Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

by Jason Schreier

  In the real world, Laidlaw and his team didn’t have time for that. Frostbite wouldn’t allow it. As they plugged away at the game, Inquisition’s designers found that they couldn’t test out new ideas, because so many basic features were missing. Was there enough stuff to do in each area of the game? The camera wasn’t working, so they couldn’t tell. Were the quests interesting enough? They couldn’t answer that yet, because their combat system didn’t exist.

  Laidlaw and crew came up with the abstract idea that the player, as the Inquisitor, would roam the world solving problems and building some level of power, or influence, that he or she could then use to affect events on a global scale. Yet for a very long time it remained unclear how that would look in the game. The team played around with the idea of “influence” as a currency, like gold, but that system didn’t seem to click. “It really could’ve used more small-scale refinement and testing and ‘Let’s try three different ways of doing this,’” Laidlaw said. “Instead [we said], ‘Let’s build some levels and let’s hope we can figure this out as we go.’”

  One day in late 2012, after a year of strained development on Inquisition, Mark Darrah asked Mike Laidlaw to go to lunch. “We’re walking out to his car,” Laidlaw said, “and I think he might have had a bit of a script in his head. [Darrah] said, ‘All right, I don’t actually know how to approach this, so I’m just going to say it. On a scale of one to apocalyptic. . . . How upset would you be if I said [the player] could be, I dunno, a Qunari Inquisitor?’”

  Laidlaw was baffled. They’d decided that the player could be only a human in Inquisition. Adding other playable races, like the horned Qunari that Darrah was asking for, would mean they’d need to quadruple their budget for animation, voice acting, and scripting.

  “I went, ‘I think we could make that work,’” Laidlaw said, asking Darrah if he could have more budget for dialogue.

  Darrah answered that if Laidlaw could make playable races happen, he couldn’t just have more dialogue. He could have an entire extra year of production.

  Laidlaw was thrilled. “Fuck yeah, OK,” he recalled saying.

  As it turned out, Mark Darrah had already determined that it would be impossible to finish Dragon Age: Inquisition in 2013. The game was too big, and they had underestimated the length of too many tasks because of their Frostbite issues. To make Inquisition as good an open-world RPG as Darrah and his crew imagined it could be, they’d have to delay it at least another year. Darrah was in the process of putting together a pitch for EA: let BioWare delay the game, and in exchange, it’d be even bigger and better than anyone at EA had envisioned.

  Sitting in a second-floor conference room overlooking the hotel promenade that shared a building with BioWare, Darrah and his leads hashed out an outline of new marketing points that included mounts, a sleek new tactical camera, and the big one: playable races. They put together what they called “peelable scope” proposals: here was what they could do with an extra month; here was what they could do with six more months; here was what they could do with a year. And, worst-case scenario, here were all the things they’d have to cut if EA wouldn’t let them delay Dragon Age: Inquisition at all.

  One day in March 2013, Mark Darrah and BioWare’s studio boss, Aaryn Flynn, took an early flight to the EA offices in Redwood Shores, California. They were confident that EA would give them some leeway, but it was still nerve-racking, especially in the wake of EA’s recent turmoil. The publisher had just parted ways with its CEO, John Riccitiello, and had recruited a board member, Larry Probst, to keep the seat warm while it hunted for a new top executive. It was impossible to know how Probst would react to BioWare’s request. Delaying Dragon Age: Inquisition would affect EA’s financial projections for that fiscal year, which was never good news.*

  Darrah and Flynn arrived at EA’s headquarters first thing in the morning. As they walked in, the first person they saw was their new boss, Larry Probst. “We walked in with Larry, and then we ended up leaving at the end of the day with him as well, which I think made a good impression on him,” Darrah said. The meeting lasted around two hours. “You’re talking over scenarios, you’re talking over impact on finances,” Darrah said. “There’s some yelling.”

