In Hindsight, Bioware Admits to Making a Hollow Open World
Dragon Age: Inquisition, in case anyone forgot, was 2014’s game of the year. Since then, we’ve heard no announcement of the next game in the series. Then, a few months back, franchise leader Mike Laidlaw left the studio. Thus, whatever comes next in the series, BioWare is moving forward without the usual Captain steering the ship. That said, Laidlaw laid low some thoughts on his last creation. In hindsight, he would have made Dragon Age: Inquisition more like The Witcher 3.
Laidlaw presented his thoughts on the Dragon Age franchise in a new interview with Eurogamer. He helped deliver three games during his time at BioWare, departing only after the resounding success of Inquisition. Following that success, however, the nicks and flaws became nowhere apparent than to Laidlaw himself. The success of other RPGs thereafter, especially The Witcher 3, made him want to revisit development. According to him, Dragon Age: Inquisition’s open world was hollow compared to the elaborate side-quests created by CD Projekt RED. He said, “We recognized it was a little hollow.
“I love the way The Witcher 3 put more cinematic, more heavy story quests into those open worlds in order to even out the pacing and do it in a way players responded to super positively. Whereas in our case, it felt like there were two phases of the game: there was the stuff in the open world which, again, the writers did a great job of theming each zone so it had like, oh, this is the one where there was an expedition that went missing and it’s all full of notes, but it was never quite the same as the level of intensity you got when you went back in time and rescued Leliana from Redcliffe. Those were heavily cinematic. So, I think it was a bit jarring due to being inconsistent.
“If I could go back I’m sure we’d look closer to The Witcher 3 – in the hindsight that I’ve seen The Witcher 3. Even we knew it was living where it was and we hadn’t balanced our budget in our deployment of stuff properly in the same way hindsight would have led me to do.”
Laidlaw went on to talk about the hurdles of developing a game for five systems. There was a point after the PAX 2013 demo where BioWare realized they’d have to cut content that was advertised. “That’s the reality of development,” Laidlaw said. “It’s certainly the reality of, oops, you’re on five platforms and two of them are significantly older than the other three.”
The next Dragon Age is in early development, but we don’t expect to hear anything until Anthem, BioWare’s new shared-world experience, arrives. We’ll have more updates before, during and after E3 2018
SOURCE: Wccftech