Former BioWare General Manager Aaryn Flynn wrote an intriguing retrospective piece in the latest EDGE magazine about his 17-year-long tenure at the Canadian developer, revealing interesting tidbits about franchises like Dragon Age and Mass Effect.
With regards to the fantasy IP, Flynn said Dragon Age: Origins was a bit stuck between its Neverwinter Nights roots (it shared the Eclipse Engine, too) and the new wave of RPGs like Bethesda's Oblivion. While the first game ended up shipping with the toolset, that didn't happen with the following two installments, and now Flynn wishes Dragon Age had stuck to its PC, modding-focused roots rather than chasing the cinematic vibe of Mass Effect.
Dragon Age, in the early days, had its fair share of identity crises. 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? It went back and forth and ping-ponged and tried different things. All because tastes were changing and ideas were changing in the industry, and so we wanted to respond as best we could. Dragon Age: Origins on PC shipped with the toolset, so we did do that. I wish we’d kept that up and stuck to that. 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 and let Mass Effect really be the cinematic storytelling masterpiece that it is.
Flynn also shared an interesting take on Mass Effect Andromeda. BioWare ended up having too much stuff on its plate, whereas he believes a smaller and multiplayer-focused Andromeda might have been a better option rather than the jack-of-all-trades game that came out.
Players really liked the multiplayer mode of Mass Effect 3, and it really resonated with a subset of the community. I think, had we just focused on that multiplayer piece and said, ‘Let’s build this out and make it something’, rather than saying, ‘Let’s make a full-on triple-A $100m-plus RPG’, we would have had more success. Because we were still learning; we were navigating things. EA was at a time of transition with new leadership, and there was a lot of change again. Trying to be too rigid in some of those things was hard.
One of the unfortunate consequences of us going all in on Andromeda was that we didn’t have the time and capacity to work more on Dragon Age: Inquisition. The pendulum was going back and forth on these titles. Had we done a smaller, more focused, more multiplayer-centric Mass Effect game, I don’t know if it would have resonated with the fans, and I don’t know how we would have sold it. It might have been unsuccessful, too – we’ll never know. But certainly, the operational challenges that a big cinematic RPG – the next big Mass Effect game – created for the studio
were enormous. It was tough to navigate.
Andromeda famously started BioWare's downward spiral, with the company canceling its planned DLCs to focus on Anthem, though that turned out to be an even bigger failure.
Dragon Age: Inquisition remains the last successful BioWare game, and it's now nearly nine years old. The next installment is expected to launch at some point next year, though the latest layoffs certainly didn't inspire confidence in fans.
As for Flynn, he's now leading the development of Nightingale at Inflexion, with a planned February 2024 early access debut date.
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