“The discovery of what’s possible on a new engine is both exhilarating and humbling,” Flynn wrote on BioWare’s blog in September 2012, just after announcing Dragon Age: Inquisition. Perhaps if he had taken a few shots of vodka beforehand—or if he didn’t have to worry about what Electronic Arts’ PR staff would think—he might have added what BioWare staffers were really thinking: What’s possible is that the new engine is a technical disaster.
BioWare’s main headquarters are nestled in a small office complex near downtown Edmonton, a city best known for its enormous shopping mall and for temperatures that regularly plummet into the obscene. It’s no wonder the studio came up with Dragon Age. If you want to dream up a fantasy world inhabited by fire-breathing mythical creatures, few cities are more suitable for the act than Edmonton.
Dragon Age, which BioWare hoped would become the Lord of the Rings of video games, first entered development in 2002. After a hellish seven-year slog, BioWare released the series’ first game, Dragon Age: Origins, in November 2009. It was appealing to all types of gamers. Hard-core RPG fans dug the strategic combat and consequential choices, while the more romantically inclined loved that they could seduce their dreamy party members, like the snarky knight Alistair and the sultry wizard Morrigan. Dragon Age: Origins became a massive success, selling millions of copies and, most important, inspiring hundreds of thousands of lines of fan fiction.
Leading the Dragon Age development team was Mark Darrah, a well-liked BioWare veteran who had been at the company since the late 1990s. Darrah had a dry sense of humor and a bushy beard that had been bright red in 2013, when I first met him, but three years later was invaded by blotches of gray. “Mark is very good at the business of game development,” said Cameron Lee, a producer at BioWare. “Internally, we call the Dragon Age team the pirate ship. It’ll get where it needs to go, but it’s going to go all over the place. Sail over here. Drink some rum. Go over here. Do something else. That’s how Mark likes to run his team.” (An alternative take, from someone else who worked on the game: “Dragon Age was referred to as the pirate ship because it was chaotic and the loudest voice in the room usually set the direction. I think they smartly adopted the name and morphed it into something better.”)
After shipping Dragon Age: Origins in 2009, Darrah and his crew of pirates already had some ideas for their next big game. Whereas in Origins you played a fanatical Grey Warden whose life was dedicated to thwarting demons, the next Dragon Age game would be about larger-scale political conflict. Darrah envisioned a game about an Inquisition—in Dragon Age lore, an autonomous organization that solves conflicts across the globe—with the player as leader and Inquisitor.
Then, plans changed. Progress had stalled on one of BioWare’s other games, the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic. Developed at BioWare’s studio in Austin, Texas, The Old Republic kept missing release dates, gradually slipping from 2009 to 2010 to 2011. Frustrated EA executives wanted a new product from BioWare to bolster their quarterly sales targets, and they decided that the Dragon Age team would have to fill the gap. After some lengthy discussions, Mark Darrah and Aaryn Flynn agreed to deliver Dragon Age 2 in March 2011, just sixteen months after the release of Dragon Age: Origins.
“The Old Republic moved, and there was a hole,” said Darrah. “Basically, Dragon Age 2 exists to fill that hole. That was the inception. It was always intended to be a game made to fit in that.” Darrah wanted to call it Dragon Age: Exodus (“Which I wish we’d stuck with”) but EA’s marketing executives insisted that they call it Dragon Age 2, no matter what that name implied.
The first Dragon Age had taken seven years to make. Now BioWare would have just over a year to build a sequel. For any big game, that would be difficult; for a role-playing game, it was near impossible. There were just so many variables. Dragon Age: Origins had contained four giant areas, each with its own factions, monsters, and quests. Decisions the player made at the beginning of Origins—like how the character’s “origin” story unfolded—had a significant impact on the rest of the story, which meant that BioWare’s writers and designers had to build different scenes to account for every possibility. If you played as a dwarf noble who had been exiled from the labyrinthine city of Orzammar, the other dwarves would have to react accordingly upon your return. If you were a human, they wouldn’t care nearly as much.
