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

(Image credit: EA)

Former BioWare veteran 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 more to do so.

As various people who attended the talk have now shared on Twitter, one piece of advice Laidlaw gives is to design your setting or lore like a TTRPG book. 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 perspective. 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 so on.

couldn't agree with this more. world building / lore docs as provocations & incitations to storytelling, rather than a closing down of possibility. in that spirit, here are a couple of sable worldbuilding bits I wrote for the team, shh don't tell @ShedworksGreg @ShedworksDan https://t.co/a8GTdwGiEM pic.twitter.com/pAMpOTGAAhMarch 21, 2023

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 new action RPG. In fact, his GDC talk is very much about how he's applying what he's learnt to that very same game.

Dragon Age, meanwhile, has continued, with Dragon Age 4 being confirmed as being named Dreadwolf. We know it'll revolve around Solas, though plenty remains a mystery.

Heather can't stop thinking about who we might be in Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. Heck, she could even be thinking about it right this second.