Dragon Age News Thread

Eh I think it's a player preference. I didn't mind the way that DAI did questing and I don't think that they all need to be "memorable in some way."

However, I don't think that those types of quests quite work for a plot like DAI. This is a similar issue with having the Inquisitor gathering most of their own crafting mats and other things. Why is the Inquisitor doing these petty things, or collecting various ornaments (via requisitions) on the battlefield? (No, saving people from starvation is not "petty," but that is still a fetch quest.)

On the other hand, I DO think they work for DA2, where your character is just hanging around in a specific city for years, especially Act 1 where Hawke needed to accumulate money. For me, the problem with DA2's fetch quests was the nonsensical nature of finding some random object and just magically knowing to whom it belonged. That was absurd. If those had been done in the vein of normal quests, where the NPC sends you out to find whatever item, that would have improved on the whole presentation. Maybe with those there shouldn't even have been a ! on the map, but relied on you talking to all of the NPCs. That would have been fun, since they are meaningless quests.

Here's another gripe about the DAI horse. If they're going to put in the horse again for the next one, they seriously need to do a lot better. The horses in Horizon gallops like a horse and behaves like a warhorse (despite it being a machine).

Well that is encouraging. Awareness that the ram meat quest is one of the most annoying of all of them, particularly with Walk Softly enabled -- just try killing a ram with infinite barrier regen and 3x as many hitpoints as you -- gives me hope that we won't be seeing anything like it again anytime soon.

Yes, I know that it is at least motivated by the plight of the refugees, unlike other fetch quests which seem to have even less motivation, but them critters are so hard to kill ... and I invariably aggro a bear while I'm hunting them.

So, now that MEA has gone Gold...any word on staff moving over to DA, or is everyone disappearing under the secret organization?

The only hint I've heard recently is that Blair might be moving back DA. I've heard more of people moving from MEA to Secret IP though...

I didn't think of this myself until someone else pointed it out but, you can hunt rams in Haven.**   No bears allowed, but you should probably watch out for Druffy's cousin.


**I ended up hunting nugs instead.

I miss Kirkwall.
Sometimes I sing "In the city , city of Kirkwall we keep it rockin" on the tune of California Love.

Mike Laidlaw‏ @mike_Laidlaw
When @eplerjc is all "why can't we do a rock opera DA," I'm all "way ahead of you, dude."



John Epler‏ @eplerjc
I just played myself.

Mike Laidlaw‏V @mike_Laidlaw
Did you know Gackt was one of the voices in Dawn of the Seeker's Japanese cast? You do now!

I recall an interview with Alexis Kennedy shortly when it was announced that he's working for Bioware and he revealed that game he's working on is already fair ways into production. And that was September last year.

edit: source is here

I wasn't saying that they were ways into full production - just that they're working on a game. And that was 5 months ago. It's fair to assume they're even farther with work now.

Except for the last part, about art assets, everything you described counts as preproduction. Prototyping is preproduction. Engine changes to support known changes to game mechanics or improvements to stuff like hair could be preproduction, or at least, a parallel schedule for core platform work, not necessarily allocated to one project.

But it wouldn't be impossible for up to 1/3 of the total resources to switch to DA4. I don't think it would be more of that, since Secret IP is a 1.0 launch, which have their own special challenges. Plus, even though 1/3 of the resources may start on DA4, they could get yanked off to work on Secret IP if it runs into problems.

I think what's important to most people, and probably some of the most labor intensive stuff, is cutscenes. It would be great if we had a couple of animators and artists that work on cutscenes to tweet about their progress. Not sure if that stuff comes early or late in production, but until they even start it, I don't think it matters that much whether the whole project is in production or not.

Well, we do know that John Epler - the main cinematic guy and current Narrative Presentation Lead - has tweeted this in October: