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Dragon Age Dragon Age: Dreadwolf - full reveal in Summer 2024, Solas fangirls rejoice

alyvain

Learned
Joined
Mar 18, 2017
Messages
376
Emo elf things.

that's what I remember, yes, even though I've played BGII many times.

I'm not sure about Corypheus, but wasn't he a megalomaniac priest who wanted to reach gods, found nothing and decided to become a god himself because now the world is nothing as it used to be? How's that more vague than an elf being emo?
 

Dycedarg

Learned
Joined
Dec 14, 2020
Messages
153
so... why?

In Irenicus' case, the punishment he received from the elves made him unable to feel any emotion. That's why he decided to experiment on other elves: to see what they had that he was lacking. It's also why he imprisoned the nymphs, to see if they could spark any kind of reaction in himself. His ultimate solution was to rob you of your soul in other to restore his. It's also why I called him a sociopath: the curse put on him made him even less empathetic, therefore worse.

As for Corypheus, he doesn't even seem like a proper character. The point of most of his actions is only to advance Inquisition's plot, the little there is.
 

alyvain

Learned
Joined
Mar 18, 2017
Messages
376
to see what they had that he was lacking

why he decided to do so if he didn't have any emotion? for the science? then why he decided to go into such troubles for a soul? I seek answers.

Nevermind, I seem to remember now that he wanted only revenge. Still not convinced about his narrative connection to the Child of Bhaal, though.
 

Dycedarg

Learned
Joined
Dec 14, 2020
Messages
153
why he decided to do so if he didn't have any emotion? for the science? then why he decided to go into such troubles for a soul? I seek answers.

Nevermind, I seem to remember now that he wanted only revenge. Still not convinced about his narrative connection to the Child of Bhaal, though.

Despite his lack of empathy, he still remebered being different in the past. I also think your "for the science" is a better answer than you realize. If I had to use a trope to describe Irenicus it would be "mad scientist". Everything in his lab kind of points in that direction. The fact that his ritual only worked because you are a Child of Bhaal is certainly the weakest link of this story.
 
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Sep 5, 2020
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Location
Germania
Well, Mark Darrah (he/him) and Mike Laidlaw (he/him) of Dragon Age infamy have now both been fired, so Dragon Age 4 will probably be a 9 instead of a 10 on the gaming dogshit scale.

Not very reassuring, I know.
 

Takamori

Learned
Joined
Apr 17, 2020
Messages
875
DA:O tried to be a CRPG, opinions divided across the board. I personally enjoyed, guess at least at the time I was easier to be satisfied, I know the CD's could be a let down but I had a blast with Nightmare difficulty and how tactical I had to be with my PT.
Now I just tried DA2 after Bioware nose dive into decline, it was a really awful experience, like gameplay wise it was ok. But the story and the production around it felt like a huge downgrade compared to the previous and my main memory of it that the my character choice look liked that I was constantly walking over thin ice. I didn't knew what the fuck my character was expressing and I accidentally I end up in bed with that fucking ugly elf that does blood magic?

Anyway Inquisition I let my friend play it and tell me what he thought since he still had it in his patience to deal with Bioware shenanigans and was the straw that broke the camels back for him, as in his words it was like a constant train of faggotry and fan service for a bioware fanboy retard summed with a full MMO experience in a fucking single player game.

If is not just sperging, I have 0 hopes that Bioware out of nowhere will shit a incline tier game out of nowhere, even after Anthem and Mass Effect. If anything DA is going to be the death scream of Bioware, I never heard of studio being up after several fails straight.
 
Joined
Nov 23, 2017
Messages
4,010
I agree that the world & lore is interesting, even though they took it onto fandom realms at points in the sequels.

It's some species of hilarity and despair that DA is probably the best worldbuilding BioWare ever did, and yet they will never fulfill the promise of a good game in the setting.

DA:O is the best we'll get, unless they grow a spine, break free from EA, and get a new influx of talent.

That's not gonna happen.

Lol, they are fully-owned subsidiary. They are never gonna 'break free'.

