After reading a PC Gamer interview with Mark Darrah, executive director for the Dragon Age games, I'm not sure if BioWare as a whole is really as dumb as they seem or if it's PR speak.

On one hand, he comments about what I consider one of the biggest mistakes in the original game: importing a dead warden into Awakening. The best option, I always thought, was to have the player create an Orlesian warden, but import the decisions that the player made previously. However, BioWare instead revived your warden and retconned your decision regarding Morrigan's end of game offer. As the game currently stands, you either have a "zombie warden" or play as an Orlesian with the default Origins choices. While not naming any alternative solution, Darrah admits that this decision was a mistake.

"...the zombie warden was just a stupid decision on our part I’d say. We should have just not let you. We decided, if you want to play awakening we should let you use your warden. Well what if they’re dead? We’ll let you bring them back to life. We should just not have that."

This provides me a small measure of hope that they can recognize what they've done wrong and why it was wrong, so they can avoid such pitfalls in the future. However, that small hope is in danger of dying when I see other comments, notably about Dragon Age 2.

"Dragon Age 2, we decided we want to try something, to try to do very different storytelling, something much more personal, something much more tightly constrained. No chosen one, no clear overarching threat. I don’t think it was a perfect success, but that was intentional.

A lot of the other changes that are perceived, the overall scope of the game or the perception of the combat getting a lot simpler or waves and things like that—not intended, exactly. That was supposed to be more evolutionary. I think we just overreached. We pushed too hard.

Because of Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age: Inquisition is having to be a lot more ambitious, to address those concerns and really try to get back much more to the roots of the franchise. Much more about tactical combat and a higher level of deliberate difficulty. More clear overall story, with the moral choices still in there, but much more in vein of Dragon Age: Origins style storytelling."

Now, some of this is obviously PR talk ("[not] a perfect success"), which is why my hope is not immediately extinguished, since PR talk can cover up truths no one wants to actually say. I'm hoping that buried in there is a real understanding of what went wrong in Dragon Age 2 and they don't actually believe what they just said. My cynicism and optimism are fighting a war right now.

There is nothing wrong with a different way of storytelling. I think that most would not have had any issue with a personal, constrained story without an overarching threat if it had been done well. The problem is that their framed narrative, something they touted from the start, was flimsy. Varric almost never enters the story from that perspective, the time jumps are weak and lazily done, and there WAS an overarching threat. Yes, there was no blight and no archdemon, but Meredith was painted as a paranoid, unreasonable dictator practically from the start and the game beats you over the head with the mage v. templar theme. It was pretty damn clear at some point, you were going to come to blows with her.

The scope of the game wasn't a fault either. You can set a game, even an epic Dragon Age game, in one city and its surrounding area. The problem, again, is that it was not done well. The game felt much smaller due to the overuse of repeated areas. Not only do you visit the same areas over and over, but they all look the same. There are several "different" caves and warehouses in DA2, but they are all the same place with the same layout and assets. Maybe one path is blocked off, but that doesn't count. The sections of Kirkwall were tiny as well. You expect me to believe that all the elves in this "large" city were in that tiny alienage? I think that's a physical impossibility. It wasn't a scope problem, it was a design problem.

The combat in DA2 was not bad because there were waves, but (again) because it was done poorly. You cannot have "tactical" combat when the player doesn't know what to expect from the game engine. The first time you play the game, you require foreknowledge of where enemy waves will spawn. Otherwise, for example, you risk your tank being far away and leaving your squishy characters to die. You need to know how many waves there are or you could end up wasting abilities on the wrong wave or enemy. The wave spawning was also unrealistic. They appeared out of nowhere, most often, and for no particular reason. Some fights worked well and foreshadowed waves, but most did not.

I don't think that the return to a clear Origins-style narrative and difficult combat will fix anything by itself. It all depends on how they do it. I'm hoping, perhaps unreasonably, that they realize this and don't just throw a "BIG BAD OVER THERE ->" sign at the start and think that solves everything.