It may be currently winning plaudits for its expansive singleplayer campaign, but Dragon Age: Inquisition had something of an unorthodox beginning.
Talking to Gamesindustry.biz, Bioware’s Mark Darrah revealed that the game started out as a multiplayer prototype some time before the release of Dragon Age 2.
The DNA of that project still resides withing Inquisition’s continent-spanning story and additional multiplayer elements. It’s a strange concept, but as ever the path to completion for any major project is a twisting, frequently surprising one.
“We actually had a project code-named Blackfoot which was the first game we had that was looking at Frostbite,” recalls Darrah. “It was a Dragon Age game, multiplayer only, that was in development before Dragon Age 2 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 this a long time.”
Some of those elements may have survived directly through Inqusition’s dungeon-crawling multiplayer mode, but Darrah points out that at its core, the RPG has always flirted with the idea of co-operation and social play.
“At its roots, role-playing is a multiplayer experience. It’s sitting at a table with your friends and playing a pen and paper experience. 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.”
I haven’t got around to trying out Inquisition’s multiplayer portion yet, mostly because there’s just do much damn stuff to do in the solo campaign. If Mass Effect 3 was anything to go by, though, Bioware knows how to create an additional feature set that doesn’t feel like it’s detracting from the core experience. Dragon Age: Inquisition is out in America already, and drops on Friday for Europe.