BioWare once planned to let you import your Grey Warden hero from Origins into Dragon Age: Inquisition
But trying to honour previous choices "a sucker's game".
There's been a question mark over this one for years, but it seems BioWare did once plan to let you import your Hero of Ferelden, your Grey Warden protagonist from Dragon Age: Origins, into Dragon Age: Inquisition. It was only at the last minute that the studio cut the feature and swapped a Grey Warden character called Stroud in their place.
In Inquisition, there's a pivotal mission near the end - Here Lies the Abyss - where you get a chance to meet protagonists from previous games. You meet your Hawke from Dragon Age 2, and then you get the chance to meet one of three Grey Warden characters from Dragon Age: Origins - and it's here the game was supposed to let you meet your Hero of Ferelden. But it didn't - this is where Stroud was swapped in instead.
"Here's the thing about honouring previous game choices from a design perspective: it's a sucker's game," wrote Gaider on Bluesky. "What many fans picture, when you mention it, is divergent *plot* - the story changes path based on those major choices. How exciting!
"But you will never be able to deliver divergent plot."
"You can deliver flavour differences (usually in the form of divergent dialogue), character swaps (character X appears instead of Y), and extra content (such as a side quest) - but plot branching, particularly the critical path?
"It's a question of resources, and there's never enough to go around.
"Here Lies the Abyss in DAI was about as good as it gets," he added, "and even that was a far cry from how I originally pictured it (hello last-minute insert of Stroud when a DAO Warden import got cut)."
Gaider's Bluesky thread came about as an addendum, of sorts, to yesterday's story about the origins of Morrigan's character and the voice actor cast to play her. The primary focus of the addendum concerns Morrigan's child in the game, Kieran, AKA the Old God Baby. He does appear in Inquisition but this was another choice from Dragon Age: Origins that gave Gaider a headache.
Remember, BioWare didn't know there would be a Dragon Age 2 when it was making Dragon Age: Origins, let alone a Dragon Age 3 (Inquisition), so it didn't plan these things in advance. It did a bunch of things in Origins it turns out were incredibly hard to fulfil later on.
The Old God Baby is a big deal... if it happened in your game. The soul of the Archdemon you defeat - a corrupted Old God - is transferred into the baby that you and Morrigan, or Morrigan and another character, conceive on the eve of the final battle. Already, then, there are permutations in who the father could be, so who should canon-Kieran look like?
"It was a decision from *two games ago* that only a small minority (hello telemetry) would even choose," said Gaider. "To the rest, they probably neither knew about it nor cared... so how many resources could you invest? To do what? Set up an even bigger divergence for the NEXT game?"
The solution came when Gaider made the scene more about Morrigan and less about Kieran, a character the players didn't know. "Thus began a feverish three days where I wrote probably the most complicated scene of my career: Morrigan's reckoning with Flemeth in DAI and the fallout after," he said. "Three different versions (OGB Kieran, non-OGB Kieran, and no Kieran), each with branching for other choices (like the Well of Sorrows)."
It was a scene that resonated with Morrigan actor Claudia Black, who'd had a child of her own not long after Dragon Age: Origins had come out. In fact, she would later have her own child play the role of Kieran in the scene. "Claudia was in the booth, gently coaching him through his lines," Gaider said, "and I think that was the first moment I felt I'd done the right thing."
Gaider, incidentally, did not work on Dragon Age: The Veilguard at all - a game that sidesteps a lot of the issues Inquisition faced by letting you customise an Inquisitor during character creation, and then outlining only three of the biggest choices they made. It does not - as previous Dragon Ages did - use the web-based Dragon Age Keep database, which tracked a multitude of decisions from the older games.