Comparisons between Dragon Age: Inquisition and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt are inevitable. Both are new entries in relatively new roleplaying game franchises that have nonetheless been developed by famed and well respected developers in the genre; both are actually the third entries in their respective franchises, with both taking cues from Bethesda’s mammoth 2011 hit, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, in crafting a vast open world for the player to traverse. And, well, both are in the same genre and have similar fantasy themes, and really, as gamers, that’s all we need to pit the two against one another. Game related products have been pitted against one another for sharing far less similarities than this before.
It appears that CD Projekt RED is aware of the comparison, and they have now spoken out on it, sharing their opinion:
“I think, we are a completely different kind of fantasy. Like Dragon Age is more kind of high fantasy, like dragons and spells, and The Witcher is more grounded, fantasy may be a part of the world, but it isn’t the main thing,” said CD Projekt RED’s Miles Tost in an interview with PlayStation Lifestyle. “There is magic in the world, but only a few people are able to cast it, and it is anchored to a certain view that people have towards it. It is much more about the people living in the world, and it just so happens to have all of these kinds of monster roaming around. Fantasy gives us more of a kind of freedom as well to design the world with.”
“We fully admire what Dragon Age has achieved with a couple game of the year awards and it is really nice,” added Tomasz Jarbowski, “I played that game and I really enjoyed it, but we are approaching a slightly different kind of experience, which is a very very deep type of story telling. I think that if you go into The Witcher world very heavily, you will discover just how many things you can discover.”
Whether or not this turns out to be superior to the much lauded Dragon Age: Inquisition, however, remains to be seen.