Blog post regarding Dragon Age production

Hey check it out!

As you may know, there are a few different stages to a game’s development. First are the Concept and Pre-Production phases, when a team works on the creative vision for the game and starts laying down the technical foundations – basically creating the conceptual and technological blueprint for the game. Iteration and flexibility are key here, as ideas and game mechanics are proposed, tested out, and refined. Once the blueprint is complete, the Production phase begins. Production is all about executing on the blueprint: taking those ideas and turning them into a working game. Eventually, a team hits Alpha and then Beta, where the polish happens, and the things that are special really come to life.

For the next Dragon Age, we are right in the middle of Production, which is a great feeling. Our blueprint was completed last year, so we’re now focused on building out our vision: creating amazing environments, deep characters, strong gameplay, impactful writing, emotional cinematics – and much more. The blueprint for the game is well understood and the team is focused.

A strong leadership team of industry andDragon Ageveterans is in place to carry us through Production and beyond. The game’s Production Director is Mac Walters, who recently led the development forMass Effect Legendary Editionand has an 18-year history with BioWare. Corrine Busche, who has been leading the design direction for Dragon Age, is our Game Director. She has a wealth of experience, including 15 years at EA, and a passion for the franchise. Benoit Houle is the Director of Product Development, and he brings an in-depth understanding of the franchise thanks to having worked on every singleDragon Agegame – starting over 16 years ago onDragon Age: Origins. I will also be working more closely with the Dragon Age team as they go through production while continuing to guide the studio.

Cool! I really did like Inquisition quite a bit and wouldn't mind spending more time in that universe. (Hard to believe it's been eight years since we recorded this.) Hopefully Claudia Black's still doing voice acting because that's half of why I play these games.

They forgot to mention the "Oh crap, the release is in 12 months, better build the entire game in 8" phase and the "It's not crunch it's BioWare Magic (TM)" phase. /s

In all seriousness, I really wish I was more hyped for this than I am. However, at this point, I'm pretty jaded about BioWare's ability to put out a decent game. Between Andromeda, Anthem, and the Less-Than Legendary Edition, I'm very much in the "three strikes and you're out" camp.

@therealturk: To be fair, EA's upper management deserves most of the blame.

Just set it in space.

I dont know what to expect from this at all. I love Dragon Age. I loved Inquisition even but it's a totally different Bioware from even that.

I do feel like completing beefing it on a Dragon Age 4 though would be the final straw for me with Bioware.

In the same post, they say that Executive Producer Christian Dailey is leaving. Sure makes last week's BioWare "news" seem like pre-planned damage control.

I want this game to be good. I want to love it. But geez.

I really want to see what this is, but right now they're in the unenviable position of having to directly compete with Baldur's Gate 3 (there's at least a bit of irony there). Really hoping both games come out of the gate amazing, two big budget CRPGs around the same time would be kind of awesome.

Gonna have to do a loooooot to get me to go back to Dragon Age at this point. The quality arc from Origins (fantastic, one of my favorite games ever) to 2 (interesting ideas rushed to severe imperfection) to Inquisition (everything wrong with 2014-era game design in one boring slog of a package) still bums me out.

@justin258: Granted I didn't play Inquisition but is Dragon Age still the sort of game you'd count as a CRPG? The reason I bring it up is I don't really view BG3 and Dragon Age competing for the same audience.

Maybe I'm being a genre dick but I always thought that in modern times you throw the C onto RPG to denote the Pillars of Eternity's, Wastelands and Disco Elysium's of the world.

Those poor bastards at Bioware. Time for 18 months of "Bioware Magic," aka working 60 - 100 hours per week of unpaid, mandatory crunch.

I really still want to be positive about this, buts it’s hard as it just keeps bleeding lead roles. I recently tried to replay inquisition, but I had played andromeda too recently and it all just fell flat (and I liked inquisition a lot the first time around in 2014).

I don’t know if the BioWare feeling can be reproduced after so long a time since the last game, such a troubled production and the implied reliance on making it feel like inquisition. I’d rather it felt like origins, if I’m honest. The Buldurs Gate 3 early access felt more like the modern version of a BioWare-like game and they are showing their work as they go, slow as it may be. The fact we still know nothing about DA4 isn’t helping the general unease.

But of course, I hope my cynicism is wrong and it’s a great game. I prefer playing good games to being right about about one sucking.

I would certainly count Origins, at least the PC version, as a CRPG in the same ballpark as Baldur's Gate and Pillars of Eternity. It's fully 3D, sure, but the presentation and gameplay ideas and tropes and so on and so forth feel very CRPG to me, less so in the console version because of the gameplay and control changes. The only real difference is that Pillars/Pathfinder/Baldur's Gate are all played from an isometric perspective and are more complex. I never actually played 2, but what I played of Inquisition felt like it still had one foot in that genre. It was less complex, more focused on having huge areas and combat that was supposed to feel more action-y than strategic, but it was splitting the difference more than anything.

But the real point I was getting at is that both games are very much going to be big-budget RPGs taking place in what is definitely a Western Fantasy setting where you create a character with a class, gather a party, explore a world full of voiced characters all of whom have something for you to do, and participate in combat that at least draws some inspiration from CRPGs of the late 90's/early 2000s. Inquisition wasn't really competing with, say, Divinity: Original Sin because they were in vastly different budget classes - one was a Kickstarter game for a company that had barely kept its head above water for years at that point, the other was funded by EA and came from the then biggest developer of Western RPGs around.

I suppose I am assuming that Dragon Age 4 is still going to have one foot in real time with pause combat where you pick a class while making a character and explore that class, but I could be totally wrong on that. They could go full action game.

Anyway, I'm not saying that the venn diagram of people who will play Dragon Age 4 and people who will play Baldur's Gate 3 are overlapping, just that there are probably a whole lot of people in whatever overlap there might be paying good attention to both games. And BG3 has a head start on positive reception. And DA4 has the baggage of Bioware's last decade or so to consider. And I think that's a significant thing Bioware needs to consider.

Also, it's still somewhat funny to me that Bioware (the company that made Baldur's Gate 1 and 2) might now need to keep an eye on the franchise that kickstarted that company (even though most or all of the staff that made BG1 and 2 are gone).

@justin258: Yep I agree totally, actually. Origins definitely fit the bill. I wasn't aware Inquisition had any of real time with pause stuff left so that's ignorance on my part. It always looked, perhaps superficially, like Mass Effect mechanics applied to the DA setting.

@hayt: You could pause and zoom all the way out to get a "tactical view" that was supposed to be similar to old Infinity Engine games. I need to try that game again, I guess, because I don't remember how similar it was.