Dragon Age 2 received a lot of stick for… well, a lot of things. Some of the major concerns were that it was dumbed down, “casualized” and that it had very little customization options. But the biggest complaint people had with the game was that it offered very little in the way of exploration.
BioWare’s new general manager Aaron Flynn, however, wants to reassure fans that the devs have taken all criticism into account and that DA3 will tackle all the problem of DA2, and that it will be more like Origins than its direct predecessor in terms of story.
“We definitely take the criticisms of Dragon Age 2 very seriously and into great consideration,” Flynn told Game Informer (via RantGaming). “We spent weeks and weeks poring over it and and figuring out not only the mistakes we made but also what we had to do to really show fans that we’d heard it and were going to do better with Dragon Age 3.
Dragon Age 2- Destiny Trailer
“In [DA2], we tried to tell a very intimate story. We did some good things, but we made some mistakes, as well. With three, we’re going back to a very grand and world-beating kind of story that has broad scope and epic things in it.”
When asked if the 2011 smash-hit open-world RPG Skyrim serves as any sort of inspiration to similar games such as DA3 itself, Flynn said: “You can’t look at a game like Skyrim and not think about how impressive what they’ve accomplished is – or [think] that’s an interesting new direction or that there was something that didn’t work well for them that we could take in a new direction.”
“I think we have to get back to more exploration in our games,” Flynn continued. “I think that’s not just because of some of our shortcomings in Dragon Age 2, but because there’s a heritage there, something we used to do in a lot of games like Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights, where exploration was one of the key themes.”
According to a recent report, Dragon Age 3 might be releasing on next gen consoles in 2014 or near the end of next year itself. Read the report here.