EA isn't the problem with BioWare anyways. The problem with BioWare has always been BioWare. Blaming EA just feels like someone holding on to a modicum of hope that BioWare will get back on track or something. Only way I can see BioWare getting better is if the people running things have a better vision for future games, or if EA just steps in and forces a direction that turns out to be better.
 

Flying Dutchman

Learned
Joined
Aug 19, 2020
Messages
475
Not sure New Years message is relevant, but okay

I guess posted a status update can be considered an actual Bioware shipped effort with no bugs, so there's that
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,228
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth


https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-01-25-dragon-age-4-locations-confirmed

Dragon Age 4 locations confirmed

BioWare's fourth big Dragon Age game will be mainly set in Tevinter, an as-yet-unvisited land within the franchise's world of Thedas.

That's according to the studio's hulking BioWare: Stories and Secrets from 25 Years of Game Development book, which I picked up over the weekend.

For fans of the Dragon Age series, this confirmation will come as little surprise. The location was set up in the final scene of Dragon Age Inquisition's excellent Trespasser expansion - although this was over six years ago now, and many other plans for the future of the series have changed in the interim.

But while the plan to visit Tevinter was expected, more concept art within the book suggests the next Dragon Age will include other fresh lands as well.

Artwork of a glittering city surrounded by water almost certainly shows Antiva City, the capital of Antiva, an area which borders Tevinter to the east. Concept art for an Antivan Crow is also shown; a theatrical assassin "celebrated for their mastery of stylish slaying" who wears an elaborate mask, wields a glowing sword, and has several actual crow sidekicks.

There's also an image of the skeletal Mourn Watch, who "guard Thedas from occult threats" and hang out in a Necropolis. While this location isn't further identified, necropolises are used in Nevarra, another area of Thedas, whose citizens are known for mummifying their dead. Nevarra borders Tevinter to the south.

Other images show The Lords of Fortune, a treasure hunters' guild based in various places but founded in Rivain (to the northeast of Tevinter), and The Deep Roads, the dwarven tunnels which span all of Thedas.

In the years since Inquisition's release, the upcoming Dragon Age 4 (which may wind up just being titled "Dragon Age" again) has gone through a couple of reboots, while key staff connected to the project have changed behind the scenes.

Indeed, the BioWare book is already out of date as it lists long-time Dragon Age contributor Mark Darrah still as executive producer. Darrah and BioWare studio boss Casey Hudson both left in December last year, with leadership of the next Dragon Age game now in the hands of Blizzard and Anthem veteran Christian Dailey.

But, as it stands now, the project looks to be back focused on a big single-player RPG filled with familiar and fan-favourite faces to continue the ongoing narrative threads of the series so far.

A trailer released at the Game Awards last year was narrated by Dragon Age 2 sidekick Varric, while concept art for the game released at Gamescom 2020 appears to show other returning faces like Isabella and Tevinter native Dorian. And, of course, the much loved/hated egg/villian Solas/The Dread Wolf continues to loom large.

BioWare has never put a release date on Dragon Age 4, though EA has previously suggested it won't arrive until after April 2022. Look forward to visiting Tevinter and some of its neighbouring lands then.
 

Nano

Arcane
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Mar 6, 2016
Messages
4,647
Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
I'd get the fangirling over Solas if he wasn't ugly. But he is. He literally looks like an egg. What gives?
 

SpaceWizardz

Liturgist
Joined
Sep 28, 2018
Messages
1,048
Saw this on reddit:

  • BW don’t generally write things or the choices as bleak as the choices in DAO were anymore. This is a conscious choice on their part, they want their game to be fun
Uh oh!
Between this and some of the other things devs have said it seems they're making the same mistake as Inquisition where the game's premise (Tevinter) sets expectations that the devs have no intention to meet.
The Whedonesque/Disney writing style is a really poor hill to die on, especially after Andromeda and Anthem.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,228
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://felassan.tumblr.com/post/641228725599485952/jon-renish-foundation-technical-director

Jon Renish (Foundation Technical Director @ BioWare, working on DA4) recently did a Twitch stream where he played through some DAO, which I think is part of a series of such streams that he’s doing. Part 1 and Part 2 of the DAO playthrough can be rewatched on his YouTube channel here and here. Although he works on DA, this is his first time playing through DAO. He’s playing through it looking at random details from a dev perspective as he’s currently working on DA4 and therefore wants to know more about the previous games. He plans to play through all 3 games, with a ~3 hour stream every 2 or 3 weeks. The next part of this playthrough will be in a few weeks.

