[00:13] When it comes to Western role-playing games, few video game developers are as renowned as Bioware. The Edmonton-based studio’s catalog is as celebrated as it is influential, with almost all of its titles representing the peaks of their genres in the eras they
[00:28] debuted. Baldur’s Gate brought computer RPGs back in vogue with its sublime, high-fantasy gameplay. Neverwinter Nights masterfully adapted its tenets into a multiplayer-centric experience.
[00:41] Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic saw the former games’ narrative finesse melded with the adventurism of the galaxy far, far away. And Mass Effect made all of this Bioware’s own – while taking it to the next level. But being this renowned comes with a high
[00:57] price. For creating cutting-edge experiences in the games industry is almost always a struggle – and Bioware has especially struggled, with nearly every major production that the studio has successfully completed representing a triumph in the face of massive adversity.
[01:13] Dragon Age, Bioware’s much-beloved high-fantasy series, is perhaps most emblematic of this. While each of its mainline entries were made under vastly different circumstances from one another, they all suffered in their own, unique ways. Its third one’s design failed
[01:28] to fully come together until late in its production, and needed to be made in an incredibly unruly engine. Its second one’s development period was one of the most cramped its staff had ever experienced. And its first operated without a consistent team or set of tools for an immensely
[01:44] long – so much so, that many wondered if it was ever going to come out at all. This is the history of Dragon Age: Origins.
[03:06] When Origins released to the world in November of 2009, it came after months of Bioware touting it in interviews and previews as a spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate. Its setting, combat system, and narrative were all repeatedly framed as modern takes on what the fabled
[03:22] role-playing franchise had offered a decade prior, crafted to enrapture both series veterans and neophytes alike. However, this hadn’t always been exactly what Bioware had wanted the project to be. In a 2018 retrospective published by Eurogamer,
[03:38] Mike Laidlaw, the Dragon Age series’ former chief designer, would recall how it wasn’t until director Dan Tudge told Origins’ development team to aim for this vision that it fully became part of its identity. Before this, the game’s identity had meandered for a
[03:52] while, with Bioware only letting a modicum of the studio’s staff attempt to hash it out for the first few years of its production – which began in late 2002. At the time, the studio was eager to start creating and controlling its own video game
[04:06] properties, having worked almost exclusively with other companies’ licenses since its founding in 1995; both Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights were tied to the world of Dungeons & Dragons, and Knights of the Old Republic, which was due to release the
[04:21] following year, was part of the Star Wars Universe. Nearly everyone agreed that the studio had succeeded in imbuing all of these experiences with its creative thumbprint – but the studio believed it could do so much more with fantasy worlds of its own design. Thus,
[04:35] work began at Bioware on an original, high-fantasy-themed role-playing game, titled Chronicle. For the first few years of its existence, development was sluggish. As revealed by Brent Knowles – another one of the game’s main designers – in a 2015 interview with RPG
[04:51] Codex, it took a long time for the manpower and technology fueling Chronicle’s creation to stabilize; many of its staff were constantly being pulled away to help on concurrent projects, like the wuxia-inspired Jade Empire, and the tools that were being used to make it were
[05:06] being pushed further and further back. And yet – slowly but surely – its design would come into focus. David Gaider, one of the project’s earliest and most prominent writers, would spend a long time hashing out the basics of its world and lore, conceiving
[05:21] a dark, realistic setting inspired just as much by the works of George R. R. Martin as it was by the works of Tolkien. Where other high-fantasy worlds featured more fanciful and lighthearted societies, Chronicle’s would be considerably grounded, with its races
[05:37] beset by issues intrinsic to our own reality, such as racism and classism. Players would be given the option to embody one of several characters – each of which would possess a completely different origin story – and this would affect the way everyone else in
[05:52] the game’s world would regard them. Meanwhile, its gameplay would take place from both a top-down perspective, in addition to a third-person perspective reminiscent of as well as recruit an eclectic cast of party members who would join their cause. And when
[06:05] Expo – under the name Dragon Age – it would also be announced that it was going to feature a multiplayer campaign, complete with its own, streamlined story.
