Imagine a world where religious fundamentalists wage an uncomfortable war against the mages, tensions between humans and other species give rise to vicious conflicts, and prophesies centuries in the making start becoming reality in the middle of surging political conflicts between kingdoms.
Add to this RPG mechanics putting the player character in position to not only tangle with the mystical threats, but also weigh in on the political mess, AND kill a hefty amount of mundane and supernatural threats to public safety.
Are we talking about The Witcher or Dragon Age? Yes.
The two licenses have a good bit in common, despite following different gameplay ideas and obviously different lore, so let’s take a look at both of them, and see how and where they differ…but also how they are similar.
The Witcher 3 vs Dragon Age: the Fantastic Clash
With Spell and Sword: Combat
The biggest differences between the two are their combat systems.
The Witcher 3 is definitely a strong solo act with occasional “feat.” from an independent NPC, if the plot dictates it. Otherwise, Geralt is on his own, and you control him much like you would control a character in any number of third-person action games, with light and strong attacks, dodges, convenient item uses, and a few quick-draw magic tricks for offense, defense, and crowd control. Enemies tend to be a test of reflexes, rather than build and gear, although they can certainly help.source: https://www.thegamer.com/
Dragon Age is in a completely different wagon, as a spiritual successor to BioWare’s run of Baldur’s Gate. As a result, combat in DAs is party-based with a tactical pause, with minor tweaks and differences based on the installment. The parties tend to have up to four characters filling in different niches based on their class and specialization. There’s a lot of room for strategizing, and combat scripts (which were pleasantly complex in Dragon Age Origins) helped you customize and automate your toons’ behavior in a satisfying way.
The World
Although combat couldn’t be more different, there is some overlap in the way both franchises do their world structure, particularly between TW3 and Dragon Age: Inquisition.
The Witcher 3 is very much an open world game with much of what it entails: free exploration, lots of incidental activities to clear off the map, some minigames, and plenty of side-quests to accept on your travels. In the core game there are two main big maps, Velen and Skellige, and two smaller ones, White Orchard and Kaer Morhen, each with its own quests, NPCs, and stories to tell.
Dragon Age games do this a differently depending on the entry. DA2, for example, is mostly the story of a single city, so you’re confined to the same locations changing over several years the plot takes from start to finish. On the other hand, Dragon Age: Inquisition offers two different central hubs (dictated by the plot) you manage your organization from, but most of the game happens on large, detailed open world maps, each with a different elaborate problem tying into the over-arching plot.
And since we’re at it…
The Stories
We’ve covered a bit about the general world setup in the intro, so let’s get into the nittier-grittier instead.
The Witcher 3’s plot is mostly focused on very personal stakes for Geralt: before we even properly leave the introductory area, we learn that Geralt’s adopted daughter Ciri is back in the world and Geralt is needed to find her before it’s too late. The person delivering the news is also important, as it’s the sorceress Yennefer, with who Geralt’s had a tumultuous relationship for a long time. What follows is a dramatic journey with many appearances both from characters the fans of the games already know and many nods to the fans of the source material: Andrzej Sapkowski’s short stories and novels.
TW3’s plot is a direct sequel to TW2 and TW1 before it, which might make certain bits less clear if it’s your entry point. It’s also the final (at least so far) chapter in Geralt’s story, which is neatly wrapped up in the massive expansion Blood & Wine.
It’s a very different situation for Dragon Age, because each game in the series is a separate story, with a new protagonist, new threat, and mostly new cast of companions. In the first game, you’re playing as one of the last people equipped to deal with a magical plague/invasion, in the second you are a refugee who finds a new life in a troubled city, and in the last you’re saddled with an uncomfortable power and responsibility related to the intersecting physical and spiritual realms.
At the same time, each DA game pushes the timeline forward and explores a new part of the world, and there is some overlap. Dragon Age 2 begins with the main character’s family running from the twisted demonic hordes which were the main threat of DA Origins, and the inciting incident of Inquisition happened during peace talks hoping to end the mages vs. church conflict kicked off by the events of DA2.
Role-playing
In terms of the conversation systems, truly one of any RPG’s key features, both series are quite similar, with limited fully voiced dialogue options providing a limited, but characterful choices which give you some leeway in defining what kind of Geralt/Champion/Inquisitor you’re playing as. Conversations were more in depth in Dragon Age: Origins, but the scope has been narrowed down to give player characters greater front-loaded specificity. The Witcher’s conversations were left mostly unscathed from TW1, it was mostly the presentation that really shifted.
In both cases your decisions have a significant impact on the direction of the plot and the endings. This is, however, where the RPG-centric similarities end, because progression systems promote very different attitudes.
Progression
The Witcher 3 has you play, well, a witcher no matter what you do, and within this boundary the game uses a classless, point-buy system with four upgrade categories divided into tiers. You could specialize in swords, magic or alchemy, and invest some points into uncategorized, but useful skills. No matter how you spec, however, you’re going to be doing the same things, just in different proportions.
Each class has its own list/tree of abilities and upgrades, and there isn’t a lot of overlap between them outside of certain specializations, like Mages’ Arcane Warrior letting them tap into a melee playstyle.
Aesthetic considerations
Let’s end it with a look at the way the games, well, look.
First of all, while Dragon Age Inquisition and The Witcher 3 were released in similar timeframes, Origins and DA2 are older, and it shows in the graphical fidelity. So don’t go in expecting technical fireworks. Also, while DAI is held up by the designs, unlike The Witcher 3 it hasn’t received a beefy remaster of the graphics, so you won’t find RTX, DLSS and other fancy options there.
With that said, the design principles shift a good bit across the three games. DAO was rooted firmly in the “gloomily down-to-earth” style, with mostly realistic-looking armaments and architecture, although the color palettes were not particularly inspiring. DA2 kept the colors, but moved towards a more distinct, somewhat exaggerated, angular aesthetic, working quite well with the hub city’s harsh themes.
Dragon Age Inquisition designs were somewhere between DAO and DA2: distinct, but mostly believable, but it also added more color than the two previous games had combined, which made the setting feel much more alive, and exploration was much less monotonous. Even the desert location, Western Approach, looks exciting, and it’s literally a desert!
The Witcher 3, on the other hand, has the cake and eats it. The designs are generally rooted in realism or in its general whereabouts. There are notable differences in style between the fancy Witcher gear and the regular-folk equipment, which wouldn’t be out of place on a real historical battlefield.
The color palettes can change from scene to scene due to atmospheric lighting filters. One moment you might frolic with a sword amid green glades, and then you come across a haunted mansion and the colors become more ominous and monochrome. Coupled with maps inspired by northern British Isles and Scandinavia, continental Central/Eastern Europe, and sunlit Tuscany (in Blood & Wine DLC), there are enough diverse vistas to go around.
Beyond this part there be dragons
This concludes our relatively quick look at some of the general aspects of both admired fantasy licenses. Ironically, we didn’t cover dragons, but that’s because we didn’t want to put TW3 at a massive disadvantage. Nevertheless, hopefully, we cleared some things up, and these two fairly similar-seeming series. There are new installments to both planned, and once meaningful updates about them arrive, we’ll keep you on top of things!
We’ve talked about The Witcher 3 specifically, but if you’d like to see what’s up with the previous Witcher games, we’ve also prepared a comparison between TW2 and TW3.