None of this was achievable in a year. Even if BioWare forced everyone to work nonstop overtime on Dragon Age 2, they just wouldn’t have the bandwidth to make a sequel as ambitious as fans expected. To solve this problem, Mark Darrah and crew shelved the old Inquisition idea and made a risky call: instead of taking you through multiple areas of their fantasy world, Dragon Age 2 would unfold within a single city, Kirkwall, over the course of a decade. That way, the Dragon Age team could recycle locations for many of the game’s encounters, shaving months off their development time. They also axed features that had been in Dragon Age: Origins, like the ability to customize your party members’ equipment. “It didn’t pan out perfectly, but had we not made those decisions it would’ve been significantly more troubled,” said Mike Laidlaw, the creative director of Dragon Age.* “So we made the best calls we could on a fairly tight time line.”
When Dragon Age 2 came out in March 2011, players reacted poorly. They were loud about their anger, hammering the game for its tedious side quests and reused environments.* Wrote one blogger, “The drop in overall quality is staggering on a cosmic level, and there’s no way I’d ever recommend anyone buying this game under any circumstances.” The game didn’t sell as well as Dragon Age: Origins—although “in certain dark accounting corners of EA, it’s considered a wild success,” Darrah said—and by the summer of 2011, BioWare had decided to cancel Dragon Age 2’s expansion pack, Exalted March, in favor of a totally new game. They needed to get away from the stigma of Dragon Age 2.
Really, they needed to reboot the franchise. “There was something to be proven, I think, from the Dragon Age team coming off Dragon Age 2, that this was a team that could make ‘triple-A quality’ good games,” Darrah said. “There was a bit of a tone, not within the studio but around the industry, that there were essentially two tiers of BioWare: there was the Mass Effect team and then there was everyone else. And I think there was a lot of desire to fight back against that. The Dragon Age team is a scrappy bunch.”
There are certain things in role-playing games we’ve grown to take for granted. Rare is the gamer who comes home from the store with the latest Final Fantasy, pops it into their PlayStation, and goes on Facebook to talk about what a beautiful save system it has. You won’t find many reviews raving about the new Fallout’s ability to properly toggle between combat and noncombat game states. Skyrim didn’t sell millions because it knows how to keep track of your inventory. These systems are necessary but unglamorous, and certainly not fun to make, which is one of the reasons most video games use engines.
The word “engine” calls to mind the guts of a car, but in game development, an engine is more like a car factory. Every time you build a new car, you’ll need many of the same components: tires, axles, plush leather seats. Similarly, just about every video game needs the same core features: a physics system, a graphics renderer, a main menu. Coding new versions of those features for every game would be like designing new wheels every time you wanted to manufacture a sedan. Engines, like factories, allow their users to recycle features and avoid unnecessary work.
Even before finishing Dragon Age 2, Aaryn Flynn and Mark Darrah were looking for a new engine for their fantasy franchise. Their in-house game engine, Eclipse, felt creaky and obsolete for the type of gorgeous high-end games they hoped to make. Basic cinematic effects, like lens flares, were impossible for Eclipse to handle. “Graphically, it wasn’t fully featured,” Darrah said. “It was getting long in the tooth from that perspective.”
On top of that, the Mass Effect series used the third-party Unreal Engine, which made it difficult for the two BioWare teams to collaborate. B
asic tasks like rendering a 3-D model required a totally different process on Eclipse than they did on Unreal. “Our technology strategy was just a mess,” said Flynn. “Every time we’d start a new game, people would say, ‘Oh, we should just pick a new engine.’”
Flynn and Darrah powwowed with one of their bosses, EA executive Patrick Söderlund, and came back with a solution: the Frostbite engine, which the EA-owned studio DICE, in Sweden, had developed for its Battlefield games. Although nobody had ever used Frostbite to make RPGs, Flynn and Darrah found it appealing for a few reasons. It was powerful, for one. DICE had a team of engineers who worked full-time on Frostbite’s graphic capabilities, beefing up the visual effects that made, for example, trees sway in the wind. Because this was the video game industry, they also spent a lot of time making it look pretty to blow things up.