[06:23] After 2004, Bioware would go dark on Dragon Age for a long period of time. Because of
[06:42] how slowly its development had been progressing up until this point, the studio decided that the project wouldn’t make any more public appearances until both its features and the technology that would support them were fully bolted down.
[06:55] In retrospect, this would prove to be a wise move, as the next few years would see Dragon Age undergo a number changes – some spurred by the arrival of key individuals on its development team, like Dan Tudge and Mike Laidlaw, and others by said team figuring out what they
[07:10] could and couldn’t do with their current resources. In addition to the game’s mechanics and rules being rebalanced over and over, the number of potential origin stories that would be available to the player were scaled down a fair bit, as a result of its developers
[07:24] realizing how much work they were to implement. And – perhaps most significantly – its multiplayer component was gutted entirely, never to be heard from again. During an extended appearance on Canadian radio station 102.1 The Edge in 2015, Gaider would describe the
[07:40] project as an exercise in scope creep; its team had a seemingly endless amount of ideas on how to further plus it, but inevitably, they had to pull back on their ambitions, and focus on creating a finished product. Eventually, Dragon Age would be re-unveiled
[07:56] in 2008 as Dragon Age: Origins, sporting a much more defined identity and story than what was present in its previous appearance. The player would now be fighting for the future of Thedas, a magic-strewn land inhabited by humans, elves, dwarves, and the metallic-skinned
[08:12] Qunari. Regardless of which origin they chose, the player would quickly be inducted into the Grey Wardens, a legendary order of knights that has been relied upon since time immemorial to protect Thedas from the monstrous Darkspawn – which are on the verge of launching a
[08:26] cataclysmic upheaval known as the Blight. It would also be unveiled later in the year that Origins would be seeing a release on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, thanks to the porting efforts of Austin-based developer Edge of Reality.
[08:40] All of this came at something of a peculiar time for Bioware. The Canadian studio was riding high on the success of Mass Effect the year prior – yet it had also just been acquired by EA, prompting concerns from longtime fans that the megapublisher would attempt
[08:55] to meddle in its affairs going forward, and force the studio’s games to conform to its own vision of what it considered popular. However, while EA’ influence would eventually be felt later on in the series, it wouldn’t attempt to intervene in any significant way
[09:08] on Origins; according to Brent Knowles, the project had been pushed back so many times at this point, that nobody in their right mind wanted to risk delaying it any further.
[09:45] As Origins’ release date neared, anticipation only grew stronger among the Bioware faithful. The game looked like it was shaping up to be a tremendous experience; one that held the souls of its developer’s old-school classics close to its heart, yet still felt
[09:59] thoroughly distinct from them. While the proof would ultimately be in the pudding, it seemed to many like it was poised to be another Bioware hit, and enrapture a much wider audience than its genre typically enjoyed – just as Mass Effect had done.
[10:13] But Bioware itself had its reservations. Publicly, it expressed nothing but confidence in Origins’ ability to succeed, pointing to the success of games like The Witcher and Obsidian Entertainment’s
[10:25] Neverwinter Nights 2 as proof that there still existed plenty of interest in high-fantasy fiction. Both the enduring popularity of this genre, and Origins’ many modern innovations, it asserted, would enable it to attract such an audience. Yet behind the scenes, it wondered
[10:41] whether this would be enough. Traditional, PC-centric role-playing games had been waning in popularity over the past few years, with its few surviving stalwarts, like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, having adopted more simplified, action-oriented designs with their
[10:55] most recent iterations. And there was no way of knowing how thoroughly Dragon Age’s darker For these reasons, Bioware would decide late in development to implement a detailed epilogue
[11:08] at the end of Origins, in order to show what happened in the long-term to the player’s companions and the lands they saved. If it never got a chance to make a sequel, it could at least provide ample closure on everything players had experienced.
