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Dragon Age: Dreadwolf is now in Alpha Stage

Draugoth

Gold Member


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Hello,

In my last blog, back in February, I talked about the next Dragon Age™ game entering the production phase. Well, we’ve come a very long way since then, and the team is incredibly happy to announce a huge step forward in the development of the game you now know as Dragon Age: Dreadwolf: We have just completed our Alpha milestone!

Up to this point, we’ve been working hard on the various parts of the game, but it’s not until the Alpha milestone that a game all comes together. Now, for the first time, we can experience the entire game, from the opening scenes of the first mission to the very end. We can see, hear, feel, and play everything as a cohesive experience.



NOW WHAT?

Of course, the game is not finished by any means, but Alpha is one of the most important game development milestones for a number of reasons. First and foremost, we can now turn our sights toward bringing the visual fidelity to its final form and iterating on gameplay features. The big question now is, “Where do we focus our efforts?” To answer that, we solicit feedback from a number of sources, including our Community Council members who each have unique perspectives and experiences, our quality verification team, and extensive internal playtesting. Gathering feedback from multiple sources gives us the greatest insight on where we need to spend more time improving the experience.

Additionally, we can now evaluate the game's pacing, how relationships evolve over time, and the player’s progression, as well as narrative cohesion—essentially how the story comes together. We can take the story we’ve written and see if we’re expressing it well through the characters, dialogue, cinematics, and ultimately, the player’s journey. Now that we have the ability to do a complete playthrough, we can iterate and polish on the things that matter most to our fans.

Hitting Alpha was the culmination of so much effort from the entire team and we used this milestone as an opportunity to come together and celebrate. We held a hybrid-style event with people onsite while others joined remotely and the team showcased their work to everyone at BioWare. We even took some time to do something fun and non-work related—a virtual escape room where we had to work together to help someone on camera find their way out. It was a really great time, and no matter where our devs are, it's important to share these types of moments together.



START TO FINISH

Now that we’re finally able to experience the entire game, for me, my favorite part is the characters. Whether followers, allies, or villains, they’re woven into the game in ways that take a concept that’s always been a part of the Dragon Age DNA—stories about people—and push it further than ever before. The characters help contextualize the world and the stakes, and I can’t wait until we’re able to start really discussing them in depth.

It’s also exciting to finally be able to bring our fans to parts of the world that we’ve previously hinted at, but never been able to fully explore—like the city of Minrathous, the capital 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 built on and fuelled by magic, and the ways in which that has come through in its visual identity, and what that looks like in comparison to previous cities we’ve visited in Dragon Age, are pretty spectacular.

As I mentioned earlier, the Alpha milestone is an extremely important one for us, but there’s more work to be done. We also want to continue being transparent with you, our community, and keep you up to date on what we’re crafting. Hopefully you’ve been enjoying our development updates on Dreadwolf this year as we’ll be looking to share more in the future.



IN CLOSING

Of course, Dreadwolf isn’t the only thing happening here at BioWare™! We have a team hard at work envisioning what the future holds for a new single-player Mass Effect™ game. And we look forward to celebrating our community on N7 Day next month. The SWTOR team also continues to work on their next update, so keep an eye on SWTOR.com and their social media accounts for any and all details on the coming game update.

It’s an incredible time at BioWare! We have so many cool things to show you in the future. Until then, thanks for being part of our community. We couldn’t do this without you.
 

adamsapple

Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
Being completely playable from start to finish is good. I can see this releasing Q3~Q4 2023.
 

Elbereth

Member
I’m pumped for a new Dragon Age… But that small tidbit of a new Mass Effect is the proverbial icing on the cake.
 
Can someone who has worked in game development inform us how long a game typically stays in alpha before release?
That really depends on the scope of the project and what kind of a game it is. A Battle Royale game would get out of alpha a lot faster than a full-fledged super long single player RPG that is filled with a tons of dialogue, audio voice lines, quests, combat and so on. Single player RPGs have a ton more code and room for errors/bugs that can take a while to figure out just because there is so much stuff.

When I did a school/university project for our last and final class before we graduated we had team of 11 students (including myself) I was an artist. It took us 3 months to finish a super tiny indie project (that did extremely well and set an example for future students) and if I remember correctly we were in alpha for either a month or a month and a half and this is a super tiny project that is no-near compared to a full-fledged team in the industry, but the bottom line was that it was still same process and the development cycle was very similar. I think I can see them being in alpha for at least 6 months or maybe more, I have no clue how BioWare works but having a game playable from start to finish is a huge milestone. regardless, polishing and cleaning the code will still take a ton of time.
 

Jinzo Prime

Member
That really depends on the scope of the project and what kind of a game it is. A Battle Royale game would get out of alpha a lot faster than a full-fledged super long single player RPG that is filled with a tons of dialogue, audio voice lines, quests, combat and so on. Single player RPGs have a ton more code and room for errors/bugs that can take a while to figure out just because there is so much stuff.

When I did a school/university project for our last and final class before we graduated we had team of 11 students (including myself) I was an artist. It took us 3 months to finish a super tiny indie project (that did extremely well and set an example for future students) and if I remember correctly we were in alpha for either a month or a month and a half and this is a super tiny project that is no-near compared to a full-fledged team in the industry, but the bottom line was that it was still same process and the development cycle was very similar. I think I can see them being in alpha for at least 6 months or maybe more, I have no clue how BioWare works but having a game playable from start to finish is a huge milestone. regardless, polishing and cleaning the code will still take a ton of time.

Thanks bro, hope their alpha goes well!
 

Daymos

Member
Very weird. It sounds more like "holy crap we made SOMETHING!" rather than claiming the thing is any good. I'll put my faith in baldurs gate 3 being good instead.. so far.
 
I loved Origins but couldn’t even stomach looking at Inquisition - I thought every single character was atrociously ugly. Here’s hoping the characters in this new game don’t look like dog poo
 

Fbh

Member
Still sounds like this will take a while to come out.

What does alpha stage mean? is it better or worse than the omega stage?

It means they've finally come to an agreement whether the women should have the left or the right side of their head shaved (spoiler alert: it's going to be both)
 
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-Zelda-

Banned
Not sure I am excited for this to be honest. The original remains one of my top fave games ever, but each one after it just left me kind of bored. That being said, I hope it works out for people who are excited for it.
 

Sentenza

Member
What does alpha stage mean? is it better or worse than the omega stage?
The game is now feature/content complete (at least in its current intended stage) and what's left is to improve on what's there.

I know there's often this misguided narrative going on about how "real betas are far from the final game and the betas we see most of the times are basically marketing demos". That comes from a position of ignorance. because by definition every single "beta" version is a candidate for the release once the known bugs get ironed out.
 
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JayK47

Member
I'd love to look forward to this, but to me each release has been worse than the previous one. Bioware is a developer in decline. Hopefully they can turn it around.
 

Madflavor

Member
After Andromeda and Anthem, they aren't the type of developer that can talk the talk anymore. There is no "Bioware Magic". They need to put out a good game and show that they're still a studio that can make fun and well made games. They have to prove themselves.
 
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