New blog postBioWare general manager Gary McKay noted the importance of this milestone, noting that the game is now playable from start to finish, while also talking about the journey ahead, including bringing visual fidelity to its final form, iterating on gameplay features. Polishing the elements most important to the Community Board and fans.
Get the full update below.
Hello,
In my last blog, in February, I talked about the next Dragon Age the game enters the production phase. Well, we’ve come a long way since then, and the team is excited to announce a huge step forward in the development of the game you know now. Dragon Age: Dreadwolf: We just completed our Alpha phase!
Up until this point, we’ve worked hard on different parts of the game, but it’s not until Alpha that the game comes together. Now, for the first time, we can experience the entire game from the opening scenes of the first mission to the end. We can see, hear, feel and play everything as a unified experience.
Now what?
Of course, the game is by no means complete, but Alpha is one of the most important milestones in game development for a number of reasons. First and foremost, we can now focus on finalizing visual fidelity and replicating gameplay features. The key question now is: “Where do we focus our efforts?” To answer this, we receive feedback from a number of sources, including Community Board members, each with their own unique perspectives and experiences, our QA team, and extensive internal playtesting. Gathering feedback from multiple sources gives us the greatest insight into where we need to spend more time improving the experience.
Additionally, we can now appreciate the pacing of the game, how relationships develop over time and player progression, as well as narrative cohesion—essentially how the story comes together. We can take the story we’ve written and see if we’ve expressed it well through characters, dialogue, cinematography, and ultimately the player’s journey. Now that we have the ability to build a full game, we can iterate and polish the things that matter most to our fans.
Hitting Alpha was the culmination of a lot of effort from the entire team, and we used this milestone as an opportunity to come together and celebrate. While others joined in remotely, we held a hybrid event with people and the team showed off their work to everyone at BioWare. We even spent some time doing something fun and non-work related – a virtual escape room where we had to work together to help someone in the cell find their way out. It was a really great time, and no matter where our developers are, it’s important to share these kinds of moments together.
Start to finish
Now that we finally get to experience the whole game, my favorite part is the characters. Whether followers, allies, or villains, they enter the game in a way that embraces a concept that is always part of the game. Dragon Age DNA – stories about people – and take it further than before. The characters help contextualize the world and the stakes, and I can’t wait until we can really start discussing them in depth.
It’s also exciting to finally be able to bring our fans to parts of the world we’ve previously hinted at but never fully explored – Minrathos, the capital city of the Tevinter Empire. We’ve talked about Minrathous in previous games, and now you’ll finally be able to visit! It’s a city that’s built on and magical, and how it’s passed in its visual identity and how it looks compared to previous cities we’ve visited. Dragon Ageit’s pretty awesome.
As I mentioned earlier, the Alpha stage is an extremely important stage for us, but there is still more work to be done. We also want to continue to be transparent with you, our community, and keep you informed about what we’re doing craftsmanship. We hope you enjoyed our development updates Dreadwolf this year because we will try to share more in the future.
In closing
of course Dreadwolf it’s not the only thing happening here at BioWare! We have a team working hard to imagine what the future holds for the new single player Mass effect the game. We look forward to celebrating our community on N7 Day next month. The Star Wars: The Old Republic The team also continues to work on their next update, so stay tuned SWTOR.com and their social media accounts for all the details on the upcoming game update.
It’s an incredible time at BioWare! We have a lot of great things to show you in the future. Until then, thank you for being a part of our community. We couldn’t do it without you.
