BioWare Responds to Graphical Disparities in Dragon Age

November 09, 2009 | By: IndustryGamers

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Dragon Age: Origins was released last week, receiving high praise from most critics, and judging by Valve's digital sales charts on Steam, good early sales results as well. BioWare is known for releasing high quality products and Dragon Age certainly fits the bill, but one aspect of the game that reviewers seemed to complain about is its visuals, particularly in the console versions.

The consensus seems to be that the PC version is superior in every way (Metacritic backs this up with a 91 for the PC version vs. 89 for PS3 and 86 for Xbox 360), but what's perhaps more surprising is that there are noticeable differences between the console versions. GameSpot's review claims, "the Xbox 360 version looks positively disappointing."

The reviewer elaborates, "Textures are highly compressed and colors are washed out, though the upside is that this version maintains a smoother frame rate than on the PlayStation 3, where things might get jittery when swiveling the camera around. The PlayStation 3 version features higher-quality textures than those on the Xbox 360, better color saturation, smoother facial animations, and shorter load times. Minor visual hiccups, like corpses that disappear and reappear, are a bit more common on the PS3, however. The PC version is the superior experience, but if you're choosing between the two console releases, the PlayStation 3 has the upper hand."

Curious about these differences, IndustryGamers reached out to BioWare for comment. The PS3 and Xbox 360 of course have vastly different architectures, but you'd hope that studios could produce SKUs of roughly equal quality across the two high-end consoles. Nevertheless, BioWare is satisfied with the end result. “Looking at the reviews as a whole, we’re seeing that people are enjoying the game no matter which platform they are playing on. We created the game to take advantage of each platform’s capabilities and we’re extremely pleased with the reactions we’ve received on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC,” commented Matt Atwood, Sr. PR Manager at BioWare.