[11:21] When Origins would finally arrive on storefronts, however, these concerns would all turn out to be for naught, with the game quickly finding an audience as massive as it was passionate. Critics loved how unabashedly deep its combat system was, as well as how much flexibility
[11:36] it allowed for; the breadth of choice it offered in terms of letting one finesse their abilities, as well as micro-manage themselves and their allies actions’ in the middle of battle felt so empowering. And when they weren’t fighting alongside the player, these very
[11:49] allies proved incredibly satisfying to interact with, providing humor, romance, and emotional catharsis in equal measure for all that entertained relationships with them. Outside of Bioware’s
[12:09] own catalogue, there existed few other games pundits could point to at the time that featured characters as multi-dimensional and intriguing as those that Thedas had to offer – or for that matter, a world as richly realized as Thedas itself.
[12:24] Not everything about Origins tickled players’ fancy. The game’s story drew flack for falling hard on its share of clichés, such as having the main thrust of its plot follow a predictable hero’s journey. Its visuals underwhelmed, as did its occasionally wooden character animations.
[12:39] And its share of difficulty spikes convinced more players than Bioware would have liked to abandon their campaigns early on. The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game would also be singled out for not feeling as well optimized as they could have been; while both
[12:54] ports had duly reworked their combat systems to be less tactical, and more action-oriented – a concession made to accommodate for the home consoles’ lack of mouse and keyboard support – parts of their user interfaces still felt like they had been poorly configured
[13:06] to fit their hardware, such as their codexes. Yet in the end, these issues would do little to stop players from thoroughly enjoying all of the game’s iterations.
[13:25] After working on Origins for seven-odd years, one might’ve thought that Bioware would have been ready to drop it as soon as it launched, and move on to the next big thing. Instead, the studio would continue to rigorously support it post-release: not only would it supply
[13:40] the game with a steady stream of downloadable content for nearly a year, but it would also greatly incentivize fans to mod it for even longer, releasing a developer-grade toolset with Origins’ PC version for the enterprising to take advantage of. During the latter years
[13:55] of the game’s development, Bioware co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuck had repeatedly stressed that the game would function as both a singular, self-contained experience, as well as a platform that would be continuously added to overtime – and once it finally
[14:09] got out in the wild, it would more than deliver on this promise. Of all these additions, the biggest and most important it received would be Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening, a full-fledged expansion to the base game. Released by Bioware in March
[14:23] of 2010, Awakening saw players embark on a quest to defeat a new and highly intelligent breed of darkspawn some six months after resolving Origins’ primary conflict. A few minor additions
[14:35] to the base game’s meta aside – including a raised level cap, and some slight improvements to its mechanics – the expansion didn’t represent a particularly large departure from what Origins had offered gameplay-wise, focusing more on providing new areas, quests, and lore
[14:49] to relish over than reinventing the wheel. Critics almost unanimously agreed that it was a more than worthwhile experience; it wasn’t perfect, and had little to offer to players who couldn’t get into the series’ first go – but to Dragon Age veterans, it
[15:04] was a must-play, especially if one wanted a glimpse into what Bioware was preparing for their next outing.
[15:20] In one fell sweep, Bioware had succeeded in carving out a new empire for itself within the realm of high fantasy games. Origins’ unique mix of both old-school and new-school design values had galvanized role-playing fans across generations into picking it up,
[15:35] and Awakening had cemented its brand as being one that would endure for generations to come. If the studio had one regret about the way it had reached this point, it was the way it had designed Origins’ epilogue; as Gaider would later explain, both he and the rest
[15:50] far ahead as to what became of Thedas after the base game’s events, because it made it difficult for them to plan out where the series’ story would go next without accidentally
[16:02] contradicting something that it had already established. In order to make things less hard on themselves, the team would eventually decide to render the epilogue non-canon, recasting everything that happens in it as hearsay and rumors.
[16:16] But, as they would soon discover, this would do little make the series’ future any easier to create. For everything they had taken for granted during Origin’s development – including the amount of time that they were given to conceptualize it – was about to change.
