Former BioWare GM Reflects On Witcher 3's Biggest Advantage Over Dragon Age: Inquisition
Fair or not, Dragon Age: Inquisition is often compared with The Witcher 3. Released just a few months beforehand, Dragon Age: Inquisition garnered Game of the Year awards and was generally praised by critics, but wound up drawing unfavorable comparisons to CD Projekt Red's seminal RPG.
But The Witcher 3 had at least one major advantage over its competition. Speaking with GLHF for an article on USA Today, former BioWare GM Aaryn Flynn pointed out that CDPR's decision to focus on the PS4, Xbox One, and PC benefited the project immensely compared to Dragon Age: Inquisition, which also had to work on Xbox 360 and PS3.
"I'd say the biggest compromise came from the fact that we had to ship [Dragon Age: Inquisition] on the Xbox 360 and PS3 at the same time as we did on the PS4 and Xbox One," Flynn remembers.
"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. In contrast, CD Projekt didn't do that with The Witcher 3, a few months later, and I think their game was better for it."
Released at the tail end of 2014, Dragon Age: Inquisition was a sprawling RPG based on exploration, relationship-building, and recruiting new characters to your growing headquarters. It was noted for the scope of its world, but criticized for its somewhat basic combat system and surplus of fetch quests.
Behind the scenes, Flynn says that BioWare struggled not just with fitting their massive RPG on previous-gen consoles, but with EA's proprietary Frostbite Engine. Flynn describes working within the constraints of
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