bard fight

[askagamedev]

You’ve talked before about how you can tell when a project is failing (lack of leadership, frequent changes in scope or direction that appear aimless) and that got me wondering, have you ever been part of a project that you just absolutely knew was going to be successful? Like, you knew the team had “found the fun”, leadership set the correct course, the project was adequately staffed, and so on? And was there anything “intangible” that you felt (call it vibes or aura or whatever but you know what I mean) during production?

And relatedly have you ever been on a project like the ME3MP you recently referenced where the team reportedly thought it was a nice little project but ended up blowing up beyond expectations? I seem to recall it made its yearly forecast in the first month or something.

I learned a long time ago that the majority of vibes, aura, whatever about how successful a project was going to be is all hogwash. I know what I like, but I can't tell which way a game will break. If I could do that consistently, I would be a much much wealthier person. I have a pretty good head for evaluating whether a game is good, but being good isn't anywhere near enough to guarantee success. All we can do is the best we can, and then see if the stars align and the public likes it.

That said, I have absolutely been on the other side of this - a couple of games I worked on and thought was solidly built but nothing super special actually ended up hitting it out of the park. I will say that the pay bonuses were really nice, but I was also experienced enough to know that I couldn't really do much more about it. It just as easily could have gone south instead through a thousand other factors outside my control.

The real takeaway from all this is that it's basically impossible to predict success. There's a huge number of factors outside our control when releasing a game - the state of the market, the interest of the players, the potential competitors in the market, and so on and so forth. We can't compare ourselves to a game that's lightning in a bottle like Arc Raiders or Slay the Spire 2. All we can do is hope that we hit our target numbers. Much of results are like a game of golf. Knowing how others do is helpful, but really we're only playing against ourselves. Other players cannot affect our score, they only serve as reference points. At the end of the day, only our own numbers matter to us.

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[barghest-land]

new star was calling me home

[irunoart]

🔥 ( ´థᴗథ)b 🔥

@Officerfriendly commissioned this brilliant idea for the animated YCH I posted a while ago!

I love it, it's so fitting 🤣

Poor Venat, we love her 💗

[onewingedangels]

TOMB RAIDER IV: THE LAST REVELATION (1999) dev. Core Design

[aesfocus]

Ferelden's Circle

[miyku]

Tomb Raider I–III Remastered | ▶ dev. Aspyr

[shoptonowhere]

sailor sweater black

[felassan]

Dragon Age: The Veilguard art book pages, under a cut due to spoilers:

This sequential series was another way to explore the story structure that was solidifying. It relates the story of Rook, who returns to her ship to find the Inquisitor waiting and expecting a report. Rook tells of the Necropolis mission being interrupted by Solas. Making uneasy alliances. Going undercover with the Qunari, rising in the ranks, and then betraying them to Tevinter. Finally heading to Weisshaupt, stopping the Wardens from making a huge mistake, and ultimately joining them and slaying an Archdemon.

The Dumat The ship idea was coalescing. The name Dumat was pulling ahead (named for the first Archdemon). We were on Frostbite, so we knew we could probably borrow some of that awesome ocean tech from Battlefield! One problem was that thematically, boats didn't quite line up with the spy theme. They're too easy to spot and attack. But you know what's not easy to spot? Submarines. The idea was completely insane... so we had to try it. This brought up the challenge of anachronism. Submarines don't fit in fantasy games. Obviously. But what if we found a way? The first attempts were to make a submersible boat. Something that looked mostly like a boat but could plausibly dive under the surface.

The more we researched and referenced submarine mechanics, the more nautical they became. Subs are incredibly sophisticated marvels of engineering, but the more we referenced them, the more we strained the believably of our fantasy world.

Top: Submarines provide the element of surprise. It was fun to explore how to exit and enter the ship for each mission. Bottom: Sneaking past Qunari dreadnought fleets and giving fishermen nightmares.

We thought it would be fascinating to have a mysterious prisoner in your brig. Do you let him out?