[16:29] Few investments in the video game industry are as safe as sequels. Not only are they an easy sell to fans and publishers alike, but as direct continuations of pre-existing games, their developments are free of a lot of the heavy-lifting original concepts need
[16:48] feedback on how to improve both. Even if they don’t manage to eclipse their predecessors before. had some very distinct ideas about where they wanted the fledgling series to go next. With
[17:04] the Blight having been brought to an end, and the Darkspawn successfully repelled, the studio felt it would be ill-advised to have them be the series’ central antagonists once more; not only would doing so feel tiresome, but it would also take away from the fact
[17:18] that Thedas already had plenty of problems without them. As Dragon Age fans already knew well, the land was filled to the brim with intrigue and factionalism; thus, it would be much more interesting if the series’ next entry saw them fight a force that attempted
[17:32] to undermine it from within, rather than from the outside. One thing led to another, and early the following year, work began on a sequel to Origins in which the player would lead a powerful, yet dynamic organization aimed at resolving large-scale
[17:46] political conflicts across Thedas. It was tremendously ambitious – and unfortunately, fated to die a quick death. Some four years prior, Bioware had established a subsidiary
[17:58] in Austin with the explicit purpose of having it develop Star Wars: The Old Republic, a Massively Multiplayer successor to its 2003 role-playing game. Everyone involved wanted The Old Republic to come out and give World of Warcraft a run for its money, but after
[18:13] repeated setbacks at the Texan office, it had just become clear that it wouldn’t be able to do so until late 2011. As detailed in Jason Schreier’s 2017 book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, this frustrated EA’s executives considerably; they wanted Bioware to deliver
[18:30] a new product on a consistent basis to help bolster their quarterly sales targets, and decided that the Dragon Age team would need to fill the gap that The Old Republic’s slippage had resulted in. Come hell or high water, the fantasy series’ next entry would
[18:43] now need to ship by March of 2011 – and this time around, Bioware would need to develop its PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 ports internally, instead of contracting them out to Edge of Reality like it had done with Origins. Sensing it would be impossible to do their
[18:59] current Dragon Age project justice within this timeframe, Bioware put it on ice, and settled for something much more modest in scope. Instead of taking players on a globe-trotting adventure, the series’ second entry – which executive producer Mike Darrah originally
[19:14] wanted to call Dragon Age: Exodus, but EA insisted be named Dragon Age 2 instead – would now take place entirely within the city-state of Kirkwall. The player would control Hawke,
[19:26] a human immigrant who has fled with his or her family to the city to escape the horrors of the Blight, and follow their adventures within its walls over the course of a decade. They wouldn’t be able to play as any other races, or choose from a wide array of narrative
[19:38] backgrounds, as Origins had allowed – though their character would now be fully voiced.
[19:51] It was a much more contrived premise than what Bioware had planned to do before it; a compromise between its studio’s creative acumen, and the fact that it needed to be made in just a little over a year. But it also had advantages. Its localized setting
[20:05] not have to worry all that much about making sure its events were respected in future installments. And because it took place over such a long period of time, it was decided early on to
[20:18] frame the game’s events as a story being told after the fact, in the vein of The Princess Bride – which meant that the game would be able to both show the repercussions of the player’s actions sooner, and get a little more creative with its humor in ways its predecessor
[20:31] couldn’t have.
[20:49] Bioware wanted to make the best of its current predicament, and not let the lack of time they had to develop the sequel interfere in their ability to make a great game. However, when the studio would officially unveil and start showing off 2 to the public throughout
[21:02] the latter half of 2010, it would be met with disapproval from swathes of the Dragon Age community. Some of this would be directed towards the game’s more compressed setting – yet a lot more would be aimed at aspects of it that had been changed for reasons other
[21:15] than this lack of time. Chief among these aspects would be how 2 had reworked its predecessor’s combat system. When Origins had released, its combat mechanics had offered players a slow-paced and methodical experience; an old-school throwback the likes
[21:30] of which were becoming increasingly rare within the role-playing genre. It enraptured many, keeping them hooked on its intricacies for hours upon hours – but it also repulsed many more, with Mike Laidlaw, the series’ creative director, telling Destructoid in
[21:46] 2011 that according to Bioware’s own metrics, a significant amount of players who tried Origins had dropped it after only an hour. While many factors likely contributed to this, the team suspected that the biggest was the lack of immediacy to the game’s combat;
