Dragon Age News Thread

So first of all, fuck Jason Schreier. Even in the edited excerpt, he comes off as a dick.

And second, VINDICATION! I've said all along that EA doesn't, "thou shalt intensify the greed!" That's just silly. But what they do say is, in many ways, worse, "We need to increase shareholder value and single unit sales aren't cutting it. What we need is recurring revenue! Bioware, can Frostbite simulate a Vegas slot machine? No? Well, work up some ideas and pitch us at the next leaders meeting. This will be our strategic imperative for the fiscal year, and we need all business units to align on this imperative. Bonuses will be based on a recurring revenue KPI going forward."

(I put a lot of words in Flynn's mouth, but I think my corporate speak is pretty authentic.)

In Jade Empire there is a style also named 'Thousand Cuts'.

I think the style also came from Lingchi because there is some Chinese culture in Jade Empire , and Mike Laidlaw was one of the lead writers. In Chinese there is another phrase almost equal to Lingchi, 'qian dao wan gua'. 'qian' means thousand, 'dao' means blade or saber, 'wan' means ten thousand, and 'gua' means cut. I think 'thousand cuts' is closer to 'qian dao wan gua'.

Yeah, not sure why "game not in full development has skeleton crew" is particularly newsworthy but I'm sure it helped get some clicks

It does mean that everybody hoping for a DA release before 2020 is just setting themselves up for disappointment.

Thank fuck I did the math and came up with 2020 or 2021 as the earliest possibilities...

If reports about MEA are accurate, the issue that decided of state of the project was wonky pre-production time, basically scrapping the main idea and getting the game reworked almost from the scratch late into development. If they can hash out enough of their vision and streamline where they can - and they've been working on it for a while now - the full production itself would logically be a smoother, potentially faster process. Nevermind that they'll have power of Anthem team behind their backs soon enough. It's not like it's still a secret IP and we don't know its release date yet, and we know that after the work on one project is done, the majority of Bioware's resources goes to the next one.

If it means a better game it will be worth the wait.

So we knew they were working on the game, we knew that the majority of the staff were on Anthem, so what's new here? Also, when I think of DA4 being a while away, I think of the phrase "quality takes time."

We'll get the game, maybe not for a couple of years or more, but we'll get it & time will be taken to make sure it is the best experience for all, I believe.

Just my opinion on this.

In the meantime I'd having a DA fix by going back through DA:I.

Yeah...let's hope that doesn't happen again. 

Presumably Sony and Microsoft keep some kind of dialogue open with major publishers/developers so they know timelines for these sorts of things.  After all, it does PS and XBox no good to release on a date and have no games available to play on them.