“Dragon Age in the early days had its fair share of identity crises,” Flynn says. “Was it going to be a tools-driven, modding-driven game like Neverwinter Nights? Was it going to be a big singleplayer RPG like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion?”
“Dragon Age on PC shipped with the toolset, so we did do that,” Flynn says.
Dragon Age: Origins does have a quite prolific modding community that’s created new party members, tons of hairstyles and armor sets, combat mods, and more. The output for Dragon Age 2 was noticeably smaller. Then BioWare switched to DICE’s Frostbite Engine, notoriously difficult for modders to use, especially without official tools, and Dragon Age: Inquisition’s modding community was hamstrung.
“I wish we’d kept that up and stuck to that,” Flynn says of shipping Dragon Age games with modding tools. “Unfortunately we got, I’d say, a little too homogenous between Mass Effect and Dragon Age. I wish we would have kept more of a PC-centric, Neverwinter-like identity for Dragon Age.”
Flynn describes the move to Frostbite as a push to standardize tools internally across BioWare’s then-growing studios. “We had so many different engines for so long at BioWare,” Flynn says, explaining that the studio hoped to create a more common vocabulary across teams who could share what they’d built with one another’s projects.
AAA gaming companies literally use NWN as an example of what not to do because it has lasted so long, is competition for their current games and was difficult to easily monetize.
I played the original NWN for 13 years, mostly community run online servers, and loved it so much. It does make me sad that companies don’t make games like that anymore, but from that perspective it does make sense why they wouldn’t.
Too bad you couldn’t do something open source like that since it requires the D&D licensing.
You don’t have to use any d&d system or content to make something similar (tho tbh I don’t think it’s a good system for videogames anyway), but especially on the content side it’s hard to find a team dedicated enough and founds enough to make it happen