The other big advantage of Frostbite was that EA owned it. If BioWare started developing all its games on the Frostbite engine, it could share technology with its sister studios, borrowing tools from other EA-owned developers like Visceral (Dead Space) or Criterion (Need for Speed) whenever those companies learned cool new tricks for enhancing facial capture or making it look even prettier to blow things up.
In the fall of 2010, as the bulk of the Dragon Age team was finishing up DA2, Mark Darrah pulled together a small group to work on a prototype they called Blackfoot. This prototype had two major goals: to start getting a feel for the Frostbite engine, and to make a free-to-play multiplayer game set in the Dragon Age universe. The latter never happened, and after a few months Blackfoot fizzled, hinting at bigger challenges to come. “It wasn’t making enough progress, ultimately because its team was too small,” Darrah said. “Frostbite’s a hard engine to make progress with if your team is too small. It takes a certain number of people to just keep it on.”
By the end of 2011, with both Blackfoot and the Dragon Age 2 expansion pack canceled, Darrah had a substantial team available to start working on BioWare’s next big game. They resurfaced the old Inquisition idea and began to talk about what a Dragon Age 3 might look like on Frostbite. By 2012 they had a plan in place. Dragon Age 3: Inquisition (which later ditched the “3”) would be an open-world RPG, inspired heavily by Bethesda’s smash hit Skyrim. It would take place all across new areas of Dragon Age’s world, and it would hit all the beats that Dragon Age 2 couldn’t. “My secret mission was to shock and awe the players with the massive amounts of content,” said Matt Goldman, the art director. “People were complaining, ‘Oh there wasn’t enough in Dragon Age 2.’ OK, you’re not going to say that. At the end of Inquisition, I actually want people to go, ‘Oh god, not [another] level.’”
BioWare wanted Dragon Age: Inquisition to be a launch title for the next generation of game consoles, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. But EA’s profit forecasters, caught up in the rise of iPad and iPhone gaming, were worried that the PS4 and Xbox One wouldn’t sell very well. As a safeguard, the publisher insisted that they also ship on the older PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, both of which were already in tens of millions of homes. (Most early PS4/Xbox One games followed the same strategy, except for a certain Polish RPG that we’ll cover in chapter 9.) With personal computers added to the mix, this meant Inquisition would have to ship on five platforms at once—a first for BioWare.
Ambitions were piling up. This was to be BioWare’s first 3-D open-world game and their first game on Frostbite, an engine that had never been used to make RPGs. It needed to be made in roughly two years, it needed to ship on five platforms, and, oh yeah, it needed to help restore the reputation of a studio that had been beaten up pretty badly. “Basically we had to do new consoles, a new engine, new gameplay, build the hugest game that we’ve ever made, and build it to a higher standard than we ever did,” said Matt Goldman. “With tools that don’t exist.”
If an engine is like a car factory, then in 2012, as Inquisition entered development, the Frostbite engine was like a car factory without the proper assembly lines. Before Dragon Age: Inquisition, developers at EA had used Frostbite mostly to make first-person shooters like Battlefield and Medal of Honor. Frostbite’s engineers had never built tools that would, say, make the main character visible to the player. Why would they need to? In first-person shooters, you see through the character’s eyes. Your body consists of disembodied hands, a gun, and, if you’re really lucky, some legs. Battlefield didn’t need RPG stats, magical spells, or even save systems—the campaign kept track of your progress with automatic checkpoints. As a result, Frostbite couldn’t create any of those things.
“It was an engine that was designed to build shooters,” said Darrah. “We had to build everything on top of it.” At first, the Dragon Age team underestimated just how much work this would be. “Characters need to move and walk and talk and put on swords, and those swords need to do damage when you swing them, and you need to be able to press a button to swing them,” said Mike Laidlaw. Frostbite could do some of that, Laidlaw added, but not all of it.