[22:00] being unable to see one’s actions be performed right away, they believed, likely made the game too dissociative of an experience to be enjoyed – even on consoles, where Origins had been tuned to feel a little quicker. For both this reason, as well as a desire
[22:15] with wanting to keep up with where the rest of the triple-A space was currently heading, the team had become motivated to try and strip away this lack of immediacy as much as they could, and make 2 a faster, more action-oriented experience. Back when Origins was in production,
[22:29] Bioware had described it at every turn as a spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate. Now the studio was describing 2 at every turn as a game where every button press made something awesome happen. To Dragon Age fans who had never taken issue with the way combat felt
[22:47] before, this was considerably disheartening; it seemed like the series was waving a flag of defeat, and surrendering its depth and uniqueness in favor of appealing to a broader, more casual audience. Even if Bioware succeeded in making the best version of this sort of
[23:02] game it could possibly make, the kind of satisfaction it would offer would still be vastly different from what that had attracted them in to the series in the first place. Compounding these frustrations further was that fact that Bioware had also simplified
[23:15] many of the mechanics and features surrounding its combat system. The scope of each character’s skill trees had been curbed, the amount of control players had over what they could equip their companions with was now significantly reduced, and – most frustratingly to PC
[23:29] players – the game’s tactical camera had been removed outright. While the console versions surroundings with, the PC version had also featured a Baldur’s Gate-esque overhead
[23:42] the game’s battles feel even more calculating and chess-like than they already were, but – as would be explained multiple times during 2’s development – implementing it had come at a cost: in order to allow such a camera to be accessible nearly everywhere and at
[23:59] anytime, Origins’ developers had been forced to design spaces that lacked interesting ceilings or skyboxes, and would still feel no more or less challenging to fight through if players switched back to third person. Thus, it had been decided early to only provide
[24:13] a third-person camera in all of 2’s versions, so that its developers wouldn’t have to deal with these restrictions again. As with the changes that Bioware had made to the way the game’s combat functioned, it was a decision that the studio would argue had been made
[24:25] as a result of well-intended reasons, and not just because it was pressed for time. Yet to many fans, it was still considerably disappointing.
[24:39] Not everything about 2 would be universally disdained before it released. For all the vitriol they generated, there were still plenty of gamers that took little issue with the various changes to its combat mechanics. And there were more than a few aspects about the
[24:51] sequel that nearly every strain of Dragon Age fan would admit seemed a step in the right direction. One example of this would be how Bioware had decided to rework the player’s relationship with their companions. Previously, if the Warden wanted to earn the trust of
[25:04] their companions in Origins, all they needed to do was continuously act caringly towards them. It was a perfectly functional system – but it also unintentionally gave off the impression that being kind was just a way to exploit other people, as well as the only
[25:18] way one could engender a relationship with them. In order to get away from this in 2, Bioware had decided to make it so that both supporting and opposing fellow companions would result in Hawke entering into an advantageous relationship with them; if Hawke agreed with
[25:33] a character’s actions and worldview, they would befriend them, and if Hawke didn’t, they would become rivalrous, with each route opening up exclusive boosts and content for that character. Clever conceits like these imbued even the most jilted fans with hope;
[25:47] that behind the curtain, Bioware fully knew what it was doing, and would succeed in blowing everyone away once more. Yet when Dragon Age 2 finally released, the only thing everyone agreed it had succeeded in doing was dividing the room.
[26:24] For every fan who found the changes it offered in terms of its combat systems and scope to be satisfying, there was a fan who felt they compromised what had previously made the series feel special. And even when judged on their own merits, these aspects of the game still
[26:37] had their share of grievances: enemies that the player fought in combat scenarios, for example, tended to approach the player in waves that would spawn out of seemingly nowhere, making a strategic approach unviable. Meanwhile, the city of Kirkwall didn’t feel like it
[26:52] grew all that substantially over the course of the game’s abridged decade, or changed as greatly as it could have in response to the narrative choices one made. Many also found the caves and dungeons located around the city to be tiring to explore, due to the
[27:05] sheer amount of recycled assets used to create them. And the game’s friendship and rivalry system, while certainly an improvement over Origins’ relationship system, felt like it could have been better explained, as well as easier to manage.
