They say that hindsight is 20/20, and that’s very true. After all, what we think is a good idea at the time may not be so cut and dry. This goes double for video games, as developers almost always try and make the best games possible, but that doesn’t mean they can’t look back and realize there are problems and faults. For example, Dragon Age: Inquisition was Game Of The Year for many in 2014, but many noted that while the game was good, the overworld itself felt hollow.
One of the heads of that game, and former Bioware developer, Mike Laidlaw admitted to Eurogamer that he wished he had done the games’ world more like Witcher 3 had done their world:
“If I could go back I’m sure we’d look closer to The Witcher 3 – in the hindsight that I’ve seen The Witcher 3. Even we knew it was living where it was and we hadn’t balanced our budget in our deployment of stuff properly in the same way hindsight would have led me to do.”
He went on to describe what he liked so much about how they did their world.
“I love the way The Witcher 3 put more cinematic, more heavy story quests into those open worlds in order to even out the pacing and do it in a way players responded to super positively. Whereas in our case, it felt like there were two phases of the game: there was the stuff in the open world which, again, the writers did a great job of theming each zone.”
Again, hindsight is 20/20, and because of that, you can’t fix the things you’ve already done. However, you can make sure you don’t make the same mistakes in the future. Many are expecting another Dragon Age title, and if they learn from what Dragon Age: Inquisition did and did not do, they’re already off to a great start.
