Bertie is a synonym for Eurogamer. Writes, podcasts, looks after the Supporter Programme. Talks a lot.
Shortly after David Gaider was born, his parents bought a set of 1971 encyclopaedias to freeze-frame the world as it was when he entered it. He still remembers the maps they contained: his first atlas. But there are two moments in Gaider's life when a gift of maps leads to adventure. In the second, he's older, and already working at the job we know him best for. He was a lead writer at BioWare.
But, midway through the journey of life, I wonder: why do maps have such an effect on me, and on us in general? What is it about a map that gives it magical powers to bind us and pull us in? I wanted to know more, and through talking to David Gaider and learning about his creation of the map for Dragon Age, I hoped I might find out.Where better to begin than by asking,"What is a map?" And who better to ask than the curator of antiquarian mapping at the British Library, Tom Harper.
But by those standards, some of the most famous maps I can think of wouldn't exist. Middle-earth would be thrown out, because its geology doesn't make sense - just look at the C-shaped mountains around Mordor! - and the rivers are wrong."It's absolute bollocks, really," Harper says, albeit very fondly, for he loves the book and he redrew that map countless times as a child, growing up, in order to 'put it right'.
"Personally," Harper adds,"it ties to what I was saying about when people see a map of a place they recognise: they get drawn into it. Maps are important to us because they actually tell us about ourselves, and they enable us to reflect upon who we are and where we belong. Maps are about people; places are about people. I really see that dichotomy between people and places with maps as the agent in helping us understand and explore that.
David Gaider's original sketches of the Dragon Age world. Wherever you see a name typed in, it's because it was changed by EA's in-house sensitivity team, which cross-checked place names with real-world names in case there was a clash. The area of Antiva, for example, used to be called Calabria, but Calabria is the name of a region in southern Italy.
Because remember, the team didn't yet know where the game they were making would be set. That's why so much of the continent you see in the sketches is as yet unused in Dragon Age games - the series hasn't needed all of it by this point. Continents are vast, after all, and realising them in 3D for players to explore is a mighty task.
He's not the only mapper to build a world like that - the more I talk to people, the more I discover that proper geography underpins a lot of the fantasy map-makers' works."When I'm making my own maps, everything starts with fault lines, tectonic plates, prime meridians and the equator," says Critical Role mapper Deven Rue. It's a process that helps lessen the overwhelming feeling a blank page can create.
Video game maps also have their restrictions, as they have to reflect, at least broadly, the world players explore, the worlds developers painstakingly create."Cartographers are never one hundred percent free to do whatever they would like with the final artwork," Francesca Baerald says. Perhaps the echoes of these thoughts are what we feel when we look at his maps - perhaps that's what pulls me in. But to do so, a map also needs space, Schley says. Space for us to pour our imaginations into."Leaving that room to breathe is absolutely essential," he tells me. It's also why King says he never names any of the places on his maps, because he wants you to do that. He wants your mind to consciously, or subconsciously, imprint itself upon what it sees.
Nevertheless, when Dragon Age 2 eventually was green-lit, the scope of it, and the focus of it, would completely change. With it, BioWare and EA would push towards a console RPG experience that stopped and started less, and had more action-packed combat. And EA only gave BioWare 18 months to make it, so BioWare decided to make a much smaller, more tightly focused game. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
The world map in Elden Ring - a map you have to collect and piece together. It's gorgeous and functional, and is the first world map in a Souls game. But it's not as reliable as you might think... |But not all games follow today's norms. Andrew Shouldice was spellbound by game manuals and the maps in them as a child, so he tried to recreate the feeling in his game Tunic.
One game he says does this really well is Elden Ring, which is exciting because it's a blockbuster representation of a map that serves both form and function - it looks to me like an elaborate quilt - and yet it toys with conventions by being rather tricksy."It lies to you at least a couple times," Shouldice says. It's smaller than the actual world, he says, and missing one zone entirely at the beginning.
Dragon Age: Inquisition concept art showing the world map and War Table, and giving us an impression of how the game's map would be used. |So Gaider left BioWare in 2016, having worked there for 17 years, most of it spent on Dragon Age. Really, he'd had enough of wizards and demons, and Anthem wasn't the tonic he sought.
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