[27:19] Amidst all of this, most of the game’s critics generally agreed that the quality of the game’s of Hawke’s struggles as an immigrant, in particular, would receive accolades for being both delicately handled, as well as for bucking conventions. In a genre where one’s player
[27:36] character often comes from an ostentatious background, and is destined to save the world, playing as Hawke – who came from a modest family, and didn’t concern themself with world-saving histrionics until 2’s very end – felt genuinely novel. But in the churning
[27:52] sea of the Internet, such praises struggled to rise above fans’ chorus of discontent.
[28:18] Over the days, months, and eventually years that would follow, 2’s most prominent creative voices would do their best to address people's complaints with the game, with Mike Laidlaw engaging with both fans and the press to discuss its qualities. In many of these dialogues,
[28:32] ways to interact and influence the game’s world and characters, and – much later on – that he didn’t think it to be as strong of an experience as Origins. But he would
[28:44] also argue that the game’s combat system, while not perfect, was in a much better place than where it was in Origins, and that as a whole, he and the rest of the team were still extremely proud of their efforts. Speaking to Eurogamer in 2018, Laidlaw would describe
[28:59] the game as having a ton of heart, a lot of risks, and a lot of people who liked it because of these risks. In the end, perhaps the biggest mistake that was made during Dragon Age 2’s development was the decision to not call it Dragon Age:
[29:12] have made the game’s development any less cramped, or spurred its creators into designing it any differently. But it would have set more Dragon Age fans’ expectations correctly
[29:24] – and possibly dampened a lot of their vitriol – by making it clear that it wasn’t a straightforward sequel to Origins; that in addition to telling the tale of a fantastical exodus, it was also a mechanical exodus from the norms that had been established by the
[29:37] series’ first title. If there was any consolation to be had, it was that in spite of all the negativity surrounding its release, 2 had still sold well enough to ensure that a third Dragon Age game would enter production; Bioware could still make
[29:51] things right, and return the series to its former glory. However, as it would soon discover, this didn’t mean that the road ahead of it was about to get any easier. While the series’ second game had been both physically and emotionally exhausting to develop, its
[30:04] third was going to be downright brutal – so much so, that it might as well have been built for an inquisition.
[30:28] In late 2010, Bioware was starting to look for a successor to the Eclipse engine. The development software that had been used to realize Dragon Age: Origins and 2, Eclipse had served the studio well, but it was starting to grow long in the tooth; its infrastructure
[30:44] was old, its graphical-rendering capabilities were no longer as powerful as the studio’s artists desired them to be, and if the Dragon Age team wanted to use it to incorporate online multiplayer into the series, as was originally planned during Origins’ creation it would
[30:58] have almost impossible to do so. The studio could have theoretically transitioned over to developing the series in Unreal, the engine used by the Mass Effect games. However – as detailed in Jason Schreier’s 2017 book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels – after paying
[31:15] a visit to EA’s Patrick Söderlund, Bioware executives ended up becoming enraptured by something a little more exotic: the Frostbite engine. Created by the technological prodigies at EA’s Stockholm subsidiary, DICE, Frostbite
[31:29] had originally been designed to power shooters like Battlefield and Medal of Honor, and would be able to benefit all parties involved tremendously if it were adopted. Bioware would not only be able to build the next Dragon Age with a powerful new piece of technology, but also
[31:43] seek direct assistance from its creators if they ran into trouble using it, as well as not have to worry about their assets or code leaking to the public – always a risk if the studio worked with an engine owned by an outside party. In addition, EA would be
[31:56] able to slowly start building up to a future in which all its studios would be using Frostbite in synchronicity, allowing them all to learn and synergize from their shared experiences with it. In order to get a feel for what using Frostbite
[32:09] would be like, Mike Darrah, the Dragon Age series’ executive producer, would assemble a small team within Bioware to work on Blackfoot, a free-to-play, multiplayer-only Dragon Age game built from the ground up using the engine. This project – which entered production
[32:24] just before 2’s release – ended up being shelved after a few months, with Darrah explaining in Schreier’s book that its scope and technological complexity ultimately proved unmanageable Unfortunately, as Bioware would soon come to realize as it waded further into 2011,
[32:44] working on the series’ real third entry wasn’t going to be any easier. On one hand, the cancellation of both Blackfoot and Exalted March had bequeathed the studio with all the manpower it needed to realize the project, as well as the time to hash out its basic,
[32:58] yet exciting premise. Where the series’ second entry had followed a lowly immigrant’s rise to glory within a solitary location, its third would take place in a vast, Skyrim-esque open-world, and repurpose Bioware’s original narrative plans for 2, with the player leading
[33:13] the Inquisition – a powerful organization tasked with restoring order across Thedas – after the boundaries separating it from the dreamlike Fade become fractured. But on the other hand, nearly everything else surrounding the game’s impending development
[33:27] was grounds to be immensely discouraged. Its fan base had become increasingly toxic as of late, riled up by the many contentious design decisions Bioware had made in Dragon Age 2, as well as by Mass Effect 3’s controversial ending. Its publisher wanted the game to be
[33:48] developed for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in addition to the PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, out of fear that the latter two consoles would underperform upon their upcoming launches.
