BioWare attended San Diego Comic-Con 2024 to discuss Dragon Age: The Veilguard and showcase the voice actors chosen for the upcoming action RPG.
While there, Creative Director John Epler and Creative Performance Director Ashley Barlow spoke briefly to Gamesradar. Epler explained why Dragon Age: The Veilguard took so long to make:
We had other projects going on at BioWare as well. We wanted to make sure we got this one right. It's the best version that it could possibly be.
Ashley Barlow added:
We started casting five years ago. The team, the talent has been on for five years. It takes a long time to record 700 characters, you know - 80,000 lines or 140,000 lines with all the Rooks. It just takes time to make good.
That's a lot of characters, but some of them will probably have only one or two voice lines. Overall, Dragon Age: The Veilguard will have more voice lines than its predecessor (2014's Inquisition), which had 88K, but still way less than other games. Red Dead Redemption 2 had over 500K voice lines, and Starfield had over 250K. Larian never provided a fixed number for Baldur's Gate 3, but it's a safe bet that it has way more voice lines, considering that there are over 140 hours of cutscenes and around 1.3 million words in the award-winning cRPG.
In another video interview with The Gamer, John Epler discussed whether reading comics and novels is necessary before playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
One of the things we do try to make sure with the games is that you don't need to have consumed all the ancillary content to understand what's going on. Still, there's characters from the comics, especially The Missing, the most recent one, that show up in the game. One is a pair of characters we've talked about before, Evka Ivo and Antoine, two Grey Wardens. In general, we just love to make sure that there's a continuity. Again, if you don't read the comics or the books, you still know what's going on, but if you do, it gives you that extra level of texture. Honestly, the same is true even for the previous games. We want to make sure that if you play the previous games you get that extra context, that extra texture, but also we want to allow players who don't necessarily consume all that ancillary media to really get into the story of the game and understand what's going on.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard won't be shown at Gamescom 2024. Despite the absence, according to EA, the game is still slated for a Fall 2024 launch on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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