Making video games with as many twisting narrative arcs as found within BioWare’s Dragon Age or Mass Effect franchises can take a lot of time. The developer commonly spends years working on each individual entry of these popular series.

Before almost any other work on a game like Dragon Age can begin, however, BioWare must first plot out what will happen in any given title considering how story-driven their games tend to be. With this in mind, it’s not surprising to understand why the idea behind a Dragon Age game is actually loosely written years before a project ever becomes known to the public.

Speaking more about the processes involved in writing each game, Dragon Age creative director Mike Laidlaw revealed that the development team always keeps future projects in mind. As such, Laidlaw confirmed that they do have a rough plan for what will happen in the next two installments of the Dragon Age franchise.

While BioWare might flesh out parts of a game’s story ahead of time, the developer doesn’t look further into the future than the next few entries. The creative team won’t bother figuring out what is going to happen beyond that. For example, the Dragon Age director admitted that even he doesn’t know how the series will eventually end since they haven’t planned the story out that far in advance.

Locations and companions are likely one of many parts of Dragon Age titles that are planned out. [Image by BioWare]

Just because a rough course is plotted for a few Dragon Age projects doesn’t mean that anything is set in stone. Laidlaw emphasized that the preliminary plans for upcoming titles are always subject to change. Considering how much time passes between each Dragon Age release, a new installment generally launches several years after its plot was first conceived.

The series’ creative director explained that a Dragon Age game could end up being very different since a project can evolve over the course of the decade that it takes to make. This is just one of the reasons that the developer likely doesn’t talk about upcoming installments until they are close to release.

Regardless of what direction BioWare takes, the series will likely always involve dragons as the name suggests. [Image by BioWare]

Also thinking ahead to the series’ future, Dragon Age producer Mark Darrah recently spoke about the possibility of expanding the Dragon Age Keep app so that fans can better customize their unique world states based on in-game decisions. As the Inquisitr previously reported, Darrah revealed that he has thought about adding a character creator to the Keep website that would let players upload their custom heroes from Dragon Age: Inquisition and earlier games, but the feature is not officially planned at this time.

[Featured Image by BioWare]