On the stream he mentioned some tidbits on the development of DA4. There were also some insights and anecdotes about the development of DAO and similar. It’s a 3 hour stream so I collected them here in case that’s of use to anyone (for example not everyone can watch streams which don’t have subtitles/captions). The stream is a fun/interesting watch though, so if you’re curious or able to watch I recc doing so. The rest of this post is under a cut for length.

Please note that there’s some paraphrasing on my part. There are also some additions from another dev who featured on the stream to give some commentary. The stream also contains more snippets that at times I couldn’t make out (I tried my best!).

(There is a mention of Cullen’s VA in the text below.)

DA4
  • Jon said he can talk about things about DA4 that aren’t “consumer-facing”, but he can’t say anything about the game that would be consumer-facing but which isn’t already publicly available. There are several reasons for this. One, that’s not his job, there are people whose job this is and they let each other do their respective roles. Two, BW are a publicly-traded company, so if he said something that could affect that that would be insider trading. Three, they’re not done making DA4 yet, so if he said that they have added [x] to the game and people got all excited about that or pre-ordered on that basis, but [x] ended up being cut, people would be like ‘BioWare lied to us’, when it’s just that things changed during the course of development, as is often the case
  • He’s glad that fans are excited for the game but notes that fan expectations are always double-edged. It can be really tough as some people started ‘playing’ the game in their heads as soon as they heard of it. That’s fine, he loves that, but he hopes that peoples’ expectations don’t turn into requirements. Clearly BW have alluded to certain characters, like Solas, being in the game, but some fans say things like “If [say] Morrigan isn’t in the game, then, rahhh!” Y’know, there’s a lot of talk about how certain characters have to be in the game, and yeah.
  • On characters which are quantum (i.e. characters which can die or which can have similar end-states as death in previous games): their being quantum makes it really hard for the devs to work with those characters in subsequent games. The devs naturally aren’t going to put as much effort into characters which could have died previously. A character can have had an amazing appearance throughout/role in a previous game, but if there is a risk of something happening to them and of them being removed [effectively] from the plot, it just doesn’t make sense to have them as a major character in a subsequent game. If a character can, say, sacrifice themselves in some glorious ending, the devs have to make sure that if they use them again, in worldstates where the character didn’t do that, the character is kind of ‘muted’, as the devs don’t want to disrespect the players who made a different choice
  • A comment in chat expressed a wish for Shale in DA4. Jon’s response is that he has no idea on that front
  • Bugs don’t come out of crunch, they come out of development in general. Crunch does impact on the quality of a game though. In recent years BW are always really trying to reduce crunch, they’re currently working really hard to bring it down. The best way of doing that is by controlling scope. As creatives it’s tough to balance wanting to make great stuff and be industry-leading with the desire to constantly do extra passes over things they’ve created like the audio, art etc. Their biggest enemy is time, other ways of reducing crunch or time spent in general include iterating tools to make often-repeated processes as time-efficient as possible
  • I think the following was an observation on the industry in general as opposed to a BW-specific/-exclusive comment: he thinks that as a result of this sort of thing [working to reduce crunch], a lot of games are going to have to be smaller and a lot more focused in scope i.e. the devs will have to focus on hitting the key selling points of that particular game/series as hard as they can, and cut down on branching out sideways/wide on a bunch of random other stuff
  • Jon doesn’t personally engage in character creators in games, but he knows that for some players that expression is worth a lot of time and focus. BW want to be industry-leading in this kind of stuff as it’s something which is interesting/key/integral to their games
  • In a way BW have made their own nest of problems what with every DA game being so different to the previous one. Still, he notes that each game has a staunch fanbase that says that their particular favorite game is the best one in the series
