Dragon Age: Inquisition was game of the year in 2014, but still, many people thought, that it had a somewhat disappointing open world. The ex-Dragon Age head Marc Laidlaw (who left BioWare over half a year ago) was also quite critical.

Eurogamer published a lengthy interview with Laidlaw, who said the following: „We recognized it was a little hollow. I love the way The Witcher 3 put more cinematic, more heavy story quests into those open worlds in order to even out the pacing and do it in a way players responded to super positively. Whereas in our case, it felt like there were two phases of the game: there was the stuff in the open world which, again, the writers did a great job of theming each zone so it had like, oh, this is the one where there was an expedition that went missing, and it’s all full of notes, but it was never quite the same as the level of intensity you got when you went back in time and rescued Leliana from Redcliffe. Those were heavily cinematic. So, I think it was a bit jarring due to being inconsistent.

If I could go back, I’m sure we’d look closer to The Witcher 3 – in the hindsight that I’ve seen The Witcher 3. Even we knew it was living where it was, and we hadn’t balanced our budget in our deployment of stuff properly in the same way hindsight would have led me to do.”

He also talked about how Dragon Age: Inquisition’s final version had a few features cut seen in the PAX East 2013 demo: „I feel very bad about that PAX demo that had some features we eventually had to cut. I feel very bad about that… That’s the reality of development. It’s certainly the reality of, oops, you’re on five platforms, and two of them are significantly older than the other three. There were some really good ideas in there, and I wanted to see them, but at the same time they were not fleshed out and proven enough.”

Let’s hope that the next Dragon Age game, which should be in development at BioWare, will not run into the same problems… although for the game to happen, they must provide results with Anthem, set to launch by the end of March next year.

Source: WCCFTech