Ship Date Change for Dragon Age: Origins

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The Dragon Age forums has an announcement that the ship date of Dragon Age: Origins for the PC has been pushed back to the last half of 2009.

We wanted to give the community a heads-up on a recent decision to move the launch of Dragon Age: Origins for the PC to the last half of 2009. That’s a change from the previously announced date of March 2009.

Why is this happening? Both EA and BioWare are really excited about the potential of the game on both PC and consoles and we want to ensure we deliver a blockbuster, AAA BioWare-quality title - as the game is shaping up so well already. An incredible amount of time and effort has gone into Dragon Age: Origins and this extra time will ensure we deliver the quality kind of launch you have come to expect from our games.

See the post here.

 

Has Bioware ever done well regarding its ship dates? I'm not sure, since I'm not that big a fan of their games. I really don't care much for how they do business or how they treat their gaming customers. But it's not very likely they will improve their business model anytime soon.

 

I like seeing games pushed back as long as it doesn't turn into vaporware. The way I see it, we wait so long for decent RPGs on the computer these days that we might as well wait six more months if it makes it more likely this will be polished. Of course, it may be more garbage made primarily for the console systems. But then, who cares anyway how soon a crappy game arrives.

 

Tal - I really liked NWN2, but even that one was pretty buggy. And in the NWN1, same thing. In both games I hit that bug where the next scene failed to trigger, leaving me stuck. That's my complaint: you wait, wait and wait, while they talk about how they are making it so "polished." Also, anyone who dares to question them on their forums is subjected to a ton of crap from their company moderators.

You are right about Blizzard. It's games take f-o-r-e-v-e-r to be released, but they are almost always top-notch and worth the wait.

 

You should see the Public Test Realm for WoW. It sounds like the release of the new content is only about two weeks away. They have a ton of work to do before they can release to Live, or it is going to be buggy as hell.

 

Well, I don't want to wait for this game... But if the choice is wait or have an unfinished game a la Bloodlines hit the market, I think I can live with the former.

 

The problem whit dragon age is that Bioware annoucned it at a stage that was far to early. So we calculated the normal time to it and got an idea in our heads. Read this tread: http://www.sorcerers.net/forums/showthread.php?t=36507

Look at the dates.

 

Probably a combination of Bioware delaying and EA aiming for the Christmas rush to ensure higher initial volume of sales.

 

Actually, no, it looks like EA insisted on a simulatneous release for Console and PC. The release will probably be somewhere around August-September-October. I think people are starting to realize that good games sell well whenever they're released. As to how much more polish the PC version will have in 6 months, I don't know and I wouldn't even hazzard any guesses, but they've sworn up and down that they won't dumb down the PC version one bit to make the console port simpler, and I think they know that if they do they'll be tarred and feathered by the fan-base (and lose anyone that has any interest in PC gaming forever).

 

That's great, but how long have they been working on it? Like 5 or 6 years? I can't even remember now. Anyway, that's a fairly sizable investment in resources and labor hours over that many years. So now you just want to sit on that investment for another 6 months, and not use the cashflow for further development projects? What sense does that make? That's what I mean by saying they have a flawed business model.

Besides, in a more cynical, but pure business approach, they could use the advantage. Some people are just dying to get this game. Many of them have both PC and console platforms. Why not release one version, like PC, which everyone will buy, who have both platforms (because they just can't wait) and then release the console version with something a bit different to make those players add the additional platform? That way they can sell the game twice to hardcore fanboys. That's a good way to boost sales. But there has to be an additional incentive (it doesn't really have to be much) in the console version to get them to spring for both platforms.