Daniel Fedor, the lead technical artist on Dragon Age: Origins, has revealed some of the biggest "What-If" moments from the game's development, including that the first entry in the franchise could have had multiplayer and dungeon-master modes.
Speaking to TheGamer for their Oral History of Dragon Age: Origins, Fedor wondered aloud about what Dragon Age: Origins would have ended up being had they not switched engines in the middle of its development.
"One thing I often wonder is what Dragon Age might have been like if we didn’t switch engines mid-development," Fedor said. "Around the time I joined BioWare in 2004, Dragon Age was being demoed at E3 using a prototype they built in NeverWinter Nights.
"I was on a separate project, the Technical Architecture Group (TAG), working on a next-gen engine for BioWare games. Not long after, the Dragon Age and TAG teams merged, and work began on rebuilding DA in the TAG engine. I can’t help but think that set us back a long time."
The NeverWinter Nights engine offered the team a "number of battle-tested things" like multiplayer and dungeon-master modes, but those features were made much more difficult in the transition to the new engine. Fedor said that this left him with a lot of "what-ifs," especially after seeing The Witcher use the NeverWinter Nights engine to great effect.
"There were a number of battle-tested things the NWN engine did that we lost, like multiplayer and dungeon-master modes," Fedor continued. "And seeing what CD Projekt Red did with the NWN engine in The Witcher was really inspiring. Would DAO have come out sooner? Would it have supported multiplayer? Could we have reworked the rendering in NWN’s engine to meet the demands of the time? It’s easy to ask these questions now, in retrospect. But I’m sure at the time, these were really difficult decisions to make."
Despite these missing features, Dragon Age: Origins was a success when it was first released in 2009, and it spawned a franchise that is currently set to get its fourth entry.
In our review of Dragon Age: Origins, we said, "this is the kind of adventure that fantasy RPG fans have been hoping that BioWare would deliver – a game with a ton of re-playability and an incredibly vivid world that is the start of an impressive franchise."
For more on Dragon Age: Origins development, check out the story about how it was originally a game without any dragons.
Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
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Speaking to TheGamer for their Oral History of Dragon Age: Origins, Fedor wondered aloud about what Dragon Age: Origins would have ended up being had they not switched engines in the middle of its development.
"One thing I often wonder is what Dragon Age might have been like if we didn’t switch engines mid-development," Fedor said. "Around the time I joined BioWare in 2004, Dragon Age was being demoed at E3 using a prototype they built in NeverWinter Nights.
"I was on a separate project, the Technical Architecture Group (TAG), working on a next-gen engine for BioWare games. Not long after, the Dragon Age and TAG teams merged, and work began on rebuilding DA in the TAG engine. I can’t help but think that set us back a long time."
The NeverWinter Nights engine offered the team a "number of battle-tested things" like multiplayer and dungeon-master modes, but those features were made much more difficult in the transition to the new engine. Fedor said that this left him with a lot of "what-ifs," especially after seeing The Witcher use the NeverWinter Nights engine to great effect.
"There were a number of battle-tested things the NWN engine did that we lost, like multiplayer and dungeon-master modes," Fedor continued. "And seeing what CD Projekt Red did with the NWN engine in The Witcher was really inspiring. Would DAO have come out sooner? Would it have supported multiplayer? Could we have reworked the rendering in NWN’s engine to meet the demands of the time? It’s easy to ask these questions now, in retrospect. But I’m sure at the time, these were really difficult decisions to make."
Despite these missing features, Dragon Age: Origins was a success when it was first released in 2009, and it spawned a franchise that is currently set to get its fourth entry.
In our review of Dragon Age: Origins, we said, "this is the kind of adventure that fantasy RPG fans have been hoping that BioWare would deliver – a game with a ton of re-playability and an incredibly vivid world that is the start of an impressive franchise."
For more on Dragon Age: Origins development, check out the story about how it was originally a game without any dragons.
Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
Continue reading...