"No Brothels to be in DA4" as per Mark Darrah Tweet.

From what I know no modern engine is built under specific type of game - they are built to be flexible. And yes, now that BW and others have developed tools and modules it is indeed suitable to build RPGs and will become even more suitable with time.
The Nomad is way more core to the experience of game like MEA than brothels in DA ever were, lol. We spend a lot of time in the damn thing, exploring and getting to places, even listening to banter - it makes the experience more enjoyable when the ride is fun and the car doesn't drive like a three-wheeled horse carriage.

Besides - I gave Nomad as an example, because I know the devs mentioned NfS team helping them working out the kinks for the ride, but we have no idea in what other areas other devs from other studios have helped them with their games.
To my knowledge there are no 'highly specialized' engines on the market tailored specifically for someone's needs, unless a studio builds it for themselves - something you yourself said the Western gamedevs have advantage over Japanese for NOT doing. According to gamedevs like those sharing insider knowledge on Extra Credits channel, the power of modern engines lies not in their specialization, but on exact opposite: their flexibility. Of course, each engine has its quirks and some are more powerful than others, but none is designed to be tailored to someone's needs... well, unless those needs are 'to create a game'.

And yes - managing 8 different engines over a host of different studios does indeed seems to be problematic. Bioware had experience with it themselves, looked at the problems brought with using a host of different engines in their own studio, then at Frostbite... and chose Frostbite.

And honestly, regardless of BW's choices, if I happened to own EA then picking and sticking to one engine I owned and could shape however I liked without worrying for external licenses and agreements, would be my very first choice, worth all the years of implementing its usage across all my studios and developing the tools. With all the shortcomings EA can be easily accused of, I consider this to be a very sensible move.

I thought the Mako was awful and the Nomad was pretty good. (Didn't help that the ME1 vehicle combat system was a crashing bore.) I suppose if you didn't get any added value from the work done on the Nomad, you wouldn't see the point of the work.

Which is ironic given time some spent on arguing how even minute details put into far less significant piece of content (like brothels) can enrich the world and game.

Brothels have to do with worldbuilding and story*, the Nomad is merely a tool to funnel people from fetch quest 83 to fetch quest 84. Worldbuilding and story are more important (in my biased opinion.) The Nomad is important in that you spend a god awful amount of time in the thing, but if they didn't have the dodgy idea in the first place of building large worlds populated with "find 9 ancient artifact" quests it wouldn't be needed. It adds little to the game of Mass Effect, it's important to be functional but it doesn't have to excel. And speaking of not excelling, a quick glance around the internet will reveal that despite the Need for Speed team working on the Nomad, it still annoyed a large number of people. Me included.

The Nomad experience shitted me up the wall as much as the Mako experience did, which leads to a fascinating point. Apparently the core concept of Andromeda was tapping into the untold potential of ME1, which basically means they took one of the aspects that royally irritated the bejeezus out of almost everyone in ME1 and they thought "lets make that aspect 100 times bigger". Everybody cheered when the Mako didn't make an appearance in ME2 (and sighed when we got planetary scanning) but hey I'm sure everyone'll love the Nomad, right? Right?

Regarding engines, we'll just have to see how their next RPG plays. If they get the engine working gangbusters then I'll gladly eat my words.

*It of course depends on how they're implemented.

This argument doesn't really work -- unless your intent was to just slip away from the topic of whether cross-studio expertise can be useful because you realize that it's a loser. (I appreciate a good dodge, but you can't seriously think that midnight tea would let you get away with that.)

I'm sympathetic to the idea that a design vision based on ME1 wasn't a good idea -- as I've said before, why base a successor game on the worst game in the trilogy? -- but the production process for parts of the game that you don't want in the first place can't be important to you personally.  And once the designers are going with a Nomad, or whatever, it needs to work well.

Unless your argument is that the NfS guys didn't and couldn't improve the Nomad for anyone, you aren't saying anything useful.

The Nomad has as much to do with the story as brothels do, and it's as much a gameplay tool as it's a worldbuilding tool. We're pioneers and explorers of worlds that are largely uninhabited or, as we found out, decimated by a catastrophe - giving us vast spaces which we scour for resources and slowly make them viable as we travel in a hardy ride acts as an apt illustration of the theme they were going for, regardless of what people think of its implementation.

The fact that Nomad leads to what you deem as dozens of fetch quests is irrelevant - after all, the brothel can be a hub that will make us run fetchquesty errands too, which is something of a separate issue from it telling us something about the story or its themes from its design alone. Hence Nomad is as important as any story element (especially given the amount of time we can spend in it) - and if it's annoyed you, imagine how annoying it would be without NfS team's help. After all, we do have a direct comparison of implementation of similar mode of transport in earlier Mass Effect and, from what I've seen, consensus seems to be largely on the side that it was indeed way worse.

But like I said - it was just an example of something they could get help for from a different studio that I know they shared with us. We don't know what other things may have been helped with, or how other teams can help Dragon Age or Anthem team or whatever else there is or will be. Point is that with EA working on a single engine now, they can and here's hoping that it allows them to build better or more robust games.

Orlais & Tevinter both have deadly, decadent courts - as does Nevarra from the way Cassandra tells it. But none of them have felt as drow-like to me as playing through the dwarf noble origin.

If I may, formerfiend : if we could get flings back, instead of brothels, would you be satisfied? Flings were a thing back in DA:O, though I don't remember them having much of a presence in any other Bioware game. I would much rather they returned, perhaps even with more depth and reactivity.

I don't care to have flings all that much either, to be honest, but I would consider it a good opportunity to roleplay, one way or the other. It's certainly far more Conan-like than going to a brothel. In the stories I've read, the man never once pays for sex.

The question also goes to everyone else who's been arguing for a brothel, if you want to answer it.

How would you know?

This reply was worth the two week wait.

It's a game, the NPCs don't care. There's no need to take stuff away from the game, but add to it. Don't like whoring in games? Then don't fucking do it. It's so simple.

But I suppose it's Bioware's way of "Disneying" what once was a gritty and immersive franchise for this new generation of offended by anything Tumblr style fans, shame DAI, shame.