Bioware doesn’t feel it’s competing with TheWitcher 3

Speaking at a panel hosted during PAX Australia, Bioware writer Patrick Weekes rejected the idea that Dragon Age: Inquisition is in direct competition with The Witcher 3.

I think ‘compete’ is the wrong word. I think there’s a story that people want to tell, where the video game companies hate each other and ‘our game is going to crush theirs.’ And that’s really not true. I came to BioWare because I love games. And I hope that the next Witcher game is fantastic and I hope that ours is fantastic, and I hope that people buy both and play both.

Every time another great game comes out, and raises the bar, that’s not threatening; it’s only threatening if we don’t think we can ever do anything better. So we look at something and go ‘that’s a fantastic game. How am I going to incorporate that awesome thing and do it in a BioWare fashion?

He then added that the real competition is with the past games of Bioware.

So, no, I think our biggest competition, and the only thing we absolutely want to crush, is what we’ve done in our past games. That’s one of the reasons I’m so proud to be on the Dragon Age team, it’s one of the reasons I was proud to be on the Mass Effect team; every new project we said ‘let’s look at the best things we did on our previous game and let’s see how we beat that. Let’s see how we make that look antiquated and quaint as we go into our next game.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is the third chapter in the series and is expected to hit in 2014, just like The Witcher 3.