[34:00] in just two years, by the 2013 holidays. All of these headaches begat further headaches; in addition to dampening the studio’s mood, the negativity radiated by Bioware’s fan
[34:15] base, for example, had made the studio feel increasingly insecure, and prone to second-guess itself when deliberating how to regain their good graces. Likewise, the fact that the game still needed to be developed with the PlayStation 3 and 360 in mind meant that its design would
[34:29] have to be limited to what said consoles’ weaker capabilities allowed for, and nothing more.
[34:43] And yet – at the end of the day – none of these problems were comparable to the difficulties that Frostbite presented. After Bioware’s initial excitement for the engine died down, it had slowly became apparent that using it to make an open-world role-playing game was
[34:57] going to be significantly harder than anyone had anticipated: where engines like Unreal and Eclipse easily allowed one to implement features common in role-playing games, such as being able to control a party of companions, or create complex character builds, Frostbite
[35:12] did not. The Swedish-made engine had been created exclusively with graphically-intensive shooters in mind, and as a result, its creators hadn’t felt it necessary to make it easily applicable to any other genre or style of game – let alone an open-world Dragon Age
[35:27] a very long time getting Frostbite to function as it wanted once the game’s development started in earnest. With the exception of its artists – who found creating gorgeous,
[35:40] varied environments in the engine to be a breeze – almost all of the project’s staff felt as if they were walking through the desert for most of its opening stages, unable to make even the barest resemblance of a functional gameplay experience using the tools available
[35:52] to them. It was a rough transition coming from Dragon Age 2, which for all its issues, had been made with an engine everyone was already familiar with. And while DICE’s engineers were always willing to help assuage the team’s frustrations, the eight-hour
[36:06] time difference separating the two meant that the Swedish studio couldn’t be relied on at any given moment. When Darrah would unveil the project in September of 2012 – announcing on Bioware’s official blog at the time that it was to be titled
[36:19] Dragon Age 3: Inquisition – he and the rest of the team were still in the process of wrapping their heads around its engine; significant progress had been made, but its core gameplay had yet to fully congeal. Sensing that it would be impossible to get the game out the
[36:33] door within the next year, Darrah and Laidlaw convinced their superiors at EA to let them delay the game to 2014; as detailed in Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, they managed to do so by arguing that – beyond making up for the setbacks Frostbite had caused – this extra
[36:48] development time would allow them to implement many more features in Inquisition than what was originally promised, including the ability to play as multiple races. A feature back and the Qunari too. The remainder of Inquisition’s development
[37:01] audiences as possible. With its combat system, for example, the studio would attempt to find a middle ground between what it had offered in Origins and 2, retaining the latter game’s
[37:13] action-oriented edge, while also reincorporating elements innate to the former, such its tactical camera. Much ado would also be made about making sure its story was consistently compelling in its own right, as well as respectful to the characters and choices players had entertained
[37:27] in the previous games. And after evaluating that it would find a niche willing to enjoy it, and not be a strain on the rest of their operations, the studio would go ahead with implementing a small co-operative multiplayer mode into the game, following in the footsteps
[37:40] of Mass Effect 3 before it. All the while, the fickleness of the Frostbite engine – and Bioware’s endless apprehension about making sure their decisions made up for Dragon Age 2’s failings – would result in nearly all of these aspects going through
[37:53] countless iterations, with some features being dropping almost as quickly as they were adopted of sieges. Yet the studio remained hopeful that no matter how close they brushed against the game’s release date, they would succeed in finalizing these designs, and bringing
[38:07] it all together before it became too late.
