Dragon Age Dragon Age: The Veilguard - coming Fall 2024

[Ismaul]

Larian is just one studio and it will almost certainly be another 4 years at least before they release their next game. There's no way that they can satisfy the Bioware wannabe market by themselves. So there's no reason why Bioware that has gone back to their roots can't exist together with Larian.

There can only be one waifu dev studio. The other are mere distractions, one-night stands while the waifu is away.

And if said studio's games have modding, fetishes can be sustained for a long time.

I wouldn't be so sure. I'm repeating myself but of all places the one where the most people claim they wouldn't touch BG3 with a stick due to tactical combat is the Dragon Age reddit.

Granted, you have a point there. Like Cat Headed Eagle says, among those that care a lot about waifus and fetishes, many don't care much for tactical or any intelligence-requiring gameplay. They want to play dress-up, feel powerful, get to the story and the romances. Top-down tactical combat is the opposite. So yeah, I can see another studio catering to those wishes.

Still, I think that players being "loyal" to a company that makes their chosen waifu(s) and gives them customizability and modding to invest further into the "relationship" is a behavioral pattern we can observe.

 

[gurugeorge]

I dread to think what a pile of shite Dreadwolf's going to be.

From the rather well-constructed dark, gritty fantasy world of DA:O to some faggot fairyland. Yeech, what a decline.

I say that as someone who maintains that DAI did hit a sweet spot for pretty decent MMO-like combat with the dwarf DLC for DAI (some of which is quite tough, and represents how DAI should have been all the way through). But eh, it's water under the bridge and DAD is obviously going to be ten times worse than DAI, especially with BG3 having kissed the rainbow. Tranny bear fucking on steroids with easy-peasy journo-level gameplay ahoy.

 

[BosanskiSeljak]

sweet spot for pretty decent MMO-like combat with the dwarf DLC for DAI

That DLC was one of the biggest slogs of the entire game and that's saying something

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Nah, combat in DAI is like combat in Ultima 7: there's some flailing animations playing on your screen and then the combat's over with some corpses in the ground. Has no tactics, thought, or any sort of involvement beyond clicking buttons.

Your character doesn't even walk towards the enemy when doing melee attacks.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Larian is just one studio and it will almost certainly be another 4 years at least before they release their next game. There's no way that they can satisfy the Bioware wannabe market by themselves. So there's no reason why Bioware that has gone back to their roots can't exist together with Larian.

There can only be one waifu dev studio. The other are mere distractions, one-night stands while the waifu is away.

And if said studio's games have modding, fetishes can be sustained for a long time.

I wouldn't be so sure. I'm repeating myself but of all places the one where the most people claim they wouldn't touch BG3 with a stick due to tactical combat is the Dragon Age reddit. A lot of people there don't even want Bioware to do something like DAO again and are extremely happy with DAI and the DAD leaks. If Bioware manages to get something out of the nasty Dreadwolf development process after two resets, I'd say they have a chance to sell well. But that's a big if, with EA being such a blatant trend-chaser (remember that the Respawn SW game was what got them to ditch the live service DA game) they might end up forcing them to switch gears once again and I doubt the studio can survive doing that for a third time.

They don’t matter. In less than a month Baldur’s Gate 3 (which at the moment is only on PC) has outsold almost every BioWare game’s lifetime sales. There’s a bigger audience in doing something like Baldur’s Gate 3 that harkens back to the CRPG’s of the late ‘90s and early 2000s than the route BioWare has been going down for the last 20 years.

Now you could say there’s still big numbers too chase. After all Skyrim shipped 10 million in a month, Fallout 4 shipped 12 million in its first 24 hours, and Cyberpunk 2077 sold over 13 million in less than two weeks. But if BioWare was going to hit those numbers going the action route they would’ve likely already hit it by now.

It’s funny with regard to something like Outer Worlds too. The whole reason that game is like it is, is because they were trying to make it for a “mass audience.” But Outer Worlds (a game that came out on October 25, 2019) only hit over 4 million sales by August 2021. If Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky over at Obsidian had basically just done Space Fallout/Arcanum, with either Fallout or The Temple of Elemental Evil tactical combat, they could’ve likely gotten the kind of love Baldur’s Gate 3 is getting now back in 2019.