  • He doesn’t want people who think that DA4 isn’t what they want to buy it and be upset - there are so many other great games out there! BW are going to make the game they’re going to make - if some people like it, that’s great, and if some people don’t, that’s cool. Sometimes waiting until reviews are out and/or really seeing beforehand if a game is something that you want [has things/features in it that you want] prior to getting it - as opposed to jumping right in or pre-ordering - is a good idea. Fans don’t always know what they want, but they do know what they like - these are 2 different things
  • He hopes that whatever they ship for DA4, people go “I enjoyed this experience”, and that then, if there’s additional content for it down the road, people can decide, “do I want this further content?”
  • On hair: BW are using the new hair technology in the latest version of the Frostbite engine, so they’ll see what they can do! This was said in response to a comment about the hair in the latest FIFA games (as EA make FIFA)
  • A comment in chat asked about a flying mechanic (griffons). Jon’s response is that flying is such a heavy gameplay mechanic that you can’t put it in a game without everything in the game being built about it (see Anthem)
  • Relating to the above comment, in DA4 mounted combat would be cool but then they’d have to make the game ‘around’ mounted combat and make the mounted combat feature meaningful
  • On the underwater concept art: it should not be interpreted as a promise of gameplay. BW have amazing artists who sit down for a couple weeks while they’re in early production and just draw loads and loads of all kinds of stuff. Concept art is like a moodboard or Pinterest board. Elsewhere in the stream he advised, take all the concept art together like a mosaic and ask, ‘what is the overall theme here?’, and to zoom out from individual details. [This stuff echoes PW’s word on concept art]
  • BW don’t generally write things or the choices as bleak as the choices in DAO were anymore. This is a conscious choice on their part, they want their game to be fun
  • I think this was more of a general comment on games: SSDs (solid state drives) mean that players will see shorter elevator rides (Mass Effect - was this a reference to the remaster?) and fewer switchback corridors (those are actually loading zones). Generally, these are going to change mechanically the time it takes to do stuff in games
  • The devs have lots of features on their backlog that they’d like to offer players but each will ofc involve implementation and subsequent maintenance, and each one that is chosen to add is being chosen over something else. And sometimes, it’s hard for them to tell if [x] feature or [y] feature would be better to add to the game
  • They’re about to work on a giant feature (a pure tooling feature, something that isn’t consumer-facing) that is probably going to take ~2 staff years of effort [I think “staff effort” includes multiple staff working concurrently, so 2 years of staff effort doesn’t = 2 years of time chronologically] to get done in the next few months. They’re investing all this effort across the people working on it because they don’t want their artists and designers etc to have to deal with the problem that it’s going to solve anymore. I’m not sure what this feature is but elsewhere in the stream they referred to tooling and automation and gave the example of, the better your tooling is, the fewer times you have to manually set the camera for a human vs elf vs dwarf position, for dynamically-generated [cinematic?] content and for the first pass to be automated (if this is the case, less time is spent/wasted on redoing it and manually touching it up) [see last bullet point in this section]
  • He doesn’t know how big DA4 is going to be but said “let’s ballpark and say like most games it’ll be somewhere between 70 and 100 GB”
  • If we kept our Wardens as the PC throughout all 3 games, at the end they would be so powerful that it’d be a bit like “Let’s just do [thing], I’ve killed gods before, whatever”. He thinks it’s good that they have fresh characters each time in DA in order to reset that power level. Some people want more Commander Shepard in the next Mass Effect and he feels like, ‘what else could you possibly want / what else could that character possibly do after 3 games?’
  • When asked how much freedom he/they have now to focus on next gen, he said that there’s actually almost no difference on that front. The problems never change. They now have better renderers, better ray-tracing, better graphics cards etc, but they have always made DA games for high- and low-spec PCs, so it’s actually about gameplay systems. The freedom isn’t power-based and them getting access to more cores and more RAM generally isn’t going to change how the games are played. The games still have to be made for hard drives on PC. Dev creativity matters more than power here. The challenge of building a BW game is more about/from managing loads of different plotstates, loads of different art pieces, etc
