Sometimes, it's just a matter of the player. They won't know how much of an effect there is, always. Or there's a follower who says, "I don't like this" -- obviously, if you do that thing, they're not going to appreciate it very much. But sometimes, that's something that nobody else will even know about. The player will have to decide based on the emotional reaction.

We're maybe not always going to get to that point, but sometimes that's all [a choice is] there for. And if you get the player away from a mindset that they need to game it, and instead get them to go for emotional moments, taking a look at how this affects the people that they care about in the game, I think that allows us mature storytelling. I think that's what we're talking about.

Battlestar Galactica is a very different genre, but I think what really impressed upon me as a writer was that this was a character drama that just happened to be science fiction. Obviously Dragon Age is epic fantasy, and there is a horde of evil that is affecting the world, but if the entire story was just you needing to fight that evil, that would not be mature storytelling.​