Former Dragon Age lead explains how writing lore books led him to design settings like a tabletop RPG book

Dragon Age Inquisition
(Image credit: EA)

Former BioWare vet🥃eran Mike Laidlaw has popped up at GDC to give a talk on building a new intellectual property, leaning on his experience creating Dragon Age games and mor♚e to do so.

As various people who attended the talk haveဣ now shared on Twitter, one piece of advice Laidlaw gives is to design your setting or lore like a TTRPG boo𓃲k. Simply put, it's entertaining, easy to learn from, and handy for sharing with others, online or offline. 

Laidlaw goes on to explain that working on Dragon Age lore books helped shape that per🎃spective. Using a wiki over a lore bible is a pain as they're hard to share externally, time-consuming to create, redundant on release, and s⛄o on.

The talk has yet to grace GDC's official YouTube channel, though plenty of those who attended are waxing lyrical. Possibility Space game director Liz England kicked things off by sharing a glimpse of what 🌟was said alongside a slide, leading game writer and narrative designer Meg Jayanth to share some worldbuilding titbits from Sable that are in tune with Laidlaw's thoughts.

Laidlaw spent 15 years at BioWare, with helming the Dragon Age series being a highlight. He left in 2017, and these days holds the role of chief creative officer at Yellow Brick Games following a stint at Assassin's Creed Odyssey studio Ubisoft Quebec. He is currently cooking up a 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new action RPG. In fact, his GDC talk is very much about how he's applying what he's lea𓄧rnt to that very same game.

Dragon Age, meanwhile, has continued, with 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dragon Age 4 being confir🌜med as being named Dreadwolf. We know it'll revolve around Solas, though plenty remains a mystery.

Heather can't stop thinking about 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:who we might be in Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. Heck, she could even be thinking about it right this second.

Iain Harris
News Editor, Games

I joined GamesRadar+ in May 2022 following stints at PCGamesN and PocketGamer.Biz, with some freelance for Kotaku UK, RockPape🐟rShotgun, and VG24/7 thrown in for good measure. When I'm not running the news team on the games side, you'll find me putting News Ed𝕴itor duties to one side to play the hottest JRPG of 20 years ago or pillaging the depths of Final Fantasy 14 for a swanky new cloak – the more colourful, the better.