Tool up, gang. We’re mounting a daring raid to find and secure the Dragon Age uber-plot document, a thing which is apparently real and which details the entire series’ meta-narrative, culminating in some kind of explosive denouement that would render any more games in the series impossible.
How do I know this? Because former BioWare dev and Dragon Age lore creator David Gaider told Eurogamer that such a thing is out there. It’s been out there since before Dragon Age: Origins, in fact. “There was, back when we made the world, an overarching plan,” said Gaider.
His approach to worldbuilding was to “seed plots in various parts of the world that could be part of a game, a single game,” but to also layer in “the overall uber-plot, which I didn’t know for certain that we would ever get to but I had an understanding of how it all worked together.”
Of course, Dragon Age turned out to be more than a single game, which meant future writers had to take Gaider’s uber-plot into consideration when putting future entries in the series together. Problem was: Most of it only existed in his head.
“I’d talked about it, I’d hinted at it, but never really spelled out how it all connected.” By the time BioWare got around to making Inquisition, “the writers got a little bit impatient with my memory or lack thereof, so they pinned me down and dragged the uber-plot out of me,” before committing it to a “master lore doc, the secret lore, which we had to hide from most of the team.”
I’m not even much of a Dragon Age fan, and even I would (hypothetically) commit a few at least moderate crimes to get my hands on that thing. Apparently, access to it was highly restricted, with pretty much only other senior writers allowed to take a peek.
Gaider, of course, hasn’t been at BioWare for the better part of a decade at this point, which raises the question as to whether the writers at the studio today are still following his uber-plot. Surprisingly enough, from what Gaider’s seen of The Veilguard, his concepts have “more or less held up” in his absence.
Which at least suggests that Gaider’s original eschatological vision for the end of Dragon Age as a whole is still in there, and could one day form the basis of the plot of a future game (or The Veilguard, for all I know; it’s not like I’ve beaten it). “I always had this dream of where it would all end,” says Gaider, without spoiling what that looks like in his head since “we could still end up there.” He does say it all comes to “the final thing you could do in this world that would break it,” though.
Say no more, Mr Gaider, I know exactly what you mean. Brace yourself for Dragon Age 5: This Time There’s Reapers.