Dragon Sub To make a submarine that fit into our world, we tried to make it look more like a sea monster. We had already named it after the dragon Dumat, so it felt like a natural fit.

We tried to disguise the sub as a natural creature, making it look more like a dragon or a sea monster.

Dumat cutaway. We wanted the interior of the Dumat, built in Tevinter, to feel luxurious and mysterious.

Top: To help give a voice to the Dumat, we explored having a captain and an engineer. They had been shelved, along with their experimental vessel, for decades. We even explored them having an unrequited love story. Bottom: We designed a mystery engine that the engineer had to feed seemingly random objects into in order to keep it running. Ten dried lavender flowers, five quail's eggs, three brass belt buckels, etc... It would have served as a way to offer up some light fetch quests: "While you're out, could you pick up ten giant spider fangs?"

Underwater Mansion The direction that started to feel the most correct was the underwater mansion on the back of a creature. It was much more mysterious and appropriate to the fantasy genre. It still gave us the awesome underwater vistas, but we weren't limited to the claustrophobic restrictions inherent to submarines.

We explored having a giant golem or a colossal sea creature carry the Dumat mansion.

The mansion on the back of a giant... something that you would only catch small glimpses of. Is it a giant sea monster? A colossal construct?

Covert Commandos "Covert commandos" was our answer to the "fantasy spy" theme. Rather than slipping into the rogue mindset that that implies, it left room for warriors to smash things and mages to light things up with fireballs. We tried to imagine what the high adventure of covert commandos might look like. It was a lot of fun to explore different team-ups between classes and factions. How do they solve problems differently? Bottom left: Going undercover with a trading caravan to make a map. Bottom right: Escaping a dragon on griffon back.

Top: A heist becomes a rescue. Center left: Evading guards in the Undercity. Center right: Three brave warriors hold the gap while civilians escape. Bottom: Everyone is on edge when an Antivan Crow enters the room.

The palanquin heist.

Top: Switcheroo at the prisoner exchange. Bottom: The party holds a chokepoint.

Top: Complicated ecosystems. Center: Sneaking through the streets of Minrathous. Bottom: Scoundrels flee when the Crows come to town.

Top: Steal some uniforms and bluff your way past a guard. Bottom left: A high-speed aravel chase. Bottom right: The team using its skills to outwith some bandits.

Bottom left: Clearing a roadblock. Bottom right: Sabotage down at the docks.

Killing time until the monsters show up.

Top right: Discovering the griffon sanctuary. Left: Just five more seconds! Bottom right: End of the line.

Early NPCs The early stages of character design are exciting. Writers and artists will develop simple sketches or descriptions to start filling up the blank canvas. We start simple. If a character works as a thumbnail sketch, they'll work when blown up to full size. It's a great way to keep an eye on shape and color, to make sure they all stand out from one another (an important element on the battlefield). We explore NPCs throughout the duration of a project. They change constantly as we discover more about the project and have new problems to solve. Top left: An early idea for Cole to act as a compassionate voice for Solas. Bottom left: Some characters are strong right out of the gate and change very little, like Emmrich here. We won't know until the project nears completion. Bottom right: It's always fun to bring old characters into newer games. In this case, explored Sten from Origins as a dreadnought captain.

From where we left off in Inquisition and Trespasser, we knew Solas would be a central figure. We wanted to show Solas having cast off his hermit disguise. He was never flashy, but he was calculating and intentional, so we gave him the ancient elven god equivalent of a business suit. --- In the early stages it helps to explore simple expressions of each character. It forces us to exaggerate, focus on fewer details, and really emphasise what matters most. Eventually we can start getting more specific, but this is a valuable stage not to skip over.

Top: Early sketches of Ghilan'nain and her experiments emerging from the sea. Center: A dwarf and her construct friend. Bottom: In earlier drafts, Solas had a partner who could play bad cop to Solas's good cop.

Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain were the two remaining elven gods. From the beginning of the project we were excited about a double Blight. --- Bottom left: Ghilan'nain is the mother of the halla, goddess of monsters. Bottom right: Elgar'nan is the god of vengeance and the sun, fire and shadow. The eclipse motif made sense very early on.

An early version of the party meets up in a private booth at the Blue Blood club.

some other pages -

Some opening pages

Foreword

Google Books preview pages Part One

Google Books preview pages Part Two

Amazon preview pages

Book art credits:

BioWare art: Matt Rhodes, Ramil Sunga, Albert Urmanov, Christopher Scoles, Nick Thornborrow, Steve Klit

Volta art: Gui Guimaraes, Stéphanie Bouchard, Akim Kaliberda, Alejandro Olmedo, Alexey Zaryuta, Julien Carrasco, Maksim Marenkov, Marianne Martin, Mariia Istomina, Marion Kivits, Matti Marttinen, Mélanie Bourgeois, Pablo Hurtado De Mendoza, Rael Lyra, Rodrigo Ramos, Thomas Schaffer, Tiago Sousa, Tristan Kang, Vladimir Mokry, Yintion J, Joseph Meehan, Stefan Atanasov, Julien Carrasco

Additional art: Marc Holmes, Thomas Scholes

[askagamedev]

How do you handle leaving a job that you enjoy due to a new opportunity of a higher salary and title upgrade? I often read that you should separate personal from professional, but I really like my colleagues/manager in both manners, they're amazing people and this job was an amazing opportunity for me. How should I say that I'm resigning without bursting into tears?

In my experience, it's important to keep the job at an arm's length - it might be super engaging and satisfying to work with these fantastic people, but a company is still a company - it will always prioritize its own best interests over yours, and those people will tend to choose their own best interests over yours as well. As such, you owe it to yourself to prioritize your own best interests too, including seeking new opportunities to grow and improve, as well as commensurate compensation for that experience. If you stagnate in a situation where you can't grow, you're doing yourself a disservice.

One way to soften the leaving a job I really like is to tell myself "This isn't forever and I can come back later". If I leave a company on good terms, returning is much much easier. When I went back to a studio that I had left on good terms, the process was super quick - I applied to return, they had an opening for me, and that was it - the only interview questions they asked me were "Do you want to come back?" and "When do you want to start?"

I've seen a number of coworkers return to various studios I've worked at as well - they're (almost) universally welcomed back with open arms. We know them, we are already good with working with them, we're glad to have a comrade return. Even better, we can return with more responsibility and solve even more interesting problems with people we still know and care about and collect higher pay for my work. You can always take solace in the thought that leaving a team doesn't mean forever, it just means for now.

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[askagamedev]

Things a Dev Will (Probably) Never Say

Whenever I look at any game’s online community, be it official forums, reddit, twitter, or some other form of social media, I’ll often see fans demanding the developers to tell them certain common things. I invariably chuckle and shake my head because I know that the devs are almost certain not to respond. Still, I see the same demands made over and over, as if this time will be the exception. So here’s a list of some of the responses you’ll (probably) never get from a developer:

1. Badmouthing or blaming a current business partner. That publisher you love to blame for everything you perceive is wrong with the game? Yeah, we work with/for them and need to maintain a good working relationship. Stabbing them in the back is very bad for business.

2. Anything financial. A lot of community members like to pretend they know the financial status of the game, and use that to support that their preferences are the right preferences. I’ve never seen a community member anywhere close to being correct with conjectures about how well a studio or game is doing financially. We’re not going to give anyone outside the company that sort of information just to prove you wrong. Also, VGChartz is definitely not a reliable source.

3. Stuff that hasn’t been announced yet. If we haven’t announced it yet, we can’t talk about it. We all know that certain games and sequels are almost certainly in development. We still aren’t allowed to talk about it until they’ve been announced.

