BioWare Comments on Return to Ostagar Delay

Dragon Age: Origins online producer Fernando Melo dropped by the game’s official forums to explain why the Return to Ostagar DLC missed the expected holiday release window, why there’s some confusion about the 320 vs. 400 point price disparity, and when PS3 owners should expect to see the add-on.

A quick update now that the official press release and site updates are underway.

Why Jan 5?

We really wanted to get this out sooner, hence the original announcement.

After that announcement was made we spotted some issues during testing that we wanted to address, and we wanted to add an achievement/trophy to the DLC for all 3 platforms. The combination of these required us to strip out a lot of fixes planned and move up our first title update (patch) for the consoles in order to try to still hit our date. This in turn required a re-submission to MS/Sony and re-cert for PC.

Given the entry into holiday season, everyone – ourselves, EA cert, and MS/Sony was beginning to reduce their crews. Even then, all were still pulling in everyone they could and threw in weekends as needed to try to hit the date.

All of this kept the DLC release date on the knife-edge of whether we would make xmas or not. In the end we missed it and did not have an exact release date from MS or Sony that we could communicate – and we wanted our next official update to be a new release date and not leave you folks hanging indefinitely.

So not an ideal release compared to our original goal, but we hope Jan 5 is not too much longer of a wait – we also put out the video for it to give you a better taste of what to expect.

Price

Originally we did talk about lowering the price for this, but it was decided to leave it at $4.99 for PS3, 400 MS Points for X360, and 400 BioWare Points for PC.

There is an error on the add-ons page at the time of this post which appears to indicate PS3 is more expense – this is not correct, and is being ammended. The official press release is correct on the pricing – which has the above prices I just listed.

PS3/Mac not getting the love?

Not at all. There’s a couple different things at play for why this is the case.

For PS3 – the PS3 price appearing higher is an error, which is being addressed. The date being later is due to Sony’s longer submission timelines for all content – DLC or full games. Once we made the re-submission as described above, this basically pushed out the PS3 date a few weeks later from the expected exit from MS cert for 360, or EA cert for PC. Normally we always try to take this longer timeline into account in our scheduling so things release around the same time – it is not always possible though.

For Mac – there are some technical hurdles we are still working on with how to deliver future DLC (incl RtO) to the Mac. If you follow the PC tech support threads, you’ll notice that the current system does not work for all our players – something we’re busy improving for an upcoming patch, and we wanted to deliver some of these improvements to the Mac. Seeing as launch DLC content is available as part of the game download, we wanted to take the time to figure that out for all future DLC – even if it meant a slight delay (hopefully only for RtO) DLC in the short term for Mac. It’ll come soon, and our goal is to provide the same level of features and content as PC.

Hope that helps clarify what has been happening. Please note that as we belong to a public company we usually cannot discuss or announce things ahead of official releases.

Also, seeing a lot of the recent posts on here, it is worth pointing out that nearly every BioWare or Moderator post you see on these forums is from someone volunteering their personal time.

Even with all the shenanigans at times, we do enjoy being on here and having this dialog with all of you (or wouldn’t be doing it) 😉 but particularly around the holiday season be aware that most folks are probably not going to be around, or may be quickly catching up and doing some moderating, but not necessarilly posting. So while there are some dedicated folks (points to web and PR guys doing updates for RtO as we speak) coming in these days, we’re officially back in office starting Jan 4th.