Dragon Age News Thread

David Gaider @davidgaider
Yep - Dragon Age originally had zero dragons. It was actually a thing.


David Gaider @davidgaider
If you read the article, you'll see brief mention of how "Chronicles" got its final name -- despite the lack of dragons in the actual setting. It's a fun story. Strap yourselves in.

James Ohlen decided one fateful day it was time to begin The Renaming - which I'd dreaded for some time, because naming anything in games is painful. This time, however, he had a plan: "All successful fantasy IP's consist of two words: Star Wars, Star Trek, Dragonlance, etc."

So James asked the team to send him words. Words that positively SHIMMERED with fantasy-ness. And he got them. A lot. He then had someone pair them up in a long, long list... which he then went through and crossed off any pair that made no sense. This left about, oh, a hundred.

He sent this list out, asking everyone to pick their five favorite titles and their five LEAST favorite titles. And he went through a process of calculating which ones titles were best (and least hated?). We did this three times, as the results the first two times were... bad.

Meanwhile, I was grinding my teeth, as this felt like the most drawn out and unintuitive process one could possibly imagine. I told James one day, "We could grab a random person off the street and they could give us a name just as good as any of these!" But he was determined.

I forget what he changed about the process on the third try, but it gave some results: five titles. The first two were crossed off after a quick google search, but the last - "Age of Dragons" - seemed fine. Sort of.

See, there was a game called "Age of Empires" which was due to come out soon, back then. Hilariously, DAO eventually came out YEARS later anyhow, but there was worry people might confuse the two games if they released close together. So, ta da! "Dragon Age" it was!

James was proud it finally worked. Me, I went to his office and was, like, "James. James. What... how did we end up with this name? THERE ARE NO DRAGONS IN THE GAME."

But it stuck. Like all names, eventually it grew to fit and nobody could imagine what else it might have been.