Dragon Age News Thread

A kind poster just gave a heads-up on a recent Game Awards podcast that talked a little about the last Dragon Age trailer at the GA.
open.spotify.com/episode/7D5JfK5rmIqVwvJ4mvQfvE?si=ncIgjFDwSI6ORxeshtg_5A&nd=1 (approx. 14 min. in)


Podcaster: Has there ever been a trailer that you look at and go, like, ‘this was too early’? Is there a story around the Dragon Age 2018 trailer? The story going around that they kinda did it without the full blessings of EA management, as a way to just kind of get the name out there so that it couldn’t get cancelled?

Geoff Keighley: Yeah, I remember that story going around, that’s definitely not true. We, EA and I laughed about that. I mean yeah, somehow it’s like, they slipped us the trailer like secretly, and we ran it -

Podcaster: That’s what I love like, on a USB stick, you met a guy in an alley with a USB stick -

Geoff: Haha, I’ll just run this. That is just - like, our show is at a scale that obviously like, EA’s on our advisory board, we have to have legal clearances for things we run, there’s a process to that stuff, so no, it definitely wasn’t like they went rogue. I think -

Podcaster: That’s not very punk.

Geoff: Just, just run some leaked assets. Yeah! There’s definitely, I think there’s some truth that like, for that game, and for other games also, I think sometimes developers wanna get games out there to make sure the projects keep going, or sometimes often we have games, and people just wanna put them out there, even to help recruiting, right? It’s actually surprising how many studios will be like ‘well, it’s way too early to announce our game, but it’s really competitive for talent, so we need to kind of announce we’re making this project and get it out there because we wanna get more people on the team’. Cause you know, the general trend is now is like, companies are like, ‘oh, we’re just gonna announce our game three months before it comes out’ or ‘announce it the day it comes out’, and you’ll see even this year, there will be games that are probably, three, four years off, right, but they’re gonna sorta tease them at the show. And a lot of it is for recruiting or you know they’re worried it’s going to leak, right? I mean the unique thing about games is that you really can keep things secret and surprise people. Like if a new movie is happening, you kinda know it’s happening, you might not have seen the footage of it, but you know they’re making this movie. In games, people really try and keep things a total surprise. And that gets harder and harder as you get further into development. So sometimes they’re like, ‘well, we might as well at least confirm it’.

Geoff: But yeah, the Dragon Age thing, I remember there was a lot of debate around that trailer, where, was it gonna happen or not? And that was one of those ones that I think was, you know, a lot of churn on it, were they ready with that, we even did a Dragon Age thing last year which was same thing, where there was kind of a lot of back and forth around, was it ready, what were they gonna show. Last year, you know, we did Dragon Age and Mass Effect which, I was really really happy with the Mass Effect trailer, that was something that we worked, I worked pretty closely with Casey Hudson on, um, to pull that together. But yeah, it’s rare that anyone truly goes rogue, but there definitely are things where the plans for trailers change, and, you know, sometimes things pull out. And that’s why people look at the final lineup and they’re like, ‘was this what it was a month ago’? No, there are things that kinda pop in and pop out.