  • On the title situation (two): names are the last thing they worry about because names have to go through legal before being approved. Every name, including character names, has to be checked in case it’s a famous person, or associated with something bad, or offensive in a different language due to localization etc
  • They don’t do face scans of people with big beards
  • There was also a bit about changes/developments to/in the cinematic design process and associated tooling [?] but I found it too hard to follow sorry >< This bit of commentary begins at timestamp ~ 1:52:45 and continues til ~ 2:00:05 [keep listening through the bit where they pause for a cutscene]
General BW
  • There’s currently ~350 staff in Edmonton, ~200 in Austin and more elsewhere
  • He notes that DA games sell pretty well, but relative to EA games in general, they’re a drop in the bucket compared to FIFA
DAI
  • 5% of players of DAI never created a character [Q: does this refer to people who just used the default appearances/presets with no editing, or people who only played multiplayer?]
  • The mounts don’t actually go faster than running, this is an illusion
  • I think they said it has 55,000 lines of dialogue. [I’m pretty sure I remember devs elsewhere saying it has 80,000 lines of dialogue]
  • One of the companions had to have their name changed during development because of legal/translation reasons. It sounds like the original name sounded too close to something offensive
DA2
  • Back when DA2 was internally code-named “Nug Storm”: this was at the beginning when it was pitched to the team on a set of slides. The image on the slide for that pitch had devil horns, a metal hand and no flesh, it was just made out of fire and flames
DAO
  • The engine DAO is made on is the third engine that they tried for it during development. [David Gaider has gone into the DAO engine stuff some on Summerfall’s series of DAO playthrough streams]
  • The cracks on the cracked eluvian asset are modelled after the crack on the Tardis in Doctor Who from around that time, as at the time some devs had been talking about Doctor Who a lot. A dev actually added this factoid to DAO’s entry on TV Tropes but someone else (evidently not a DA dev) came by and deleted it saying that it was too much of a stretch x)
  • Before the game had its name there was an HTML script that randomly generated possible titles for consideration, it adds verbs and nouns together e.g. “Grim Dark”. One of the craziest possibilities that it once generated that the devs always remember is "Bone Wind”
  • One of the portraits that’s used for decoration around the world in-game (it’s of a bearded human man) is actually of a specific BW staff member
  • He played through Stone Prisoner, where Wilhelm’s son Matthias gives exposition in the cellar. Matthias is voiced by GE and this had been pointed out to Jon earlier on. Jon: “I don’t think that character’s voice acting was super strong there”
  • On the in-game area towards the end of Stone Prisoner: Outdoor areas in games are large and one of the things needed for them is streaming, so different chunks can be ‘streamed in’. There’s a tower [?], and technically the top of the tower was made an outdoor level so that sky stuff could be there, though it didn’t really need to be. The person that made it an outdoor level chose the very smallest chunk size for the terrain mesh, which determines how fine of a streaming they do. So when playing, every time you moved like 4 meters, the game would stream out 50-100 chunks behind you and the same in front of you (this is the bubble around the player of what actually exists). Because it was so small, it was constantly thrashing the CPU and disc to do all the loading. The devs were like “this isn’t going to work”, but they barely had any time. The solution: they made a new level that was outdoor and copied all the sunlight and other settings, but with the largest chunk size. They copy-pasted the entire level from one to the other. The problem with that many chunks then is that there was a giant expanse of flat terrain sticking out of the middle of the tower. They didn’t know if the story was going to involve shots of the outside of the tower for this sequence or not, so they took the terrain deformation tool and bundled all the terrain vertices at the bottom of the tower in a giant clump. So to this day there’s a mess of vertices and twisted terrain at the bottom of the final level that probably no-one has ever seen [not sure though if this anecdote is in reference to a place in that DLC or somewhere elsewhere in the game?]
There were also some tidbits on Anthem, however I didn’t note them down (sorry). I’m planning on watching parts 1 and 2 sometime soon!

If you think I misheard or misunderstood anything from this stream please let me know and I will edit/fix it. :)

(Thankyou to some of my friends who explained a tech detail from this to me.)

[source] <– current rewatch link
 

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