 

[Rhobar121]

I don't know if anyone else cares about the game. This is probably the 5th year of production if I'm not mistaken?
They still haven't even officially shown a fragment of the custscene, let alone gameplay.
I wonder if there is anyone else who thinks it will be a good game or at least a decent one.
EA could do everyone a favor and just cancel this game because it's never going to come out at this rate. At the moment, you can wonder what will be completed first this game or Star Citizen.

 

[Takamori]

How long EA will keep sporting Bioware corpse around or they are finally delivering the mercy kill?

https://www.pcgamer.com/bioware-lay...towards-a-more-agile-and-more-focused-studio/

 

[Tyranicon]

I'm just imagining some all-hands meeting where a picture of BG3 is set up and higher-ups screaming "why didn't you nerds make this instead?!"

 

[Rhobar121]

DA:I was lucky to come out before Witcher 3, Dreadwolf is already doomed to be compared to BG3 so they might as well give up.
I don't see how this bunch of morons would be able to do anything better (or more degenerate) than Swen to stand out.

 

[Ismaul]

I'm just imagining some all-hands meeting where a picture of BG3 is set up and higher-ups screaming "why didn't you nerds make this instead?!"

Pretty sure the higher-ups are the ones that wanted nothing to do with BG3, in part because of licensing fees.

The Bioware strategy has been for a while to succeed with an established WotC franchise (D&D, Star Wars d20) and then make their own generic version once they have the guaranteed audience.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

DA:I was lucky to come out before Witcher 3, Dreadwolf is already doomed to be compared to BG3 so they might as well give up.
I don't see how this bunch of morons would be able to do anything better (or more degenerate) than Swen to stand out.

There was a lukewarm response to DAI in spite of it getting many GOTYs. And even when it was given those GOTYs, the reaction to those bits of news were just a collective groan, even among Bioware fans. The Witcher 2 had already killed them, and killed them bad (because they were doing TW2 vs DA2 kinda debates). In turn, I can only remember a loose statistic about numbers of dragons killed as a relevant look into how many people had bought/played DAI. No boasting about purchases or whatever. Even FO4 had Bethesda boasting about units "shipped" (but not sold) and that game was another TW3 victim.

 

[Rhobar121]

I'm just imagining some all-hands meeting where a picture of BG3 is set up and higher-ups screaming "why didn't you nerds make this instead?!"

Pretty sure the higher-ups are the ones that wanted nothing to do with BG3, in part because of licensing fees.

The Bioware strategy has been for a while to succeed with an established WotC franchise (D&D, Star Wars d20) and then make their own generic version once they have the guaranteed audience.

They can't even do that see Anthem.

 

[Roguey]

I don't know if anyone else cares about the game. This is probably the 5th year of production if I'm not mistaken?
They still haven't even officially shown a fragment of the custscene, let alone gameplay.
I wonder if there is anyone else who thinks it will be a good game or at least a decent one.
EA could do everyone a favor and just cancel this game because it's never going to come out at this rate. At the moment, you can wonder what will be completed first this game or Star Citizen.

It's been in development since 2015, this is its eighth year.

Though this is its third iteration.

The development of the fourth main entry in the Dragon Age series, code-named "Joplin", began in 2015 with Mike Laidlaw as its creative director. It was intended to be a smaller, more narrative-focused game set in the Tevinter Imperium region of the game's world setting, Thedas.

Problems with the development of BioWare's other games Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem led to repeated interruptions as "Joplin" staff was shifted to these games. This included putting "Joplin" on hold in late 2016 with development resuming in March 2017 after Andromeda shipped. In October 2017, BioWare and its parent company Electronic Arts cancelled "Joplin" altogether, reportedly because it had no room for a "live service" component to provide ongoing monetization opportunities.

Development of the game was restarted under the code-name "Morrison" in 2018, this time with a live-service component and based on Anthem's code. According to Bloomberg News, after the success of the single-player game Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and the decision to cancel the reworking of the massively multiplayer online Anthem in February 2021 following its lackluster launch, EA and BioWare decided to remove the planned multiplayer components from "Morrison" and to develop it as a single-player game only.

This particular version has only existed for about two and a half years.

