David Gaider, the former BioWare lead writer behind the Dragon Age series, has torn into generative AI, branding it a “plague” and warning that the tech is being shoved into game development long before it’s actually good enough to be there.
“It’s not ready for prime time,” Gaider said in an interview with GamesRadar, adding that “there’s just a lot of executives who really, really want it to be.”
Gaider spent nearly two decades at BioWare, working on Baldur’s Gate II, Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, and every mainline Dragon Age game. He built most of Thedas from the ground up. He now runs Melbourne-based Summerfall Studios, the team behind Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical. When he speaks about narrative pipelines, people in the industry listen.
His biggest issue is with the idea that AI can hand writers a usable first draft. “In all my time as a narrative designer I’ve never once encountered a situation where editing an inferior product took less time than simply throwing it out and redoing it would have, or resulted in anything better than mediocre,” he said.
Translation: fixing bad AI writing takes longer than just writing it properly the first time. And the finished product still ends up mid.
Vibe coding vibes off
Gaider didn’t stop at writing. He also took a shot at AI-assisted programming, aka “vibe coding”: the trend of prompting AI to spit out code you don’t fully understand. “I can’t even imagine using it for bigger tasks like programming. How does one bug fix ‘vibe coding?'” he asked.
The point being: if nobody on the team actually knows how the code works, good luck finding the bug when everything breaks.
His comments land in the middle of an industry-wide AI gold rush. Studios are testing generative tools for dialogue, concept art, code, voice work, and localization, while executives pitch the tech as a magic productivity boost. Meanwhile, the industry is still bleeding jobs, with tens of thousands of layoffs since 2023, making AI adoption an especially raw topic for developers.
Games like Dragon Age rely on branching dialogue, companion arcs, quest state tracking, and tight lore continuity, exactly the kind of dense, interlocking work that generative AI tends to fumble. Gaider’s argument is that a draft which looks fine in isolation can quietly wreck an entire questline once it hits the actual game.
Some developers still defend AI as a decent assistant for prototyping, admin tasks, and helping experienced coders move faster. Gaider’s not buying the bigger sales pitch though, and coming from someone who’s shipped some of the most beloved RPG writing of the last 25 years, that carries weight.