4. Information scheduled for release elsewhere. No, we cannot talk about that upcoming feature because we’re still working on the art and animations for it and can’t show it off yet, so we’ll wait until we can in order to get more marketing buzz out of it. Or, alternatively, we’ve already done an interview with a gaming blog about it that’s scheduled to go live in a month and we can’t break that agreement or they’ll sue us for breach of contract. Or maybe it’s part of our big batch of E3/Gamescom/TGS/PAX/whatever announcements that we’ll use to promote the game.

5. Here’s what we are prototyping/thinking about doing. If we talk about something that hasn’t been approved yet (i.e. could be cut) we’ll inevitably get called liars if it does get cut. Most of the time, most such things get cut. You’ll get to see it if/when we have something polished-looking to show. Until then, we can’t acknowledge its existence.

6. No, we will never do that. Never say never, even if the real answer actually is “No, we will never do that.” We generally only plan for a year or two in the future anyway. None of us know what will happen after that.

7. [Some game that we made] is garbage and we never should have made it. We’re sorry you didn’t like it, but that doesn’t mean it has no redeeming qualities or that we shouldn’t be proud of what we’ve accomplished. Even if you didn’t like it, some people out there did. It still represents years of our collective lives spent working and doing our best.

[askagamedev]

Is classic game porting/remastering becoming its own specialization? What I mean is, of course it's happening more these days, so/but is space growing to be someone who specializes in these projects? Or is it still niche enough that the small number of teams/staff who do it will continue to do it?

The answer here is "kind of". Here's the main issue - game development is expensive. AAA studios are expensive and cost a lot to run, assigning a AAA studio a remake/port project is not really worth it when compared to the estimated return on investment. Instead, what game publishers often do is contract out the remakes/port job to an independent third-party studio. This has two major benefits.

First, it costs notably less than the publisher putting their own internal AAA studios on it. When you're doing a remake/port, you often don't need super high fidelity assets or extremely large scope - the majority of the gameplay design and systems already exist. Contracting the project out to an external studio means the publisher can just pay a flat amount and doesn't have to worry about things hiring new people, handling benefits, setting up the studio, etc. The external studio gets to do that, and often has their own stuff in place already. This works very well for the independent studios too - they can take jobs like this in order to pay the bills and fund their own game development. Behaviour, independent developer of Dead by Daylight, also has a second team that does work like porting and remakes/ports for other studios. Their porting and remake team provides the income to keep the studio afloat during leaner times.

Second, it allows the publisher to give these external studios a chance to prove themselves - can they deliver a promised project in time, budget, and quality? If they can, this studio may be worth acquiring or working with again. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom was developed by Japanese independent studio Grezzo, but this is far from their first game for Nintendo. They ported Ocarina of Time 3D, Majora's Mask 3D, and Luigi's Mansion for the 3DS, and they did the port for Link's Awakening to the Switch. The team that built Sonic Mania first proved themselves to Sega by doing iOS ports of Sonic CD, Sonic 1, and Sonic 2 before being given the Sonic Mania project.

With these two reasons in mind, doing remakes/ports do two things. First, they can earn money to pay the bills in a situation where it isn't worth it for the publishers to build them internally, allowing these studios to build their own projects or just have a more stable sustainable situation. Second, it provides a "minor league" situation where these external studios can prove their ability to the publisher in a lower-stakes situation in order to be entrusted with a higher and more interesting project later. As long as remakes and ports of games continue to do well, this kind of work will be in demand.

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[askagamedev]

I often hear gamedev cited as something that is tough to do with a remote team. Do you have any advice for doing remote development in a gamedev context?

Gamedev is tough to do in general, but it's generally more difficult to do in a remote setting because humans are accustomed to being social in a certain way. Online communications is often bottlenecked in ways we aren't immediately cognizant of. After working remotely for a few years, I've adopted certain specific counter-intuitive techniques in order to try to facilitate better understanding on the team. The best advice I can give for remote work is Default to Talking in Public. Instead of using DMs to speak to someone about work privately, post to the appropriate channel and tag the person you want to speak to - even if you end up only speaking to the other person during the conversation.

