The best news you’ll hear about Dragon Age 3 all year

Posted by on September 17, 2012 in Games

In Electronic Arts’ press release for Dragon Age 3: Inquisition, Bioware general manager Aaryn Flynn notes:

…we know we need new technology to truly make this vision become fully realized. And we’ve been working with DICE to make Frostbite 2 the foundation for the engine that is going to power Dragon Age 3.

Mass Effect 3 pushed Bioware’s traditional “connected shoeboxes” level design as far as it was going to go, and it did it long after it should have gone. To see the Frostbite 2 engine in action, boot up Battlefield 3. And now imagine how it will look in a game scheduled for late next year. That’s what Bioware is finally working with.

  • http://twitter.com/jdhas jdhas

    Wait, a Bioware game NOT entirely comprised of right angles? SACRILEGE!

  • http://www.facebook.com/crisco.moonshine Crisco Moonshine

    I have forsaken all military shooters so I can’t boot up BF3 but I do remember seeing some crazy realistic footage at some conference or other a year or two back, so if that’s what they’re working with now — great. In the era of Skyrim, Dark Souls, et al, I felt they were headed in this direction anyway because I’m not sure you can have a AAA RPG that looks like its engine was developed 2002.

    The other good news is they aren’t rushing this one so maybe the main story arc will feel less rushed/incoherent (loved a lot of the little side stories and characters, though).

  • Ashen

    Just because it’s going to use a different rendering engine does not mean level design is going to become magically better. You can do large open levels in Unreal just fine and it didn’t stop them from stacking crates and corridors in Mass Effect.

    Of course given their comments about Skyrim it is possible they’re going with a more open world route, which I’m not sure is a good idea. They’ve never really did a game like that and their only attempt (SWTOR) wasn’t particularly good.

  • Mark L

    Chesty: PCNAME, I have always felt attracted to you, regardless of your gender.

    PCNAME: Which option gets us to have sex? Like normally I’d go with the nice one, but Bioware likes to make me work for it.

    Chesty: You could just give me a gift.

    PCNAME: Oh yeah. Man, this is way too much like real life.

  • Barac Wiley

    It will look like a very pretty series of connected shoeboxes with some things that you can blow up in the middle.

  • tomchick

    I see you’ve been through a lot of Bioware romances.

  • tomchick

    Absolutely fair point, Ashen! However, I feel that the connected shoeboxes have limited what they could do in the past. I’m glad they’re acknowledging that their tech has been a limiting factor, and I hope the design of Dragon Age II fills out into the new engine.

  • Sean

    If it has a big open explorable world like that of Skyrim I will be very happy.

  • Brad Grenz

    Yeah, the engine switch is definitely good news. The internal engine team was not up to the ambitions of the designers and writers. That said, I hope they haven’t “switched to Frostbite 2″ in the same sense that Command and Conquer is being “made by Bioware”. WHAT IF THEY ARE REBRANDING ENGINES TOO? IS THERE ANY LIMITS TO WHAT EA WILL DO?

  • Saltiness

    Considering how utterly terrible the level design (let alone writing) has been across several of their games, I can’t see myself getting excited about this at all. It’ll probably be Dragon Age 2, except stream lined even further into reducing its RPG backend into obscurity.