Over on Tiktok, Mark Darrah was asked, “If you could go back in time what would you remove from each of the Dragon Age games and what would you add?”
Like everyone who ever installed the Skip the Fade mod for Dragon Age: Origins, Darrah thinks the Lost in Dreams quest needs a snip. “I would be tempted to cut or dramatically reduce the dream sequence part from the Mage Tower,” he said. “It’s not very good content. It’s kind of filler. It was definitely done pretty fast in the end.”
As for what he’d add to the original, Darrah suggested the planned human origin where you’d get to play one of the avvar in the Korcari Wilds. “I would like to have another human origin,” he said, “but wow, what an expensive add.”
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For Dragon Age 2, Darrah would remove one of the things I found frustrating about it—no matter whether you side with the templars or the mages, you’re forced to fight both at the end. Even if you side with Orsino and the Circle of Magi he wigs out from blood magic, proving Meredith and the templars right in believing the mages are “barely tethered nuclear bombs” who do deserve “to be treated as non-humans.”
Darrah’s first suggestion for something to add to Dragon Age 2 is “probably just a couple of more levels to use,” and yeah, a little more variety in locations would certainly help. He’d also like to have less gold available in the main questline during act two, as the idea was to encourage sidequesting to raise money for the expedition. As it stands, “If you just do the crit path, the crith path gives you enough gold to go on the expedition so it kind of doesn’t work. I don’t know where I’d make this cut, but I’d be tempted to cut one of those crit-path missions just to get that back.”
When I replayed Dragon Age: Inquisition in advance of The Veilguard, the open-world bloat hit me as a much bigger issue than it did on my first playthrough. Darrah suggests snipping parts of it, saying, “I’d probably cut Hissing Wastes maybe or one of the big levels because it’s too big. And the other thing I would change would be to dramatically reduce the amount of Power that you need to go on the crit-path missions. That’s there for not-super-great reasons, and I think you could cut it by 40 to 60% and the game would just be paced better.”
Finally, “Veilguard, the thing that I would add is the Keep. I told them to. It wouldn’t take ‘that much’. I mean, it would.” As for what he’d remove from Veilguard, he says, “I don’t have a good answer to that one.” I’m sure the internet has plenty of suggestions, but as someone who came around on Veilguard by the time I reached its excellent suicide mission ending, I think it’s fine the way it is.