  Maybe it was a convincing pitch, or maybe it was the executive turmoil. Maybe the specter of Dragon Age 2 had an effect on Probst and crew, or maybe it was that EA didn’t like being called the “Worst Company in America.” An Internet poll wasn’t exactly causing EA’s stock to plummet, but winning the Consumerist award two years in a row had made a tangible impact on the publisher’s executives, leading to some feisty internal meetings about how EA could repair its image. Whatever the reasons, EA green-lit the delay. Moving Dragon Age: Inquisition back a year might hurt Q3 earnings, but if it led to a better game, that would be a win for everyone.

  I first saw Dragon Age: Inquisition in a lavish suite at the Grand Hyatt hotel in downtown Seattle. It was August 2013, and the next day BioWare planned to show the game to fans at the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) next door, so the studio had invited journalists to get a preemptive peek. Sipping from a complimentary water bottle, I watched Mark Darrah and Mike Laidlaw play through a beautiful thirty-minute demo set across two war-torn regions, called Crestwood and the Western Approach. In the demo, the player-controlled Inquisitor would rush to defend a keep from invading forces, burn down boats to prevent enemy soldiers from escaping, and capture a fortress for the Inquisition.

  It all looked fantastic. None of it made it into Dragon Age: Inquisition.

  That demo, like many of the sizzling trailers we see at shows like E3, was almost entirely fake. By the fall of 2013, the Dragon Age team had implemented many of Frostbite’s parts—the tires, the axles, the gears—but they still didn’t know what kind of car they were making. Laidlaw and crew had scripted the PAX demo by hand, entirely based on what BioWare thought might be in the game. Most of the levels and art assets were real, but the gameplay was not. “We did not have that benefit of rock-solid prototypes,” said Laidlaw. “Part of what we had to do is go out early and try to be transparent because of Dragon Age 2. And just say, ‘Look, here, it’s the game, it’s running live, it’s at PAX.’ Because we wanted to make that statement that we’re here for fans.”

  Dragon Age 2 hung on the team like a shadow, haunting Laidlaw and other leads as they tried to figure out which gameplay mechanics would work best for Inquisition. Even after the PAX showing, they had trouble sticking to one vision. “There was insecurity, and I think that’s a function of coming out of a rough spell,” said Laidlaw. “Which of the things that were called out on Dragon Age 2 were a product of time and which were just a bad call? Which things should we reinvent because we have an opportunity moving into this? It leads to a ton of uncertainty.” There were debates over combat—should they iterate on the fast-paced action of Dragon Age 2 or go back to the tactical focus of Origins?—and many, many arguments over how to populate the wilderness areas.

  In the months after PAX 2013, the BioWare team ditched much of what they’d shown during that demo, like boat burning and keep capturing.* Even small features, like the “search” tool, went through dozens of permutations. Because Dragon Age: Inquisition didn’t have a proper preproduction phase, in which the designers could fool around with prototypes and discard the ones that didn’t work, Laidlaw found himself stretched thin. He had to make impulsive decisions. “I’m sure, depending who you ask, there are members of my team who would say, ‘Wow, I think we did a good job in a rough situation,’” said Laidlaw, “and others who would say, ‘That Mike guy is a giant asshole.’”

  Previous BioWare games had been big, but none were as massive as this. By the end of 2013, the Dragon Age: Inquisition team comprised more than two hundred people, with dozens of additional outsourced artists in Russia and China. Every department had its own leads, but nobody worked in a vacuum. If a writer wanted to pen a scene about two dragons fighting, she would have to take it to the design team for a layout, t
hen to the art team for modeling, and then to the cinematics team to make sure the cameras all pointed at the right places. They needed animation; otherwise the two dragons would just stand there staring at one another. Then there was audio, visual effects, and quality assurance. Coordinating all this work was a full-time job for several people. “It was a real challenge to get everyone working in the same direction,” said Shane Hawco, the lead character artist.

  “I think to get more specific on the complexities at this scale of game development, it’s the dependencies,” said Aaryn Flynn. “It’s the things that have to happen for the other things to work and be successful.” The common term in game development circles is “blocking,” which describes when a developer can’t get work done because he or she is waiting for someone else to send over some integral art asset or piece of code. “‘OK, well I was going to do this today, but I can’t because we have a crash, so I’m going to go to this other thing,’” said Flynn. “Good developers are constantly juggling these little tasks on a daily level.”