One of the benefits of working within the same space is that it's much easier to pull someone into your work space to ask questions or have an impromptu meeting. One would think that DMs are an easy analog to this, but it's actually more troublesome than that. Normally, what happens is that the major stakeholders begin the discussion, and then others that are more tangentially involved are pulled in near the end to handle things like creating, prioritizing, and assigning tasks to cover the needed new work. Adding someone to DMs with history is a little better, but it puts the newly added person on the spot with needing to catch up immediately. The real problem with this, however, is following up the impromptu meeting makes it even more difficult for people who weren't involved to catch up. They weren't in the original DM chain, which means the entire discussion needs to be repeated again.

We can improve this by making such discussions/questions public by default and tagging the people involved. This leaves a publicly viewable history and discussion, which latecomers can view to catch up on. This also has the added benefit of allowing other tangential devs to see and possibly chime in with caveats and gotchas the primary discussers might not be aware of. It also makes other team members see that work in this area is being done and those who are interested can also follow along. There's some initial reluctance to doing so, since it feels more like speaking in the public square instead of being private, but many of those "private" discussions in the office are often overheard by other stakeholders anyway, who will insert themselves into the discussion by bringing up things that the initial speakers weren't necessarily aware of. In general, defaulting to asking questions and discussing elements in public channels solves a lot of remote working issues just by making sure anyone who wants to know about something can know about it.

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[askagamedev]

I've been employed as a senior game programmer for two years but I really need a new job and I don't think I'm good enough to compete as a senior, if took a salary decrease I wouldn't receive much less a year after tax. I don't wanna be stressed out being expected to do things I can't do effectively. How would you recommend getting a new job at a more junior position? My heart is no longer in this profession I don't have love for it anymore. I just want a job to provide for my family.

There seems to be a lot to unpack here. I'm reading several different elements that each warrants its own response. Here's what I'm seeing:

You aren't feeling job satisfaction with what you do any more

This happens from time to time and likely needs some soul-searching to seriously answer. If you just want to provide for your family, there's nothing wrong with doing what is expected of you and no more. If you really don't like game dev anymore, you could always try finding a job in a game-adjacent field - simulation, gambling software, user experience, education and training software, and so on. Most technical problems are fairly fungible.

That said, sometimes all it takes is a reminder that there are players out there who really do appreciate what we do. I get a tremendous amount of job satisfaction seeing players enjoying the parts of the game I made.

You're feeling some imposter syndrome in your current job

Imposter syndrome is very normal, especially for where you are in your career. It never really goes away, and it will always tell you that what you're doing is scary and that you can always give up and go back. If you're really concerned about your performance on the job, you should talk to your manager about it. Ask for a one-on-one and discuss it. If you're doing fine, your manager will tell you so. If you aren't, your manager will also tell you and likely suggest ways to improve. And, if you really want to take a more junior position, your manager should be able to help you transition to one of those too.

You want a new job with less responsibility

There's nothing wrong with this per se, but accepting a demotion will probably take a toll on your long-term career. At the very least, it is likely that you will be asked about it at any job you apply for in the field, and you may get passed over for roles because the hiring managers consider you too senior for it. This may not matter to you but you should probably consider your long-term vs short-term goals and what it is you want to do with the rest of your career and life. If you've taken the time to consider the ramifications (especially with your family) and still feel like it is the best choice, by all means do it. I caution against making such a long-term decision hastily.

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[askagamedev]

Harada on Tekken, Soul Calibur, and the Changing Corporate Landscape

Recently, Katsuhiro Harada of Tekken fame posted a [lengthy tweet] where he talked about what happened to the Soul Calibur franchise, the team, and the less-visible effects of companies growth and change over time. Harada is a good guy and I very much appreciate his candor and willingness to talk to the public. His English tweets can be a little difficult to parse though, so I thought I would offer my interpretation of what he said, based on my own understanding of game dev, the industry overall, corporate politics, and economic trends.

