Dragon Age News Thread

Brianne Battye‏ @bbattye
Making writing playlists and need some new instrumental music (or to rediscover something awesome). Any suggestions? I love writing to movie soundtracks, but if you like something different, I'd love to hear that too

Mary Kirby‏ @biomarykirby
Depends on what (or who) I'm writing. Varric got Gershwin's Piano Rolls and Yo-Yo Ma's Bach cello suites. Vivienne got Zoe Keating and the Inception soundtrack.

Brianne Battye‏ @bbattye
Vivienne gets a soundtrack about mind games? I'm shocked!



[HASH]DAT

Emily (aka Domino)‏ pentapod
"Oops... I just hit submit instead of pre-check..."
"Did you just break the build?"
"YOLO!"
#overheardintheoffice





[HASH]DAT

I obviously haven't been attacking enough doors.... ALL doors?

No, he mentions keep doors, from 3 keeps we can attack.

GamesRadar @gamesradar
Now that we know Dragon Age 4 is real, here’s what we want to see [updated] buff.ly/2Alf05R

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[HASH]DAT

Huh... a surprising vote for open world. I mean, I enjoyed it, but most people I see pooh-pooh the concept. For what it's worth, I think MEA did handle open world a bit better than DAI in regard to having activities spread around the map and also in making the maps more dynamic. More things like day/night change in Crestwood + dam activities would go a long way to improving things.

The only thing I hated, loathed, despised (etc) from MEA's open world maps were the random quests you found by clicking on some item in the world. They're not really "fetch quests," as they don't all involve obtaining things, but that is sort of what they were. The reason they were so annoying was because they required you to go around and around and around (and around) the map, looking for more enemy camps to find whatever it was. These things were not marked on the map. If you had already done a fair bit of exploring before getting whichever quest, you might have to figure out which camps to return to. In a way, they're sort of like DAI requisitions, but much worse. At least you knew that they were requisitions and could even avoid them, but these MEA abominations disguise themselves, tempting you to pick up a random quest that might lead to something interesting, only to turn around and ensnare you in a seemingly never ending loop of exploration. I'm normally a completionist, and these were the only "quests" (they're not worthy of the word) in the entire game that I didn't finish.

The other thing I found a bit perplexing was the vote for "better connections with our party members" which specifically references the MEA loyalty missions. While this type of thing is nice, the conflict I see with these is that having such a huge amount of resources taken up with that has the potential to limit the amount of party members, and also to potentially alter the optional recruitment. All of MEA's followers were mandatory; I can't remember if any of their missions were as well. This is the problem with followers that are more closely tied to the plot, which sucks if you really hate someone.

I thought DAI had a nice amount of follower content, with a mix of actiony and non-actioney content (e.g. Cassandra versus Dorian), that was tailored to that follower. Having all of the MEA missions be some sprawling combat adventure got a bit tiresome because they were ALL like that.

The problem I had with those quests, was that either the camps, or the items you had to find in them, didn't spawn for me. (or it took ages for them to spawn   ) I have one quest I never could finish, because the item I need never appeared. I think the mission text was "Destroy "Thing"" Just that the Thing never spawned. 

I don't think people appreciate just how creative game programmers have to be to design stuff we don't really think that much about while playing  

Emily (aka Domino)‏ pentapod
"There is no F-U button"
#overheardintheoffice



[HASH]DAT

BioWare @bioware
Take a peek at the first 12 pages of Dragon Age: Knight Errant #2 via @polygon: bit.ly/2iqA7g3

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[HASH]DAT

Lollll thanks, Dorian!

I never take this talent because of combat issues, but this story is hilarious. And... you can end the spell early? How?



I don't know why people keep second-guessing DG's own thoughts and feelings on the matter. He had been there for like 20 years by that point. He wanted to do something different and felt like a change. Most of what I've seen him say suggests that he was burnt out on Dragon Age, so he didn't want to return to "work on his baby."