Schmooples' Den! The DA News Discussion Thread

Mike Jungbluth @lightbombmike
When you wrangle together a spreadsheet that lays out the full scope of your game



John Epler @eplerjc
Me after we did that this week.

Hard to say, I find it unlikely they had only just figured out their main plot, but formalized every detail of quest implementation? Maybe.

Yeah, seeing this come from 2 departments (Narrative & Animation) makes me think they've got their whole gameplan laid out now (or soon, depending on the other departments).

Well, we know the release date is sometime after April 2022. Most likely Fall 2022, as BW likes to release games in either the first quarter or last quarter of the year. My guess is November, as they like that month.

Yeah it's animation and narrative leads talking here, so it's likely they've got the thing storyboarded and all the foundational planning done. 

There's also this comment by Mike Jungbluth further down:

Here's the text from that tweet:

ɴᴀᴛᴇ ᴡᴀʟᴘᴏʟᴇ @bentllama
Lead duties. Always taking hits for the team.

Mike Jungbluth @lightbombmike
This isn’t taking a hit for the team. This is setting up all the balls in a line for my team to keep kicking into the goal

Emily (aka Domino) Taylor pentapod
“Based on that one story from the old BioWare office where [redacted] had no pants on, it’s now mandatory, you have to have pants on!”
#overheard at the pub

Game scope covers everything that will be in the game: from engine features to the amount of text it will have. Managers and leads needs to be able to keep track of everything to make schedules and make sure things are on tracks.

It just mean they less or more locked the game scope down for now, which doesn't mean much because some companies does that just a year before release while others do it in pre-production. And being locked doesn't mean it can't change afterward anyhow.

...There isn't a 'colloquial' use of 'episodic', especially in something as specific as discussing stories, lol. "Episodic" and "serialized" are two different things.

And yes, actually - people will be lost. I began my adventure with Inquisition, and while I got the gist of the story, I had to go back and replay two other games in order to understand most of what was happening. If I wanted to know even more, I had to grab auxiliary material. None of those are standalone stories, or stories that need only short recap.

Never mind that story being serialized is a minor problem compared to other issues with adaptation.

But I've elaborated on that point in my earlier response to Hrungr, so you can hop back and re-read that part of discussion, if you're interested.

I think it's a pipe dream to think they'll have the marketing thing figured out by the time they're ready to actually talk about the game. They will either release way too much info a la DAI so you barely have to play the game to know anything, or they will tell us next to nothing.

I vaguely remember Mark Darrah or Mike Laidlaw staying that they put out too much information too soon for DAI, so they may make an active effort to trim it back until closer to release.

I’m still hopeful for some information at EA Play this year, but I’m not expecting it to be too informative until 2021.

I remember this comment from Mike from when he was still at BW...

Da1AnOnlyCrazy ‏@da1anonlycrazy
hypothetically if some one were to announce say a open world fantasy RPG when will be a good time to do so?

Mike Laidlaw @mike_Laidlaw
6 months before it’s in stores, if Fallout 4 is any indication.

- And as I've mentioned before, I'm a fan of shorter run-ups to launch for those reasons (TMI). And hype fatigue is a real thing. Hold back on showing gameplay until the studio is at least reasonably confident it'll be indicative of the final game. Showing off some overly-idealistic vertical slice a year before launch is just a recipe for setting unrealistic expectations.