.

With the approval of the name of the game, the developers significantly changed the design of the Archdemon. In the original idea, he was also supposed to appear in the game, but he looked completely different. According to the developers, the Archdemon was supposed to look like "a huge scary anime villain, as if from Final Fantasy, which Lovecraft invented." After significant changes, the main villain of the game acquired the appearance of a dragon and thus began to correspond to the direction of the game and its name.

Dragon Age: Origins was released on PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and macOS in 2009. The developers positioned it as the spiritual successor to the Baldur's Gate series, which in turn received good reviews. Dragon Age: Origins tells the story of the fictional kingdom of Ferelden, in which the player chooses one of six provided storyline backstories and goes through the path of becoming the Gray Guardian, an extinct elite squad to fight the creatures of darkness. Players will be charged with the task of assembling an army, reconciling warring clans, stopping the civil war and fighting against the Archdemon.

The game has been in development for over six years and as a result has received rave reviews from critics and players, becoming one of the iconic representatives of the RPG genre. A year after the release, the game received an add-on, after 2 years it acquired a sequel, which did not please the players, and in 2014 the last part of the Dragon Age: Inquisiton game was released so far. As for the fourth part of the saga about the world with dragons, the famous insider Jeff Grubb talked about the likely release of Dragon Age 4 in 2023. If the title comes out, it will visit gaming platforms such as PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.