When you hear the term “Stone Age,” what springs to mind? The first thing I think about is a weird deer kidnapping Josh Homme, although the next image I see is of lads knocking about with little tools made out of stone - it’s the Stone Age, innit.
While rocks and boulders did play a role in defining this era, however, it is also still just that: an era. When Dragon Age was originally pitched, it was envisioned as the age of dragons (obviously), although said age had supposedly already transpired. Over a year into development, Dragon Age still didn’t have a single fire-breathing lizard to justify its namesake.
“Early on, Dragon Age didn't have a name,” Dragon Age: Origins lead environmental artist Ian Stubbington tells me. “There were some ideas but nothing concrete, so it was decided that one of the coders would make a quick random name generator. They knocked something together and added a whole bunch of fantasy words to the list. It was fired up and produced some names and the one that got the final vote by the team at the time was of course 'Dragon Age.' David Gaider (lead writer) responded [with] something like, 'Hmm, we better add some dragons to the story then…’”
“Oh, that,” Gaider says. “Yes, originally Dragon Age was a fantasy world that was kind of… past its ‘high fantasy’ stage. Magic was on the decline and dragons had been hunted to extinction. The big story in Dragon Age: Origins was not only that the darkspawn were returning but that this was the unexpected return of a fantastical past the setting had thought it’d left behind.”
Gaider explains that prior to becoming officially known as Dragon Age, Origins was temporarily called “Chronicles,” although nobody on the team really liked that. Meanwhile, Origins writer Jay Turner tells me that although Dragon Age originally “felt pretty generic,” people gradually got used to it until the game couldn’t possibly have been known as anything else. Again, the main issue wasn’t the name - it was that the game had zero dragons.
“That, of course, prompted me to go to James Ohlen and complain,” Gaider explains. “Why would you call it ‘Dragon Age’ when the actual age of dragons was centuries previous? You didn’t even see or fight a dragon!
“James said ‘good point’… but what he then directed me to do was to change the story and setting to accommodate the new title. So suddenly we had dragons returning to the world, the Archdemon changed into a dragon, and - best of all - I created a calendar system with named ‘ages’ so that the current age could be, you guessed it, the Dragon Age. All to make the name of the game look very deliberate and tied into the rest, though in this case it was very much the tail wagging the dog. I probably sound like I was unhappy about that - I was, for a while, but, in the end, I got used to the idea. Dragons were also damn fun to fight.”
It’s worth drawing attention to the fact that the Archdemon had to be changed into a dragon in order to accommodate the new name. After discussing its original lack of dragons, Origins managing editor Daniel Erickson describes what the darkspawn’s Big Bad originally looked like.
“The Archdemon was this big, freaky, anime-villain sort of thing that felt like Lovecraft does Final Fantasy,” Erickson says. “First David tried to say the time period was the ‘Dragon Age’ - kinda like year of the Ox - but nobody was buying it… so insert dragons.”
Despite the Archdemon’s significance to Origins, even this change occurred surprisingly late into development. According to Origins creative director Dan Tudge, “the hypocrisy was not lost” on the devs working on a dragonless Dragon Age - everyone was working hard in order to organically introduce dragons to this dark fantasy setting. While it’s easy for anyone who has played Origins to think of Flemeth and the dragon who guards the temple at Haven as obvious examples of dragons in the game, even the unnamed, standard drakes and dragonlings came about long after the original vision for the game had been articulated.
“Dragon Age was more a reference to the Iron Age or the Bronze Age,” Tudge explains. “In naming it Dragon Age, I guess I could just skip by everybody that they needed dragons - like that insinuated it was full of dragons, right? I think it just kind of got lost on people. So a little farther into the game we started adding you know, the smaller dragons and things like that. And of course the Archdemon. We added that towards the end.”
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the final problem. Sure, the Archdemon’s status as an enormous dragon did a fair amount of heavy lifting in terms of ensuring “Dragon Age” worked as a title, but the Warden still had to kill it somehow. Tudge recalls one weekend late into development where the animators and engineers had ended up in a screaming match over whether or not you could behead a dragon in real time.
“We were in a leads meeting and the animation team had come in on the weekend,” Tudge remembers. “They set this up, they rigged all the bones and everything where you could in real time cut off the dragon's head. The engineers were like, well, we're closing out bugs. We do not have time to hold this up. And they were screaming at each other and it was getting really heated. I yelled at everybody. ‘Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.’ And then I'm like, ‘Do you realise we're all getting paid good money here to argue about whether or not we can cut off a dragon's head?’
“The argument was like, well, what if you're a magic user, you're carrying the staff in real time - you're gonna run up, you're gonna hit it, you're not going to force them to change a weapon. I said we'll make it a cinematic and there'll be a sword in the ground and you'll run towards the sword. No matter what your character is, he's gonna pick that sword up. It can be a rogue, it could be a magic user, and that's how they will cut the dragon’s head off. It'll be a big scene with the head off and blood squirting everywhere. The animators were like, ‘Okay, that'll do,’ and the programmers were like, ‘Yeah, we don't have to do anything.’ Everybody was happy.”
That’s how the Archdemon was properly integrated into the story as the first major dragon in Dragon Age, long after the original concept for this world had been drawn up and undergone various iterations since. It’s weird to think about now - Inquisition alone has ten dragons - but BioWare’s illustrious fantasy RPG could have been drastically different if not for the team striving to reappropriate the setting to suit the name. It probably worked out for the best - I’m not sure BioWare would have “Chronicles 4” in development 12 years later.