Quote Originally Posted by Razade View Post
EA's earned their negative reputation for being a ghoulish corpse farm for studios. Bioware is one of their larger corpses. All the issues in DA2 and Inquisition can be laid at their feet both in forcing talent from the company through corporate mismanagement and absurd deadlines. Dragon Age 2 was supposed to have four acts, one solely spent in the Deep Roads with a lot more lore for Red Lyium and a whole boss fight that had to get cut. The sole reason the Mages went Blood Mage in every story path is because they wrote a boss fight against Orsino if you went Templar but didn't have a boss fight for the Mage route and EA demanded an equal number of boss fights right before launch so there was no time to make a new one. There was a ton more dedicated to the serial killer plot, which would have taken up a good deal more of Act 1 but EA didn't trust players to remember all the details between Act 1, then a break in the Deep Roads, and then the political struggle against the Qunari. Instead of cutting it ,which would have reduced content, they kept it in as it was. Everyone knows about how the poor dev time led to the game only having like 10 maps to fight in, there was supposed to be triple the number with other areas outside the city. DA2 could have really been something.

Inquisition was originally planned to take on Skyrim's popularity and was intended to be just as open world with all its areas (which is why the first two are stupidly huge with barely anything in them) but Skyrim took 5 years with a few years of development and planning, so closer to 7. Inquisition too 3 years of actual work with 2 years of development for a total of 5. So it's no wonder it didn't come out looking like Skyrim. There was also some regime changes, which led them to decide against going full open world. I know less on the troubles Inquisition had because by the time I finished it I swore I'd never buy another Bioware or EA game but it had to be worse than DA2 considering how many big named people fled the company after it's release. With more fleeing even before Dragon Age 4's release, and the decade it's taken them to actually release it I'm not holding my breath that it will be any better and that's not even taking into account that Dragon Age 4's had two massive rewrites even before the new team they've put to it.
I believe Origins took about five years plus planning, and Inquisition clearly wanted to be bigger than Origins, and so I'm guessing it faced another EA-enforced deadline.

But yeah, I'm not looking forward to Dragon Age 4 for exactly that reason. The talent that made me love the series has gone, and DA4 is starting to show the signs of Duke Nukem Forever syndrome. I'll likely pick it up with all the DLC when it's on sale for like £10 three or four years after eventual release. Until then I'll just wait until I can pick up the tabletop RPG book for more Dragon Age.