The Dragon Age continent Thedas is actually a curious abbreviation


The setting of the Dragon Age-Games is a continent called Thedas, pretty much every fan should know that. At first glance, nothing seems unusual about the name, at least as long as you don’t consider what it stands for. The word Thedas is simply an acronym for “The Dragon Agive Setting”.

Actually, the name was only intended as a temporary placeholder. In a Twitter thread, David Gaider, who was lead writer at Dragon Age: Origins at the time, tells how the name ended up in the game.

” Nothing else sounded right ”: This is how Thedas came about

On Twitter, Gaider took the time to tell how the strange name came about and why it ultimately prevailed. The acronym originally came from the BioWare forum, where fans gave the as yet nameless setting of Origins a provisional title.

The development team themselves could not agree on a name at the time of development. As Gaider reports, the then Creative Director James Ohlen had a suggested name, but Gaider didn’t like it at all. So it was agreed to use a temporary name for the time being and the choice fell on Thedas. “Sometime in the future”, so the thought, the team wanted to choose a real name.

It was a few more years before BioWare came back to the subject. Thedas had already gotten stuck in their heads, as Gaider relates: “At that point in time we had been saying and writing Thedas for so long … well, you can imagine.”

Link to Twitter content

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Qunari should also be a temporary name

Gaider learned a lesson from this about what temporary names should and should not be. He claims to have made use of this when it came to naming the Qunari. At first the team was probably not enthusiastic about the name because it sounded too much like “canary”. So Gaider suggested using it as a temporary name and choosing a correct one later. Unsurprisingly, it ultimately stayed with Qunari.

This is not the only instance in which Dragon Age proceeded in a rather unconventional way when assigning names. Even the title of the game itself came from a name generator – and it was the first to ensure that there are dragons in Dragon Age:

The Dragon Age series shouldn't have any dragons at all

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The Dragon Age series shouldn’t have any dragons at all

Dragon Age 4 could only come for PS5 and Xbox Series X / S

Dragon Age 4 has been in development for several years, but we still have to wait a while for the new single-player RPG. When it appears, it could even be available exclusively for current console generations, i.e. only for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X / S.

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