A few days after BioWare revealed the official name and logo for Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, Mark Darrah, the former project director for Dragon Age 2, has spoken about how the game's reception and perception has changed since it launched in 2011 (thanks, PCGamesN). Speaking on his Old Game Dev Advice YouTube channel, Darrah said that despite the game's rocky launch, over the years it has become "fashionable to like". Much like the Star Wars prequel trilogy.
In an hour-long video about Dragon Age 2 in his Memories and Lessons series, Darrah spoke about how the game went through a tough time in the development phase and wasn't all that liked once it launched either. But now, 11 years later, there has been a sudden swell of appreciation for it (including here at TheGamer), which Darrah chalks down to the characters.
"Over time, as we've got more and more distance from the launch, Dragon Age 2 has become the one that is fashionable to like," says Darra at 53:35. "And I think it's because – while it has many flaws, while it shows that it's been rushed, while there are some mistakes in it – what Dragon Age 2 does is that it has a strong focus on characters. After we got out of the blast radius of the confirmation bias and the marketing campaign, the game was able to get a bit of fresh perspective from people. That allowed people to see what was good about the game and not just see what was different or bad about the game."
This isn't unprecedented. Take, for instance, the Star Wars prequel trilogy example given earlier. A majority of fans hated the movies when they came out, but after the Clone Wars animated series, which deeply focussed on character development, and the release of the sequel trilogy, which was somehow worse. The prequels don't appear all that bad in retrospect. The key word being 'appear'.
As for the recently revealed title of Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, BioWare has said that aside from the name and a bit of plot flavour, we're not going to see or hear much about the game until later this year.
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