The former lead writer for the Dragon Age series, David Gaider, has been giving fresh insight into a bunch of the RPG series’ beloved characters, and has admitted that he “probably shouldn’t have” written the one new follower he did for Dragon Age 2, even though “it’ll make his fans mad” to say it.
Sorry, Fenris fans, but it’s your favorite elven warrior. In a new thread on Bluesky, Gaider explains that when creating the RPG series’ followers, he would let the other writers pick who they wanted to write first. However, Fenris didn’t seem particularly popular. “In this instance, it meant I was left with the angry elven warrior character who nobody else appeared to want,” he says. “It should have been my first clue that something was up. The second was how the artists had zero clue what to do with him.”
This in itself doesn’t mean that Fenris was “a bad character,” but Gaider describes him as “an idea that probably deserved some re-examining.” Unfortunately, given the rush to make the game in the first place (he says that the team had “just over a year and a half”), “there wasn’t time for any re-examining even if it’d occurred to me.” He speculates that had this happened, “maybe I’d have re-booted him as a templar. Someone pro-templar rather than anti-mage, who could give a personal hook into Meredith and give the templars some badly-needed humanity.”
Alas, this wasn’t to be, and he admits that he “struggled, at first” writing the character, and felt that Fenris being a guy who “hates everything, all the time” had “felt very one-note” to him. However, Gaider ended up focusing on Fenris’s trauma, noting that “I dipped into a more personal part of myself than I’d ever done before.
“It gave me the center of his story I was missing, but wow was it uncomfortable. In a good way, maybe. I likely wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t been so desperate. In a way, I think DA2 had some of our best writing *because* of the timeline. It was raw, with little time to sand down the interesting parts.”
All in all, Gaider concludes that “Fenris turned out better than he had any right to, considering the rocky start. He had a lot of soul, a vulnerability forged by pain that struck a chord with a lot of players, and I’m glad.” In the end, the one real regret the lead writer shares is having Fenrir “live in a corpse-filled mansion that would never update.” With all that said, he adds that we’ll probably “never see Fenris in a future DA” since his lyrium tattoos require an “expensive” custom body. However, at least he “lives on” since Gaider’s fourth Dragon Age novel – which would have killed the elven warrior – ended up being canceled.
With Dragon Age: The Veilguard out now, be sure to check out our Dragon Age: The Veilguard review to find out why it’s one of this year’s best RPGs.