[38:30] Finally, after countless hours of crunching, Bioware managed to get Dragon Age: Inquisition
[38:45] out the door in November of 2014. And – at least at first – reactions to it would be almost unanimously positive. Critics had nothing but praise for the scope and beauty of its
[38:57] world, as well as the epic heights that its story reached. The series’ previous entries
[39:10] had done their best to make players feel like they were part of a grand, heroic narrative, and its third offered far and away the most immersive interpretation of this ideal thus heights that Origins had previously provided, was still plenty enjoyable.
[39:22] affirming in the process that Bioware – despite everything that had happened over the past few years – could still deliver the goods. Yet underneath all of this, an undercurrent
[39:35] of negativity bubbled around the game. For while almost everyone agreed that its best moments were utterly sublime, many also felt that the moments between them were comparatively much more lacking: as a result of how little time Bioware had in the end to imbue Inquisition’s
[39:50] world with meaningful things to do, the studio had resorted to padding its environments with a large amount fetch-quests, such as killing set numbers of enemies, or finding a trinket for some non-playable character. In addition to being exhausting and forgettable, many
[40:05] game’s main narrative, arguing that it left the experience feeling mismatched. These criticisms wouldn’t bear strongly on Inquisition’s public perception right
[40:17] away – in part, because such busywork tended to pervade many other games during this period – but they would become significantly more pronounced some six months later, when Polish developer CD Projekt Red would release The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. An action role-playing
[40:34] game based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s acclaimed series of fantasy novels, The Witcher 3 impressed players in many regards – but none so much as with its side quests. No matter their size, they almost all managed to feel intrinsically linked to the game’s overarching narrative
[40:48] in ways both meaningful and unpredictable, with seemingly menial tasks often evolving into much more consequential story arcs than one could have ever anticipated. While as a whole, The Witcher 3’s mechanics, systems, and thematic content made for a fairly
[41:05] different experience than what Bioware had previously offered, the sheer amount of care that had gone into this aspect of the game would result in many players crowning it the superior high-fantasy experience – and souring on Inquisition.
[41:29] Like the previous two Dragon Age games, Inquisition would see a succession of downloadable content expand upon its gameplay systems and narrative over the year following its release. Most of this post-release content would be well received, with its final outing, Trespasser,
[41:45] proving especially popular; in addition to offering a tantalizing tease as to where the series would go next, Trespasser also provided thorough closure to all of its characters’ various stories, pleasing fans that had become enraptured by them during the base game.
[42:00] However, following this, Bioware would go on to produce Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem – both of which had their merits, but ultimately found themselves the subject of intense backlash due to their assortment of glitches and design flaws. And while some of these flaws – as
[42:16] would be revealed later on – were caused by headaches unique to their creations, many others were caused by headaches that Inquisition had also suffered from during its own development, such as their technology being unruly and difficult to work with, their designs being
[42:30] formalized extremely late, and their staff possessing a quixotic belief that everything would come together in the final hours – no matter how badly things had gone beforehand. In a 2019 exposé into Anthem’s development, Schreier reported that many within the studio
[42:46] felt like it would have been better if Inquisition had failed, because if it had, it would have underscored much earlier on that these issues were unsustainable – and potentially saved It’s impossible to know how widespread this sentiment was, or still is among Bioware’s
[43:05] staff. What is certain is that Inquisition has one of the most muddled legacies of all its studio’s games. Even with The Witcher 3 stealing some of its thunder, most that worked on it still stand by that it’s still a tremendous improvement over 2, and a very
[43:19] strong experience overall. But the extent to which it caused Bioware to suffer – both during, and after its development – casts a shadow on these achievements. It sullies the game’s ability to offer escapism, and underscores that its creators, in the end,
[43:36] are only human.