Dragon Age: Inquisition has been delayed and, if you’re smart, you’ll just shrug this off. Because this was a forseeable setback. Games get delayed all the time, especially in the final stretch before their release.
Any BioWare fan should have known this was coming. The company’s own track record suggested it. Let’s look at it this way. In the last seven years, the developer has been working on six RPGs: Mass Effect, Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 3 , and Dragon Age: Inquisition . Of those six, two were released on time. Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect, Mass Effect 3, and now Dragon Age: Inquisition all missed or will be missing the original launch date. BioWare is more likely to delay a game than release it on time, so this honestly should have been expected.
More importantly, this postponement has come at about the time when BioWare is probably doing some last minute quality control. Think about it for a moment. What do developers and publishers always do in the last few months of development? They have Q&A testers going over Dragon Age: Inquisition , playing for hours, actively trying to break the game. I’d imagine more bugs were found than expected, and instead of shipping the game as-is and patching it later, BioWare is putting in extra work. Which isn’t to say we won’t see patches after the game is released, perhaps even day-one fixes, but now is the time when a few crucial parts are fixed.
Though, it would be foolish to think the entire reason behind the delay is for last minute touch-ups. As substantial a reason as that may be, I think there could be another deciding factor. October is a month packed with video game debuts. Dragon Age: Inquisition ‘s original launch date was October 7, 2014. Four days prior to that, Super Smash Bros . is coming to the 3DS. Not to mention, October 7 is the same day Driveclub, Skylanders Trap Team, Alien Isolation, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, Project Spark , and NBA 2K15 will be released, and The Evil Within is out a week later. Dragon Age: Inquisition is a huge star, to be sure, but it would have been buried among so many others.
In comparison, November 18, 2014 is positively barren. Sure, Dragon Age: Inquisition will be up against Far Cry 4 and Pokemon Alpha Sapphire/Omega Ruby , but better to face competition from only two games during one of the busiest shopping weeks of the year, than be one of eight major releases in a seven day span.
The point is, the Dragon Age: Inquisition isn’t a huge surprise, and it’s really nothing to get worked up over. True, we have to wait 30 days more, but we should think of it this way: October and November 2014 are going to be two of the busiest months in gaming, with multiple games coming out one after another. We’ll all be so busy, the time will fly by.