Showrunner Mairighread Scott and EP John Epler talked to io9 about the franchise’s new animated venture on Netflix.
With Netflix’s Dragon Age: Absolution, BioWare’s fantasy-RPG franchise makes a gradual return after having been previously in a bit of franchise limbo since 2015. The series hasn’t completely gone away thanks to comics and some books, but Absolution marks a real sense of change for the series ahead of the release of its fourth installment, Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. Even if that game may be another year or so out, this show comes at a time when more game franchises are being expanded upon with (usually) animated adaptations.
As a franchise, Dragon Age is largely defined by sprawling epics where characters travel across the lands to fight a great evil with a cadre of allies and willing organizations. But Absolution, not unlike 2011’s Dragon Age II, is more of an intimate affair whose central plot revolves around a heist to steal a powerful magical artifact. When io9 recently talked to showrunner Maighread Scott, she revealed that her pitch for the series already had a heist baked in at the start. In her words, it would be “Reservoir Dogs meets Black Hawk Down,” with all the chaos, betrayals, and death that combination implies.
For executive producer Jon Epler, a heist story made perfect sense to do in the world of Dragon Age. “Heists provide an amazing pressure cooker for emotions, and you get a lot of mileage out of seeing people who shouldn’t be together bump against each other,” he said. They’re fun because of the relationships that get formed (or destroyed) during the events of the caper, and Dragon Age has loved to showcase relationships in all their messy glory. Ask anyone who’s played even one game in the series, and you’re likely to find that they feel about a particular character completely differently than how you do.
Epler and Scott were aware of the importance to relationships to Dragon AGe—Scott called them the “second pillar” of the franchise, whether they’re ones that come with player input, or others that form naturally over the course of the story. “Dragon Age is about the people,” continued Epler. “Ultimately, the series is about people, and characters who have an impact. A lot of their impact isn’t just on the people around them, but how those relationships manifest in the larger world, and the different types of relationships you can have.
