Dragon Age veteran says his favorite BioWare RPGs are actually Neverwinter Nights and Jade Empire because they came before the industry's "necessary evils"

BioWare's former general manager Arryn Flynn, despite being closely associated with Dragon Age and Mass Effect, says his favorite games from the studio are actually an older pair because they came before the industry's "necessary evils." 

Speaking to Gamesradar+ about his new survival game's big turnaround, Flynn also delved into why Neverwinter Nights and Jade Empire are his favorite games from the storied RPG studio. "I worked on the tool set for Neverwinter Nights and there was just me and a couple other engineers," Flynn explains. "And it was just the three engineers who built that and I loved that time. I thought that was super cool. I was stretching my wings as a programmer and engineer."

The Neverwinter Nights tool set lets players tinker with the game's insides and "when I hear people are still playing Neverwinter and still messing around with that thing 20 odd years later, it blows my mind," Flynn said. He also loved that every single designer and developer at the studio had to use the same tool set because it "pushed and pushed and pushed us" to continually improve it.

That ragtag development style also fuels Flynn's affection for old-school martial arts RPG Jade Empire. "Again, a small team delivered something BioWare hadn't done before, which is action combat," Flynn continued, "and we did that on the original Xbox, with 64megs of RAM, and we took the KOTOR engine and made it work for that."

"I really enjoyed those times. We were just scrappy developers doing our best to make cool things. The trappings of the business, and a lot of those things hadn't bedded in yet, hadn't become necessary evils."

The Dragon Age veteran also recently praised Baldur’s Gate 3’s early access, and said he wouldn’t return to BioWare because that “was never on the cards for us.”