Right now, you may be anticipating Dragon Age: Inquisition because of how much of a return to the fundamentals of the WRPG genre it seems to be (as opposed to Dragon Age II, which, unlike its heavily classic-cRPG like predecessor Dragon Age: Origins, eschewed role playing to become more of an action game), but did you know that the original design for the game was anything but ‘traditional?’ In fact, if Bioware had gone through with their original vision for the game, they’d probably have suffered even more backlash than they did with Dragon Age II.
You see, they originally started designing Dragon Age: Inquisition as a multiplayer game. Back then, it was codenamed Blackfoot, and over time, the multiplayer became a side by side, equal attraction alongside the single player campaign that the game is promising.
“Weirdly, we actually had a project code-named Blackfoot which was the first game we had that was looking at Frostbite,” Inquisition executive producer Mark Darrah told GamesIndustry International. “It was a Dragon Age game, multiplayer only, that was in development before Dragon Age II came out. That became the core of what became Dragon Age Inquisition, the techlines, more than any of the development, so we’ve actually been looking at multiplayer a long time.”
According to Darrah, role playing and multiplayer actually traditionally go hand in hand.
“It’s sitting at a table with your friends and playing a pen and paper experience,” he said. “It’s been a single-player experience on computers for a long time, but Baldur’s Gate had multiplayer co-op through the story. This is an attempt to get that feeling back, something you can do, get a fantasy experience, but much more bite-size.”
Actually, I really like what Bioware is saying, and what it seems to be going for with the multiplayer vision of the game, but at the same time, I’m glad that the game has a traditional single player mode as well.