Darrah and his team knew that they were the Frostbite guinea pigs—that they were exchanging short-term pain for long-term benefits—but during early development on Dragon Age: Inquisition, even the most basic tasks were excruciating. Frostbite didn’t yet have the tools they needed to make an RPG. Without those tools in place, a designer had no idea how long it might take to do something as fundamental as making areas. Dragon Age: Inquisition was supposed to allow the player to control a party of four people, but that system wasn’t in the game yet. How could a level designer figure out where to place obstacles on a map if he couldn’t test it out with a full party of characters?
Even when Frostbite’s tools did start functioning, they were finicky and difficult to use. John Epler, a cinematic designer, recalled one internal demo for which he had to go through a Sisyphean ritual just to build a cut scene. “I had to get to the conversation in-game, open my tools at the same time, and then as soon as I hit the line, I had to hit the pause button really, really quickly,” Epler said. “Because otherwise it would just play through to the next line. Then I had to add animations, and then I could scrub it two or three times before it would crash and then I’d have to start the process all over again. It was absolutely the worst tools experience I’ve ever had.”
The Frostbite team at DICE spent time supporting Epler and the other designers, answering their questions and fixing bugs, but their resources were limited. It didn’t help that Sweden was eight hours ahead of Edmonton. If one of BioWare’s designers had a question for DICE in the afternoon, it could take a full day before they heard an answer.
Since creating new content in Frostbite was so difficult, trying to evaluate its quality became impossible. At one point, Patrick Weekes, a writer, had finished a scene between several characters and inserted it into the game. He then took it to some of BioWare’s leads for one of their standard quality reviews. When they turned on the game, they discovered that only the main character could talk. “The engine would not hook up the nonplayer character lines,” Weekes said. “You would say something, and then it would go ‘blip blip blip blip blip’ and then you would say something again, and you’d go OK, I don’t know if I can judge the level of quality without any of the words that happen.”
Engine updates made this process even more challenging. Every time the Frostbite team updated the engine with new fixes and features, BioWare’s programmers would have to merge it with the changes they’d made to the previous version. They’d have to go through the new code and copy-paste all the older stuff they’d built—inventory, save files, characters—then test it all out to ensure they hadn’t broken anything. They couldn’t find a way to automate the process, so they had to do it manually. “It was debilitating,” said Cameron Lee. “There’d be times when the build wouldn’t work for a month, or it was unstable as hell. Because the new version of the engine would come in, the tools team would start doing the integration. All the while, the team is still working and moving ahead, so it gets worse and worse an
d worse.”
The art department, meanwhile, was having a blast. For all its weaknesses as an RPG engine, Frostbite was the perfect tool for creating big, gorgeous environments, and the studio’s artists took advantage to build out the dense forests and murky swamps that would populate Dragon Age: Inquisition. Under Matt Goldman’s “shock and awe” approach, BioWare’s environment artists spent months making as much as possible, taking educated guesses when they didn’t yet know what the designers needed. “The environment art came together quicker than any other aspect of the game,” said the lead environment artist, Ben McGrath. “For a long time there was a joke on the project that we’d made a fantastic-looking screenshot generator, because you could walk around these levels with nothing to do. You could take great pictures.”
Great pictures didn’t make for much of a video game, though. Mike Laidlaw, who headed the story and gameplay teams, had been working with the writers and designers to come up with basic beats for Dragon Age: Inquisition. Sketching out the story wasn’t too hard. They knew the player would organize and lead an Inquisition of like-minded soldiers; they knew the big bad would be a demonic wizard named Corypheus; and they knew that, as always, there would be a crew of companions that the player could recruit and seduce. But the concept of Dragon Age: Inquisition as an “open world” game was stymying Laidlaw and his team. The art team had constructed all these sprawling landscapes, but what were players going to do there?* And how could BioWare ensure that Inquisition’s giant world remained fun to explore after dozens of hours?
In an ideal world, a big project like Dragon Age: Inquisition would have a dedicated team of system designers who were solely responsible for solving those problems. They’d devise quests, activities, and all the other encounters that could keep players entertained while exploring Inquisition’s massive world. They’d try to envision what designers call the “core gameplay loop”—what does a thirty-minute play session look like?—and then they’d keep prototyping and iterating until that gameplay felt good.
Blood, Sweat, and Pixels Page 15