  Blocking was always an issue, but as engineers at both BioWare and DICE added more and more features to Frostbite, work on Dragon Age: Inquisition became significantly less tedious. Tools started functioning properly. Levels began to shape up. People on the Dragon Age team who had been slowed down by Frostbite before, such as the systems designers, were finally able to implement and test ideas in the open world. They were running out of time, though, and another delay was off the table.

  Every year at Christmas, each team at BioWare would send out a build of its game for the entire studio to play over the holiday break. Whichever game was closest to release became top priority, and over Christmas 2013, that game was Dragon Age: Inquisition. Darrah and his team spent long hours in November and December piecing together a playable version of the game. It didn’t need to be perfect or polished (after all, nobody outside EA would see it) but Darrah saw it as an opportunity to size things up. This year’s build would be “narrative playable”—people could play through the whole story, but big chunks were missing, and sometimes instead of a new quest, the game would just display big text boxes that described what was supposed to happen. When the rest of BioWare had played the demo and came back to the Dragon Age team with their feedback, Darrah realized that they were in trouble.

  There were big complaints about the story. “Some of the feedback was that the game didn’t really make a lot of sense and the motivations for the player weren’t very logical,” said Cameron Lee. At the beginning of Inquisition, a massive explosion would tear a hole in the Veil, a magical border that separated the real world from the dreamlike Fade. (In Dragon Age lore, this was bad news.) The original version of Inquisition’s story allowed the player to close this rift and officially take the mantle of “Inquisitor” during the prologue, which was causing some hang-ups. “It didn’t do the story help,” said Lee, “because you’ve closed the rift, so what’s the urgency to keep going?”

  The writers knew that fixing this problem would add extra hours to everyone’s days, but what else could they do? Embarking on a mission that they called “Operation Sledgehammer,” the writers revised the entire first act of Dragon Age: Inquisition, adding and tweaking scenes so that the player would have to go out and recruit aid from one of the game’s warrior factions—the mages or templar—before closing the rift and becoming the Inquisitor. “[Sledgehammer] didn’t destroy the story entirely; it just meant that you had to break some bones in order to reset them in the right kind of way,” said Lee. “This happens very often in game development.”

  The other big piece of negative feedback from the holiday build was that the battles just weren’t fun. In January 2014, in hopes of solving this problem, Daniel Kading, BioWare’s lead encounter designer, began an experiment. Kading had recently joined the company after twelve years at Relic, a Vancouver-based studio best known for strategy games like Dawn of War, and he’d brought with him a rigorous new method for testing combat in video games.

  Kading went to BioWare’s leadership with a proposal: give him the authority to call up the entire Inquisition team once a week for an hour, four weeks in a row, for mandatory play sessions. The leads said yes. So Kading opened his own little laboratory, working with the other designers to construct a set of combat encounters that the rest of the team could test out. Because Dragon Age’s battles were composed of so many factors—player abilities, stats, monster strength, positioning, and so on—Kading saw his experiment as an opportunity to pinpoint where the problems were. After each session, the testers would have to fill out surveys about their experiences. Whereas the holiday build had been wide ranging, this was laser focused.

  When surveys came back during the first week of Kading’s experiment, the average rating was a dismal 1.2 (out of 10). Somehow, that was comforting to the Inquisition gameplay team. “Morale took an astonishing turn for the better that very week,” Kading said. “It’s not that we could recognize the problems. It was that we weren’t shirking from them.”

  Over the next week, Kading and his team made several small tweaks to combat abilities, boosting cooldowns and changing animation speeds based on the feedback they’d received. “The individual responses came through in fits and starts,” Kading said. “‘Winter’s Grasp is [much better] now that it’s a four-second freeze instead of a two-second freeze.’ ‘This encounter was so much cooler now that I could wall off the behemoth reliably.’” Four weeks later, when Kading’s experiment had finished, the average rating was an 8.8.

