Bioware seems to be known as much for failure as it is for success nowadays, and though the company has many great titles in its portfolio, some of their more recent titles have been a huge struggle for the company. One such struggle was Dragon Age: Inquisition. Former Bioware general manager Aaryn Flynn talked about the development of Dragon Age: Inquisition in a recent interview with USA Today, and revealed a lot about the struggles the team had to go through when making the game.
The first struggle was having to use the Frostbite engine. Frostbite was created by DICE and was not originally intended to be used for anything other than making first person shooters. Using it to make an RPG presented unique challenges, as the engine at the time did not have any systems for managing inventory or other typical RPG mechanics, which meant that most of those types of systems had to be built by scratch. Flynn remarked:
“To bend it to make RPG elements was certainly a challenge. It resulted in compromises and things that we certainly didn’t want to do if it weren’t for the technology limitations. But the team found incredibly clever and reasonable ways around that whenever they could. I haven’t touched it in five years, so I can’t tell you where it’s at now, but I still see the bugs being recorded by players and other games and go, ‘Ah, that’s too bad.’ Mark Darrah, the former executive producer, had a famous line: ‘Frostbite has no notion of player or health,’ or something like that. There are just things that make you like, ‘Oh, my God, what? Okay, we’ve got to do that.’”
Perhaps the biggest challenge the team faced though was that the game was a cross generation game. Making sure the game ran well on old generation consoles really limited the scope of what the team wanted to accomplish according to Flynn:
“But I’d say the biggest compromise came from the fact that we had to ship Inquisition on the Xbox 360 and PS3 at the same time as we did on the PS4 and Xbox One. That crushed so much ambition because we didn’t have the team size or the time to differentiate those things, truly. So you had to kind of develop the lowest common denominator. And as that came in, that certainly beat out some expectations and ambitions we had for certain fun features in gameplay.”
Flynn went on to mention that CD Projekt Red’s beloved RPG, The Witcher 3 that released a few months later did not have to worry about this compromise, since they decided to make it for the current gen consoles only. Because of this, Flynn felt that their game “was better for it.”
It should be noted that currently Bioware is working on the next Dragon Age game, and it will not be a cross gen title according to reports.
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