Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening Interview

The guys over at GreyWardens.com let us know that they’ve published an interview that they conducted with Dragon Age online producer Fernando Melo during a press event for Awakening over in Germany. The conversation covers quite a bit of ground, including the whole Return to Ostagar fiasco:

The delayed release of Return to Ostagar caused a fair amount of drama within the community. While these things happen in the world of software development it never paints a good picture of the company, at least not in the eyes of the average End User. Is there anything BioWare has changed in their digital distribution methods to better combat such a delay in the future?

This was a big blow for the team as well. We really wanted to make this a special content piece for fans to enjoy over their holiday season, and the team worked extremely hard to try to make that come true.

Instead Return to Ostagar (RtO) was to become something along the lines of a ‘˜perfect storm’ for us where a lot of small faults and circumstances, not only internally but also externally to us, all came together at the same time and in a really awkward time of the year. This managed to divide everyone’s efforts and attention in such a way that issues got through the previous processes that normally would have spotted it certainly well before it ever made it to the public.

Since then, RtO has turned into an important case study for us, and we’ve changed quite a lot of our own process actually not only with how we develop and test our content and patches, but also in how we will communicate these going forward.

Unforeseen circumstances are actually a very normal part of any software development, and in particular game development and the online space but rarely does that actually get out and impact the public. Still, you don’t have to look very far for other examples of companies that have recently had online issues it’s a very dynamic space to be developing in with a lot of moving parts, thus lots of potential failure points.

But they say sometimes your best lessons and improvements come from your missteps and in this sense Return to Ostagar was oddly one of the best things that could have happened to us when it did. It helped us to rapidly mature all of our processes in a much shorter timeframe than our normal method of iterative improvement, and because of that it will benefit all of our subsequent content, and ultimately our players.