🐉 wii sports jock 🐉 @turbogandalf Hi @patrickweekes I love the knight errant & deception comics and i'm really curious: how much of the narrative & character decisions come from the lead DA writers, and how much is up to the comic authors?
Patrick Weekes @patrickweekes Tricky question! Short version:
- We at BW (me, Matt Goldman, Nick Thornborrow) give a high-level “Here’s what kind of story we’re interested in.” - Comic writers (Christina and Nunzio currently) propose a story based on that. - We at BW offer lore adjustments as needed.
So the great folks at Dark Horse, and Christina and Nunzio specifically, are telling a story they own, and we are making sure it fits with where we want to take the franchise.
🐉 wii sports jock 🐉 @turbogandalf i hope.. vaea is in the fenris comic....
Nunzio DeFilippis @ndefilippis She is.
fine dwarven crocs @inhushedcrocs thank you so much for this confirmation.... she's my absolute favorite from all the comics 🥺💕
Nunzio DeFilippis @ndefilippis She's probably my favorite character that I've ever created in comics (with Ser Aaron a close second). I've come to love Francesca too, but Vaea's my pride and joy.
Rollin Bishop @rollinbishop If all goes well, should have an interview with the creative team in the next couple weeks. What do you #DragonAge fans want to know?
Nunzio DeFilippis @ndefilippis Please send your questions about #DragonAge #BlueWraith to @rollinbishop so Christina Weir and I can answer them in our upcoming interview. Happy to answer anything we can without spoiling the series. #Fenris #Vaea
Imperator Furiåsa @devilkitten We were given new cups when we moved, but they’re not cups. They’re barrels. “Would you like a barrel of Earl Grey?” “Yes please. Add a hive of honey and a cow of milk as well, please.”
Crystal McCord @mrscmccord Today, @bioware brought in @carrieadoll for a workshop on Finding Your Story. Carrie has such a way of making me looking inward and pulling out feelings that I didn’t realize were hiding away in there. I feel empowered and inspired! The best day. Onward!
John Epler @eplerjc I’d like to give credit to @patrickweekes for at least half of the dread tweets I’ve visited upon you this morning, but it truly takes a village.
David Gaider @davidgaider I can't decide whether this will be fun or a vicious bloodsport which will have me ducking for cover. Or both. 😅
I mean, think about it: I recently tweeted an opinion about Alistair and Kaiden, and had their fans descending on me like angry hornets. Am I *allowed* to have personal opinions on romances? Even after four years away from BioWare?
Chris "Communist Skeleton" Anderson @postmodernlocke "Oh, you must work at BioWare!" "How could you tell?" "You're the only people who wear hoodies in this building."
Sean Obrigewitch @shrimpbutch What is your favourite level in a #BioWare game and why? I am doing important research and I need your help! #Anthem #MassEffect #DragonAge #SWTOR #SWKOTOR #EnvironmentArt #GameDevelopment
Emily (aka Domino) Taylor pentapod It's a good type of Friday when someone points you to the trove of QA bug videos from Dragon Age Inquisition development and you get to meet "Ser Noodles", aka what QA called the horse before its legs worked properly ... 😆
Imperator Furiåsa @devilkitten Ser Noodles climbing a ladder is priceless.
Sean Obrigewitch @shrimpbutch What is your favourite level in a #BioWare game and why? I am doing important research and I need your help! #Anthem #MassEffect #DragonAge #SWTOR #SWKOTOR #EnvironmentArt #GameDevelopment
Sean Obrigewitch @shrimpbutch Thank you all so much for all your comments yesterday! I really appreciate you taking the time to contribute to the conversation! #MoreQuestionsToCome
Here's how Dark Horse Comics describes the new three-issue comic:
"Dragon Age: Blue Wraith starts off with the fanatical Qunari seeking to topple the Tevinter mageocracy. Caught in the middle, one powerful young mage’s desperate search for her father brings her face-to-face with a notorious mage hunter—Fenris, the Blue Wraith."
The exact creative team for Dragon Age: Blue Wraith includes writers Nunzio DeFilippis (Dragon Age: Knight Errant, New X-Men) and Christina Weir (Dragon Age: Deception, New X-Men), artist Fernando Heinz Furukawa (Dragon Age: Knight Errant, God Is Dead), and colorist Michael Atiyeh (The Orville: New Beginnings, Halo: Escalation), with covers done by Sachin Teng. In general, these names should be familiar to anyone that's been following along with the most recent set Dragon Age comics.