The [initial comment] Harada responded to was "Soul Calibur needs a director as loyal as Harada. You can see this via the game mechanics that came and went in the Soul Calibur games". Harada responded by pointing out that there are many games with great mechanics that didn't survive the test of time. Game mechanics aren't really what make or break a franchise like Soul Calibur or Tekken. A lot of great games and franchises were unable to make the transition from earning their keep one coin at a time in arcades to providing sufficient value to players to buy a high-priced game for home use.

Soul Calibur did not have this problem - Harada saw firsthand that they made a strong transition from arcade revenue to home consoles. Soul Calibur had a strong leader named Yotoriyama (who also worked before with Harada on Tekken, and Harada on Soul Calibur). The Soul and Tekken teams established a strong rivalry in the early days of the polygon game era. While the Tekken team were known as an argumentative bunch of renegades, the Soul team was highly regarded as elite, the best of the best at the time.

In Harada's opinion, it is actually strong leadership and clarity of vision that maintain a franchise. Many franchises have died because key leaders have left for whatever reason. Yotoriyama was exactly the kind of director that the original tweet was talking about - the team was focused, driven, and producing great results. Tekken was the top earner in the arcades, but the Soul Calibur was outperforming Tekken on the home consoles. Unfortunately, the corporate landscape changed as the company grew and is what eventually and inadvertently killed Soul Calibur.

As companies grow, the focus of the top leadership shifts from "make great games" to "manage the organization efficiently". This basically means that endgame game developer career paths eventually evolve away from "making great game content and features" into organization management positions. Greater emphasis was placed at the corporate level on broadening one's skillset instead of mastery in a particular field. This also meant staying on a particular franchise for a long time was bad for each individual's career. As member after member of the Project Soul team either left to broaden their skillset or was promoted out of developer roles into management, the core vision and direction of Project Soul weakened. Harada faced a similar situation with the Tekken team - he was promoted to being head of the Global Business Department, but it had little to do with game development. All of his reports were marketing people and not game devs.

Harada decided to go against orders and lead the Tekken team anyway, despite the orders from above, in large part because he believes that the fans of any game can only depend on a dev team that has the necessary drive and vision to deliver. Harada's decision to go rogue was only really possible because the Tekken team was already full of renegades who weren't willing to listen to the corporate management. This was the largest difference between the Soul and the Tekken teams. The Tekken team remained driven and focused on their core vision because they were unwilling to take orders from the corporate level, while the Soul team slowly had their drive and vision whittled away one team member at a time. Harada ended by saying he believes that there are still some who have the will to resurrect Project Soul, but they need uniting in order to make it happen.

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[askagamedev]

Say a studio misses a milestone by a wide enough margin that the publisher decides to get involved. What exactly can/will the publisher do to put the project back on track?

Typically it takes more than one milestone for a publisher to decide to intervene. If the publisher believes that a project has gone off the rails there are two major options available. If they think the project is too far gone, they'll cancel the game and reallocate the workers, have a big layoff, or some combination of both.

If they believe the project is still salvageable, the usual process is to replace the team's leadership (or assign them a new boss) and send in their [rescue operators] to take up key team positions and try to save the project. The publisher's rescue team tends to be very experienced and very good at triage. They are there to take a hard look at what is currently going wrong and change the development trajectory to reaching minimum shippable status within the time given. This usually means replacement of the team's existing leadership because the project needs major directional change. The goal is no longer "make the best game you can", because that goal is now unreachable. Instead, the goal becomes "get the game to ship".

At this stage we don't have the resources to get new assets or significant code changes, so most of what we need to do is cobble things together that fit within the existing frameworks and work well enough to be a (mostly) complete and cohesive experience. Features and content that aren't up to snuff get cut or repurposed quite quickly here. Entire levels that are too far behind schedule to reach completion by the deadlines will be cut, set aside for potential DLC repurposing, or scrapped for parts/assets to be used elsewhere in the game.

