Ion Hardie
Co-Producer and Lead Designer, Reflexive Entertainment
The first thing that comes to mind is our dialogue system. The first "draft" of how we display dialogue to the player gave us a lot of power to make the cool elements that we designed. However, as the game progressed, what we actually wrote far surpassed what I thought we were going to be able to implement.

In the early stages, Chris Avellone from Black Isle came over and wrote and revamped a few characters and expanded them two to three times what I thought we were going to have in terms of complexity. Chris was joking a lot about what that meant for scripting, and it did increase the scripting requirements, but the game was so much better for it. A lot of it was stuff that allowed for NPCs to respond to the player character differently depending on more character variables, and the dialogue really started to come alive.