Former Mass Effect and Dragon Age director says he "wouldn't go back" to the way BioWare makes games

Former Mass Effect and Dragon Age director and BioWare general manager Aaryn Flynn says he "wouldn't go back" to the RPG studio.

In a presentation ahead of the release of his new survival game, Nightingale, Flynn, whose BioWare resumé runs nearly 20 years from Baldur's Gate 2 to Anthem, discussed the lessons he's learned at his new studio, Inflexion Games. "It's really important to us that we create a lot of value for our players," Flynn said. "I could tip a beer and tell you all about my frustrations at BioWare and EA around value creation for players."

Flynn doesn't touch on those frustrations in huge detail, but he does mention some of where they might have stemmed from. He discussed the value in self-publishing Nightingale, suggesting that "it's a really, really cool difference between our time at BioWare when EA published so much [sic] of our games and when we had third-party publishers," and also touched more on the idea of "value creation," hinting that difficulties existed around "what it means to do something that players can truly appreciate and truly love about a game that they play," tying that into Nightingale's $30 price tag.

More than anything, however, Flynn discusses the community of players that Inflexion has worked with to bring Nightingale to life, saying he's "hugely grateful" for the "tens of thousands" of players who have helped test the game: "They've been so gracious and so appreciative of it. And we love working with them." 

Unfortunately, Flynn says that the player interaction he's found so useful for Nightingale is something that he found to be missing from other parts of his career: "We didn't do a lot of that at BioWare, at least not in the middle time at BioWare, we did in the early days. So I wouldn't go back, I just wouldn't go back to doing things where we just sat in a room and built something and then finally launched it and said that was that."

Check out our Nightingale preview for a closer look at Flynn's new survival game.