Not all rescue operations are successful. I would say that one in ten or twenty rescue operations ship something pretty good. A good one third or so of rescue projects fail outright and get cancelled. The rest of the time, the project ships and then either get savaged by critics and/or players or get the 'mid' 7/10 game ratings that are so often quickly forgotten.

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[jack-of-blades]

When Veilguard comes out, please keep it in the back of your mind every single time you interact with Varric and Lucanis that their writer got laid off with little to no warning and that she is and always will be a Dragon Age legend and one of the reasons why the franchise has stayed afloat for as long as it has

[momochanners]

After a good night's sleep, I think I can better solidify my thoughts in regards to the Dragon Age trailer.

First, let's start with the positives:

- Companion diversity: This has always been part of the series' DNA that has been clearly depicted with every iteration, so those who cry foul over "Asian & Black elves", prosthethics, etc etc...I really don't get that, because values and sensibilities evolve over time. Even the series itself has course corrected when needed, eg. Player character creation influencing the family ethnicity of the Couslands in DA:O vs the Hawkes in DA2.

- Unlocked romances: Letting players choose whoever they want to romance regardless of their sexuality and race has always been a positive for me. Allowing everyone to enjoy the experience equally is great (and I'm sure the nuances of player race & gender will be addressed through dialogue and banter). Moreover, CRPGs are long and time-consuming, so to be locked out of character romances mid-way through is never going to be a good time (from personal experience and observing fandom in the past).

Now the negatives:

- Maybe it's me being on the older side of the Bioware fandom (15 years in Dragon Age, 20 years if you count older games like KotOR and Jade Empire), but I cringed very hard watching the trailer. If you followed the development of this game in the past decade, the cancelled live service element that was to be DA4 in one of its iterations was so all over the way the companions were introduced that it brought out a visceral reaction in me. The tonal whiplash from how foreboding Dreadwolf was presented in the past to the patronising happy quippy MEET OUR LITTLE GUYS YOU'RE SURE TO LOVE also did not help as a first concrete look of what to expect after all this time (also poor anachronistic choice of soundtrack when you already have Trevor Morris' compositions right there). I was so dismayed when they went with a looter-shooter-esque lighthearted vibe when they could've leaned hard on the foreboding established mood and momentum they've already got going with Dreadwolf. 

- The branding switch this late in the game that comes with it, especially one as drastic as this will always come with questions and ambivalence. I feel that mitigating uncertainty from announced changes (party number, combat mechanics, setting and environment, etc) should've have been prioritised to reassure existing and lapsed fans before appealing to new ones in such a jarring way.

-  I'm simply baffled at the marketing suit who signed off on whatever this is to be their "best foot forward" at reintroducing the final form of this game? If only there were confident with the world they've already built instead of relying on trendy gimmicks, the amount of damage control I'm seeing prior to the gameplay reveal tonight was so avoidable. Controlling the narrative from the get go is so very important especially now as opinions can easily snowball overnight into behemoth-like proportions especially from bad faith actors. You would think that lessons were learned from DA:O's "THIS IS THE NEW SHIT" and DA2's "Press a button, something AWESOME happens" debacles.

(The thing is, despite it being my least favourite DA out of the three, imho Inquisition has the best marketing campaign in the franchise despite the developmental troubles going on in the background. So it has been pulled off successfully before!)

- I think the Bioware layoffs, especially the recent extensive gutting of senior staff in September 2023, significantly depleted my goodwill as a fan. To see Varric being paraded as a mascot in the trailer, game promotion and supplementary media while having his creator unceremoniously let go after years of building the franchise we love left me so very cold. And it's a me problem, but seeing many other fans barely acknowledging that save for few hollow words before getting back into the fun frustrated me so much. I get being excited to finally get something solid after years of false starts, but with what was lost along the way...I personally don't feel right to approach this installment without cynicism.

Idk, I'm just a bundle of conflicted feelings over this series I guess? When it's so good, it's really good and stays with you as memorable gaming experiences that stays with you for life, but when it stumbles and fumbles the bag...it hurts to see.