Charlotte Reber, "Dragon Age II" (Boss Fight Books, 2026)

Feb 20, 2026

Charlotte Reber, fiction writer and gamer who researched Dragon Age II with its writers, tells a behind-the-scenes account of the game's rushed development. She explores the compressed scope decisions, the choice to make a voiced protagonist and the three-color dialogue, Varric’s unreliable narration, marketing missteps, and cut content that reshaped the final game.

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ANECDOTE

How The Project Began

Charlotte Reber discovered Dragon Age II after initial negative buzz and immediately fell in love with its characters and writing.
Her fascination with Jennifer Hepler's interview about the game's rushed development prompted the Boss Fight Books project.

INSIGHT

Scope By Time, Not Space

The team reframed scope by focusing on time over space and placing the story in one city to fit a one-year development cycle.
This constrained design let writers concentrate on character and dialogue rather than expansive level content.

INSIGHT

One Writer Per Companion

Writers assigned each companion to a single writer to build deep, consistent character voices quickly.
This division of labor reduced back-and-forth and let each writer 'measure twice, cut once.'

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Rushed through development in just a year to capitalize on the runaway success of its predecessor, Dragon Age II's writing team had only a few months to write an entire game before handing it off to voice acting and development. The result was an often ramshackle sequel featuring a smaller world, fewer companions, and repetitive quests—as well as some of the best characters, dialogue, and storytelling Bioware has ever put to screen.

Based on new interviews with DA2 writers David Gaider, Jennifer Hepler, Lukas Kristjanson, as well as editor Karin Weekes, author Charlotte Reber tells the wild behind-the-scenes story of how a team at the top of their game made the best of an impossible assignment to create the series’s first fully voiced protagonist, its charmingly unreliable narrator, and a crew of unforgettable party members to bother, befriend, and romance. From DA2’s inception to its mishandled marketing campaign to its volatile reactions from players, Reber’s book raises a mug of ale to the game that was—and the game that might have been.

Charlotte Reber is a fiction writer and gamer with a fascination for telling stories and playing games in unusual ways. She has a handful of degrees in creative writing and children's literature from Wellesley College and Simmons University, and lives in Vermont with her family, several cats, and a suspiciously low number of dragons.

Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the HNU University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, Germany, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal TITEL kulturmagazin for the game section, and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist.

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