 

[Rhobar121]

I don't know if anyone else cares about the game. This is probably the 5th year of production if I'm not mistaken?
They still haven't even officially shown a fragment of the custscene, let alone gameplay.
I wonder if there is anyone else who thinks it will be a good game or at least a decent one.
EA could do everyone a favor and just cancel this game because it's never going to come out at this rate. At the moment, you can wonder what will be completed first this game or Star Citizen.

It's been in development since 2015, this is its eighth year.

Though this is its third iteration.

The development of the fourth main entry in the Dragon Age series, code-named "Joplin", began in 2015 with Mike Laidlaw as its creative director. It was intended to be a smaller, more narrative-focused game set in the Tevinter Imperium region of the game's world setting, Thedas.

Problems with the development of BioWare's other games Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem led to repeated interruptions as "Joplin" staff was shifted to these games. This included putting "Joplin" on hold in late 2016 with development resuming in March 2017 after Andromeda shipped. In October 2017, BioWare and its parent company Electronic Arts cancelled "Joplin" altogether, reportedly because it had no room for a "live service" component to provide ongoing monetization opportunities.

Development of the game was restarted under the code-name "Morrison" in 2018, this time with a live-service component and based on Anthem's code. According to Bloomberg News, after the success of the single-player game Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and the decision to cancel the reworking of the massively multiplayer online Anthem in February 2021 following its lackluster launch, EA and BioWare decided to remove the planned multiplayer components from "Morrison" and to develop it as a single-player game only.

This particular version has only existed for about two and a half years.

It's even worse than I thought.
Still 2.5 years is not so little considering that it usually takes the most time to create assets and I assume most of them were done earlier. I assume some people with brains work there and they didn't throw everything in the trash every time.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Ah, the trials and tribulations of a Gantt chart

 

[duskvile]

All giant studios/corps have faced reduction in staff. It's impact of global economy and recession.

 

[Ismaul]

My God so they made Laidlaw quit and scrapped the original project because they wanted a live service game, only to scrap the live service aspect and restart?

Management are morons.

 

[Axel_am]

168 is too much to go through everything. What's the verdict here?

Don't tell me I'll need to like Inquisition to like this one as well.

 

[perfectslumbers]

168 is too much to go through everything. What's the verdict here?

There's no verdict we know nothing about the game and it will probably never come out

 

[Axel_am]

Perfect. Some things are better left dead.

 

[Ismaul]

Such optimism.

Bioware is not dying without a whimper. Or many.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

I'm just imagining some all-hands meeting where a picture of BG3 is set up and higher-ups screaming "why didn't you nerds make this instead?!"

Pretty sure the higher-ups are the ones that wanted nothing to do with BG3, in part because of licensing fees.

The Bioware strategy has been for a while to succeed with an established WotC franchise (D&D, Star Wars d20) and then make their own generic version once they have the guaranteed audience.

They don’t literally have to have the license to do something like BG3. BioWare could’ve been doing that with their Dragon Age series. Obsidian could’ve been doing it with their own properties. The problem is they look at the type of game that made them famous as niche, and started chasing other trends in the hope of better sales.

The biggest thing hold something like Dragon Age: Origin back is it looked like fucking shit. In 2009 in looked like an alright looking (better textured) original Xbox game, and on Xbox 360 it looked like a shitty looking original Xbox game. It had a bigger team than the original Assassin’s Creed, came out two years later, and looks like it’s years behind it. BioWare also falls into this stupid trap PC developers create for themselves where they don’t think such and such thing will work on console, so they change it to some “console friendly” version of the thing they’re doing, but that “console friendly” version always sucks...like how console Dragon Age removes the isometric camera and tries to make the gameplay feel more like an action game which only results in making it feel like one of the worst action games you’ve ever played.

 

[Ismaul]

They don’t literally have to have the license to do something like BG3.

They'd have to believe that TB gameplay has appeal, which even the original devs never did. They adapted a TB system into a RTwP abomination.

Decline is in their DNA. Chasing mass appeal was always their path, EA or not.

 

[Tyranicon]

Gamedev studios with more than 30 employees are a mistake.

 

[Orud]

By the way it's safe to say that "finally coming in 2024" is incredibly optimistic. They wouldn't be firing 50 people now if the title was in good shape and on track.

Jon Renish, technical director on Dreadwolf is also out. Game sounds like a banger so far.