Inside BioWare’s Narrative Design Architecture: An interview with veteran writer Sylvia Feketekuty
Hey everyone,
I recently had the incredible opportunity to sit down and chat with Sylvia Feketekuty. As many of you know, she was a major voice on the writing team for Dragon Age: Inquisition (she penned Josephine Montilyet, worked on the Jaws of Hakkon DLC, and wrote the DLC companion banter), alongside her brilliant work on Mass Effect 3 (including Liara in the From Ashes and Citadel DLCs).
Instead of a standard promotional press junket, we spent our time digging into the actual, invisible structural mechanics of AAA narrative design, how writers navigate strict "word budgets," the architecture of branching script logic and how a studio like BioWare physically maps out a narrative under tight technical constraints. We focused heavily on Dragon Age, with a healthy side of Mass Effect design philosophy thrown in.
I wanted to share a few of the sharpest, most technical highlights from our conversation directly with the sub:
Austin Langer (RPGamer): When thinking about RPG dialogue across different eras, how do you approach balancing clarity and relatability with maintaining a distinct tone for the setting?
Sylvia Feketekuty: Writing for Dragon Age was different [than Mass Effect]. Since Mass Effect takes place in our own universe, you know how the laws of physics are supposed to work there. But each Dragon Age game had to reestablish its particular metaphysical framework of magic and spirits, their effects on different cultures, and the politics of dealing with them, on top of introducing new people and places. In my opinion, at least, there was a lot more to explain to players. Especially in the first few hours.
This is probably why, when I came on to Dragon Age: Inquisition, the narrative team already knew they wanted a diplomat character. Josephine helped to ground the big, political forces clashing around you. Whenever she briefed the Inquisitor, I had Josephine approach it like an executive summary. She knows the Inquisitor’s time is valuable. So, in tandem with your other advisors, she always gave players just enough information to make a decision, but never so much as to overwhelm them.
Austin Langer (RPGamer): As player choice systems scale across multiple games, maintaining all those outcomes can become difficult. How do teams decide which past decisions remain meaningful and which ones are quietly deprioritized?
Sylvia Feketekuty: The main concern isn’t just how many words you have to reference past decisions, but how much scope you have to build and test the content’s complexity. Once you have to factor in branching within branching decisions, it can rack up exponentially. Generally, whenever we didn’t feel we had enough resources to do a past choice justice, or it wasn’t easy to work into the new game’s story, we went with lighter references. Or let it lie, so that we didn’t violate anyone’s playthrough.
That isn’t always satisfying for players. I think that’s because some people believe if a choice from one game isn’t referenced in the next, we didn’t actually like that choice. If you’re outside the black box of development, I bet it can feel frustratingly personal. All I can do is promise that I’ve never seen that actually be true. No one who works years on a game likes the idea of a player feeling left behind. We want people to feel their decisions in past games were legit! It’s just almost always a matter of time and budget.
If you want to read our full, deep-dive discussion, the unabridged text interview is live over on RPGamer right here
PS: I have a youtube channel if you like this kind of analysis and nerdy deep dives (I'll be posting more frequently soon).