Word count.
There are a bunch of reasons why there’s been a ten year wait for a new Dragon Age. Developer BioWare has been busy with other projects during that decade, and big-budget games generally take longer to make now than they did back in 2014. But according to the game’s creative director John Epler and creative performance director Ashley Barlow, there’s a much more straightforward reason: game big.
During a recent interview with GamesRadar, Epler and Barlow were asked about the game’s lengthy development. Epler responded first, pointing out that “We had other projects going on at BioWare as well,” before stressing “we wanted to get this one right.” Then Barlow chimed in with some figures that give a sense of the game’s size. “It takes a long time to record 700 characters, – you know, 80,000 lines, or 140,000 with all the Rooks.”
Taking that latter figure, 140,000 lines would make The Veilguard the most voluminous Dragon Age to date. The previous game, Inquisition, clocked in at 88,000 lines. Such a figure would also make The Veilguard wordier than Baldur’s Gate 3, which had an estimated 114,921 lines of dialogue as of patch five. Weirdly though, the Veilguard figure is still dwarfed by Bethesda’s Starfield, which has a whopping 252,953 lines of dialogue. In space, it seems, everyone can hear your screed.
There is a question over the figures Barlow provides, however. By ‘all the Rooks’, Barlow is referring to the customisable player character (named Rook) who presumably has different line recordings based on the player’s chosen voice. It’s not clear whether the latter figure includes recordings of the same lines in different voices, or if there are character-specific barks related to things like your chosen fantasy race or class that add to the total. In any case, the number of unique lines in The Veilguard may be somewhere between the two quoted figures, which is still a lot, obviously. And still less than Starfield (seriously, how does Starfield have so much talking? Nobody says anything interesting!)
BioWare has been trying to big up Veilguard lately after a mixed reception to its reveal trailer. Earlier this month, the studio claimed that it’s the first game in the series “where the combat’s actually fun”, and where the characters are “intentionally” the focus of storytelling. As with Barlow’s figures, I have some doubts about the veracity of those statements. But I’m nonetheless intrigued to see what BioWare has cooked up in the five years since the deeply disappointing Anthem, and with everything it’s saying, the studio clearly knows it needs to deliver after two less than stellar games.
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