  As 2014 went on, the Dragon Age: Inquisition team made significant progress, although many of them wished they didn’t have to ship on those clunky old consoles. The PS4 and Xbox One were both significantly more powerful than their predecessors, particularly when it came to system memory (RAM), which is what allows a game to keep track of everything happening on-screen.* The PS3 and Xbox 360, which were running on graphics technology from 2004 and 2005, just weren’t doing the job.

  A console’s RAM is sort of like a bucket. Displaying characters, objects, and scripts in a game is like adding varying amounts of water to the bucket, and if you overfill it, your game will slow to a crawl or even crash. The PS4’s and Xbox One’s buckets were nearly sixteen times as big as those of the PS3 and Xbox 360, but early on, Darrah and Laidlaw had decided not to add features to the next-gen versions that wouldn’t be possible on the last-gen versions. They didn’t want playing Inquisition on the PS3 and 360 to feel like playing a different game. That limited how much water they could put into their bucket, which meant the team had to find creative solutions.

  “A lot of what we do is well-intentioned fakery,” said Patrick Weekes, pointing to a late quest called “Here Lies the Abyss.” “When you assault the fortress, you have a big cut scene that has a lot of Inquisition soldiers and a lot of Grey Wardens on the walls. And then anyone paying attention or looking for it as you’re fighting through the fortress will go, ‘Wow, I’m only actually fighting three to four guys at a time, and there are almost never any Inquisition soldiers with me.’ Because in order for that to actually work on [the PS3 and Xbox 360], you couldn’t have too many different character types on the screen.”

  “I probably should’ve tried harder to kill [the last-gen] version of the game,” said Aaryn Flynn. It turned out that the safety net of older consoles wasn’t even necessary. EA and other big publishers had severely underestimated how successful the PS4 and Xbox One would be. Both new consoles sold gangbusters in 2013 and 2014, and the last-gen versions of Inquisition wound up composing just 10 percent of the game’s sales, according to Mark Darrah.

  Though the Dragon Age team was making progress, and they’d all become more comfortable with Frostbite, parts of the game were still way behind schedule. Because the tools had started functioning so late in the process, and because Inquisition was such a massive, complicated game, the team wasn’t able to implement some basic features until the very last minute. “We were eight months from ship before we
could get all of the party members in the party,” said Patrick Weekes, who was trying to playtest the much-loved companion Iron Bull when he realized there was no way to recruit Iron Bull. “I went, ‘Wait, we’re eight months from ship and no one in the world has ever played the game with Iron Bull in their party?’ So I have no idea if any line where he’s supposed to say something, any line of banter, no idea if any of that is actually firing right. And it wasn’t laziness on anyone’s part. It’s just reality: you’re trying to make an engine. All of the programmers and scripters are at the time literally building the world.”

  Because everything was so far behind, the Dragon Age team could identify only some of Inquisition’s flaws during the last few months of development. Trying to determine the game’s flow and pacing before that period was like trying to test-drive a car with three wheels. “You write the story and you do a review and you go, ‘OK, we’ll change some things,’” said Mark Darrah. “And then you put it in and you do a white box.* [You’re] running around a level, and it’s OK. And then you get the voice acting in and you go, ‘Actually, this doesn’t work, it’s totally terrible.’” Time was running out, and BioWare couldn’t delay Inquisition another year—they needed to deliver this game in the fall of 2014.

  This left Darrah and his team with two options. Option one was to settle for an incomplete game, full of rough drafts and untested ideas. In a post-DA2 world, that wasn’t an appealing thought—they couldn’t disappoint fans again. They needed to take the time to revise and polish every aspect of Inquisition. “I think Dragon Age: Inquisition is a direct response to Dragon Age 2,” said Cameron Lee. “Inquisition was bigger than it needed to be. It had everything but the kitchen sink in it, to the point where we went too far. . . . I think that having to deal with Dragon Age 2 and the negative feedback we got on some parts of that was driving the team to want to put everything in and try to address every little problem or perceived problem.”