“Dragon Age in the early days had its fair share of identity crises,” Flynn says. “Was it going to be a tools-driven, modding-driven game like Neverwinter Nights? Was it going to be a big singleplayer RPG like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion?”
“Dragon Age on PC shipped with the toolset, so we did do that,” Flynn says.
Dragon Age: Origins does have a quite prolific modding community that’s created new party members, tons of hairstyles and armor sets, combat mods, and more. The output for Dragon Age 2 was noticeably smaller. Then BioWare switched to DICE’s Frostbite Engine, notoriously difficult for modders to use, especially without official tools, and Dragon Age: Inquisition’s modding community was hamstrung.
“I wish we’d kept that up and stuck to that,” Flynn says of shipping Dragon Age games with modding tools. “Unfortunately we got, I’d say, a little too homogenous between Mass Effect and Dragon Age. I wish we would have kept more of a PC-centric, Neverwinter-like identity for Dragon Age.”
Flynn describes the move to Frostbite as a push to standardize tools internally across BioWare’s then-growing studios. “We had so many different engines for so long at BioWare,” Flynn says, explaining that the studio hoped to create a more common vocabulary across teams who could share what they’d built with one another’s projects.
I’d love some news about them going back to the dark fantasy and writing style of Origins/Awakening over the high fantasy BS Inquisition set them on, tbh.
Origins’ story was so good that it got me to go to the library in the height of my teenage “reading is lame” phase just to get more exposition from the books. I really wish they’d stayed in that vain in the sequels.