10 Video Game Developer In-Jokes You Totally Missed
9. Shale's Resizing - Dragon Age: Origins (2009)
Video game character models must inevitably go through a lot of changes during development, and not always just cosmetically. For when an NPC proves so big and cumbersome that it can't even navigate the game world in which it resides, changes have to be made.
And in this case, such changes didn't sit too well with the NPC in question.
Shale, a friendly but disgruntled golem found in the village of Honnleath, is, height-wise, a little bigger than yourself at the time you meet it. During development, its character model was originally much larger, but when it showed to have great trouble getting through the doors around the place, the developers gave it a pretty drastic scaling down.
By a line of dialogue from Shale, this resizing is made canon within the game's story, as it explains that it once stood at ten feet tall, but was chiselled down by its owner so that it could fit through the doors of her house.
Obviously, then, this isn't a joke you'd properly understand without some inside knowledge. But once you've heard the real-life truth behind Shale's sad story, you'll feel for the cynical rock cluster all the more.