Dragon Age: Blue Wraith #1 is set to release on January 15, 2020 with the following two issues releasing after that.
David Gaider @davidgaider My eyebrow rose three notches.
Emily (aka Domino) Taylor pentapod "What kind of colour is that for a banana to be? No banana should be that colour." "On the bright side, the avocados look way better now." "But the bananas!" "It's the bananas of Dorian Gray. For the avocados to look better, something else had to suffer." #overheardintheoffice
John Epler @eplerjc DAI deep lore - the reason Iron Bull had a dedicated sex tower is because we boarded out the whole ‘everyone walks in on you’ scene and then we made the player’s bedroom with a staircase entrance instead of a door.
More deep lore - I deliberately framed the scene so the creepy picture on the wall would look at you disapprovingly, and got the Art team to revert it when they changed it.
I’m trying to remember all the other weird shit we added because after a certain point it was ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’.
Oh right, the scene where Bull fights off the assassins had zero motion capture budgeted for it, so it is pieced together from something like 40 animations blended in-engine.
DA2, but when Bartrand locks you in the vault, I made the player do a rail slide because it was infinitely easier than trying to get staircase animations to line up.
Mark of the Assassin - if you spare Arlange, he shows up (creepily peering around a corner) in the background of two scenes before he confronts you. One is the Lake, and I forget the other.
More Mark of the Assassin - when Prosper’s guards surround you in the vault, I had to make it look like something you’d never fight your way out of due to overwhelming odds. I also had a hard character limit, so it’s like, six guys, looped repeatedly.
More DAI - the hardest scene I ever worked on from a tech perspective is when Solas spoke to the spirit in Elven, but the subtitles were in English, because our Face animation tech did -not- like it.
The hardest part of the Iron Bull afterglow scene was making sure Bull’s junk was properly covered in every shot.
Patrick Weekes @patrickweekes The Other Sex Tower
A lot of these @eplerjc DAI Memories seem to come back to me asking for something impossible with current tech/resources and then Epler making it not only possible but kickass.
John Epler @eplerjc More accurately, a lot of these come down to Patrick being an absolute pleasure to work with, because they understood we couldn’t do everything, but all they asked for was the best player experience we -could- do.
Patrick Weekes @patrickweekes Plus a soapbox for the dwarven Inquisitor to stand on.
👻 🎃Pivot to Video 🎃 👻 @krisligman I remember being at the GaymerX panel where you very somberly informed the audience that yes, John had just figured this out
Patrick Weekes @patrickweekes It turns out that a scene involving significant physical contact between two characters, one of whom is sometimes 4’10” and sometimes 7’2”, and sometimes in the middle, is kind of a pain.
John Epler @eplerjc Did Iron Bull at one point have lovingly detailed junk?
John Epler @eplerjc More DAI - the hardest scene I ever worked on from a tech perspective is when Solas spoke to the spirit in Elven, but the subtitles were in English, because our Face animation tech did -not- like it.
Pella @pellamore Why was the animation tied to the subtitles?
Patrick Weekes @patrickweekes Short version: I was being fancy.
Longer version: it’s not tied to the subtitles. It’s tied to the line, and the line IS the subtitles. The tech can do “rough in lip sync from text.” It can’t do it from an audio file.
Which is why, barring a text/VO mismatch, the subtitle is also the audio line.
But because I was being FANCY, I wanted Elf Inquisitor to get English* subtitles for the bits between Solas and the spirit.
* Or whatever language one played in.
I would love for us to get tech that made this easier — I love having elves and Qunari and dwarves say stuff in their own languages for dramatic effect — but it’s an esoteric ask.
John Epler @eplerjc Sort of - it analyzes both, audio for timing and text for phonemes. When they don’t match it kind of just gives up. Patrick Weekes @patrickweekes Listen, Epler, I Dunning’d my way into this conversation, and imma Kruger my way out of it.
John Epler @eplerjc I think the scene from DAI with the worst effort-to-people-seeing-it ratio I worked on was when you hug Varric after leaving Hawke to die. Still worth it, even when it broke weekly.
More canon, @patrickweekes and I refer to anyone who let the Chargers die as ‘basically monsters’.
Patrick Weekes @patrickweekes It’s a totally valid choice, we can see both sides, but they ARE monsters.
John Epler @eplerjc Deepest of lore - until tonight I forgot there was an Iron Bull scene where he takes you to visit your soldiers, and I worked on it.
