I dont buy the rumor of them not implementing a final battle in Skyhold due to hardware limitation. They can do it in a smaller scale, like Adamant Fortress Assault maybe? Running around fighting pockets of enemies - slip in a few cut scenes of how your forces are doing in between fights?
From Kotaku Asks (Dragonage devs):
user:
"Were there ever any plans for Skyhold to be attacked during the game? It seems a lot of "fixing up" the keep is geared towards that. Any chance that any DLC will involved the stronghold of the Inquisition being directly attacked at Skyhold like what happened at Haven?"
Mark Darrah:
"Actually, we never did plan that (performance concerns) but it would have been nice to play with your toy, wouldn't it?"
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Eurogamer interview with Laidlaw:
Sections of the game were adjusted as a result, as it became clear that some ideas were not going to work as originally planned. A version of the game demoed at PAX Prime in 2013, around a year before the game's final release, showed hints of a war simulation system, where players would have to focus on building up and maintaining military strength around their captured keeps
"We had to do some changes," Laidlaw admits. "That was something where we had a good working prototype but we hit a snag due to the technical limitations on it. Having multiple forces fighting works fine on PC but you end up in a situation where having realistic-feeling war on the older consoles is exceedingly challenging."
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Whether it was a captured keep or something bigger and more complex than Haven (and Skyhold IS complex - more than Haven or the corridor at Arbor Wilds in fact. They're not just pretty big area-wise, but have multiple levels), seems that consoles were simply not cut to do anything about it.
And the damaged has been done. Dropping oldgen now will not fix any of these issue.
For base games, no. For DLC? Well, according to Darrah they dropped old-gen, because it couldn't handle what they're preparing (we know that we'll at least see more creatures on screen).
Also - who knows? Maybe that special mode mentioned in the leaked survey (if it's actually true) will allow us to change something in base game itself?
One of the main complains? Lets see, fetch quest, filler quest, abrupt ending, etc. The list goes on and presentation is pretty low on the list.
The fact remains that many things that are wrong with the game can be tracked to old-gen. Also: ask yourself where they could allocate the money and effort that went to scaling the game down to PS3 and Xbox....?
It was a mistake for them to develop the game on 5 platforms, true, but now the deed is done. We should wait and see what they'll deliver without that burden on their shoulders.
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