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[Stronghold II]

 So Bioware, I love you guys, always have, but let's be honest here.

 Mass Effect 2 is superior to Dragon Age in every possible way. The graphics are tons better, the action and combat is much more smooth,  the story seems more detailed and fleshed out, the characters are more developed, I could go on and on.

 My question is why?

 Dragon Age was in development for what.......3 times as long as ME 2? Wasn't the dev time about 10 years? If not it was VERY close to it. Why is DA so far below the level that ME 2 is?

 Did you guys just get sick of working on it? Were you just ready to get the thing released after all this time? Is ME 2 the goldmine that EA was looking for, therefor more money was pumped into the project?

 I just don't get it.

 I didn't realize just how far behind DA was until I experienced the gloriousness of Mass Effect 2.

[David Gaider]

It's difficult to compare a game that's made with a new engine with one that is not -- Baldur's Gate 2 was made in much less time than the first, for instance, because it had an already-existing engine. It's a sweet spot to be in for a developer. You know what your engine is capable of and can simply tweak it and improve on it, devoting your time to adding content which you can see immediately in-game. Mass Effect 2 is the first game since Baldur's Gate 2 when we've been in that position, in fact.

Glad you enjoyed ME2, at any rate -- there are stylistic differences between the two games that may make people enjoy one game over the other regardless, and hopefully if a full sequel develops for Dragon Age we'll be in a similar boat. Which will be nice. Dragon Age has received a really excellent reception, both critically and from the fans, and it's always a pleasure to take that kind of foundation and build on it.

[David Gaider]

WilliamShatner wrote...
New engine or not the five year development of DA does have to be questioned. If BioWare turned this game out in 2-3 years I'd say fine, but FIVE YEARS? If this game had state of the art graphics and was a big divergence from BioWare's previous game in terms of gameplay and design I'd understand but it's not. For 2009 the graphics were subpar and the gameplay and game design was KOTOR Redux. It seems like a game BioWare could turn out in their sleep. The only new element is the origin stories (wait for someone to point out a game that has done that already).

The five year figure gets bandied around a lot.

We did not have a full team working on the game for five years. What we had was a significant amount of pre-production with a small team followed by a great deal of time preparing the engine and figuring out exactly what kind of game we wanted to make and how. There is a lot of fluidity in terms of the team sizes between Bioware projects, and projects that have "priority zero" will take up more resources than other projects which are due further down the line. That's just the way it is.

Even so, if someone really wants to imagine that we should be able to whip off a game like Dragon Age lickety split or that the game in its current format didn't take a herculean amount of effort to produce -- and turned out quite well for all that -- then go right ahead. We're not going to lose any sleep over it.