Former BioWare general manager Aaryn Flynn has said he wishes the Dragon Age series had kept a more “PC-centric, Neverwinter-like identity.” Flynn’s comments come from a new interview, where he reflected on his career with the iconic studio behind other games like Mass Effect.
In the interview for the latest issue of Edge magazine (courtesy of GamesRadar), Flynn discussed the “identity crises” Dragon Age went through in the early days of development. “Was it going to be a tools-driven, modding-driven game like Neverwinter Nights? Was it going to be a big single-player RPG like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion?” he said.
When it came to deciding the ultimate identity for the RPG series, Flynn said BioWare “got a little too homogenous between Mass Effect and Dragon Age.” While he wishes the game series had retained more of the original influences from Neverwinter, the game began to take on its own identity as time went on and more instalments were released — with more action and MMO-leaning touches as sequels rolled out.
When it came to the modding capabilities of Dragon Age, Flynn reflected back on the development of Neverwinter and his early days at BioWare, developing a toolset for the Dungeons & Dragons-based game that both players and developers used. “We wanted everybody to be able to say, ‘I, as a modder, can build the same thing that Bioware does.’ We didn’t want any exceptions to that,” he added. He also said that many BioWare developers started their career modding the D&D RPG.
When Dragon Age: Origins shipped on PC, it did come with the toolset in the same vein as Neverwinter, which saw a burgeoning modding community grow around the beginnings of the now iconic fantasy RPG franchise — to date, there are over 3.3k mods on NexusMods for Origins alone.
When Dragon Age: Inquisition came onto the scene in 2014, BioWare had made the transition to the Frostbite Engine by DICE — which developers and modders alike famously found difficult to use. This, in addition to not shipping with the same toolset as its predecessors, dried up the prolific modding community that had spawned from BioWare’s previous titles.
Flynn said he wished Bioware “kept that up and stuck to that,” in regards to releasing Dragon Age instalments with modding tools, but explained the shift to the new engine was borne from needing to standardise the engines used internally across BioWare projects. “We had so many different engines for so long at BioWare,” he said.
Flynn’s comments come at an interesting time for RPGs, with the release of two heavy hitters – Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield – in as many months, both with extensive modding communities already growing and spurring on their sales and player success. Baldur’s Gate 3, in particular, shares the same D&D RPG DNA as Neverwinter Nights, by virtue of the source material, and is perhaps a glimpse at the direction Dragon Age might’ve taken had it stuck to a similar identity as Flynn’s wishes.
Flynn no longer works for BioWare, having since founded Inflexion Games, which is currently working towards the release of the upcoming survival game Nightingale. With a fourth Dragon Age game in development (Dreadwolf), there’s no telling whether we might see a return to the PC-centric, modding-haven glory days of Neverwinter, although given the studio’s direction for the previous title and other work, it seems pretty unlikely. BioWare only recently laid off 50 staff members, including the writer of the much-loved character Varric, Mary Kirby. While currently the studio claims the development of the next game (as well as the next Mass Effect) isn’t impacted, there’s bound to be an impact on the overall personality of the title that remains yet to be seen.
Details for Dreadwolf are few and far between as of yet, but we’ll be keeping an eye out for updates as they come through – and watching to see how new releases like Baldur’s Gate 3 might affect the ever-evolving identity of the series, too.
Lead Image Credit: BioWare
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