Dragon Age 2 lead writer says fan-favorite Fenris “probably deserved some re-examining,” even if he “turned out better than he had any right to” following the RPG’s tight turnaround

The former lead writer for the Dragon Age series, David Gaider, has been giving fresh insight into a bunch of the RPG series’ beloved characters, and has admitted that he “probably shouldn’t have” written the one new follower he did for Dragon Age 2, even though “it’ll make his fans mad” to say it. 

Sorry, Fenris fans, but it’s your favorite elven warrior. In a new thread on Bluesky, Gaider explains that when creating the RPG series’ followers, he would let the other writers pick who they wanted to write first. However, Fenris didn’t seem particularly popular. “In this instance, it meant I was left with the angry elven warrior character who nobody else appeared to want,” he says. “It should have been my first clue that something was up. The second was how the artists had zero clue what to do with him.”

This in itself doesn’t mean that Fenris was “a bad character,” but Gaider describes him as “an idea that probably deserved some re-examining.” Unfortunately, given the rush to make the game in the first place (he says that the team had “just over a year and a half”), “there wasn’t time for any re-examining even if it’d occurred to me.” He speculates that had this happened, “maybe I’d have re-booted him as a templar. Someone pro-templar rather than anti-mage, who could give a personal hook into Meredith and give the templars some badly-needed humanity.” 

Alas, this wasn’t to be, and he admits that he “struggled, at first” writing the character, and felt that Fenris being a guy who “hates everything, all the time” had “felt very one-note” to him. However, Gaider ended up focusing on Fenris’s trauma, noting that “I dipped into a more personal part of myself than I’d ever done before.