New Information Revealed, Explanation of Return to Ostagar Delay Offered As Well
January 7, 2010 – Fans of Bioware’s epic RPG, Dragon Age: Origins were disappointed to learn that Return to Ostagar was delayed in the eleventh hour. The DLC package was hastily suspended in an announcement on Bioware’s forums, but with the announcement came news that a new expansion pack, Awakening , will be arriving in March. Just two days after learning of Awakening, new details are emerging about the expansion pack.
Awakening, which will cost a hefty $40, will take place several months after the end of the Blight in Dragon Age: Origins. The world is still picking up the pieces after the end of the blight. Communication is broken, roads are rarely traveled upon, and you will be traveling to Amaranthine, in the north of Ferelden, to put the Grey Wardens back in their rightful place in the world. Rumors abound in Amaranthine, and you find out that the Darkspawn haven’t returned to the ground like in previous blights. Something is keeping them out.
The game will raise the level cap from 20, and players who haven’t yet beaten Dragon Age: Origins can begin a new game in Awakening with a new character. The character will automatically begin between levels 17 and 20 to help with the foes you will face and the new level cap will probably be somewhere in the mid-to-high 30s. As in Mass Effect 2, you will be able to import your character, whose previous actions will be reflected in the way that characters in the world react to the character.
The game will also feature new party members and new monsters such as the Spectral Dragon, Inferno Golem and The Children.
The interview, conducted by Jeff Haynes at IGN, also touched on the length of Awakening and the reasons behind the delay of Return to Ostagar. Speaking about the length of Awakening, Fernando Melo, the Online Producer of the expansion pack said, “I think it’s safe to say it’s larger than any other downloadable content out there. I think we need to treat it a lot more like a traditional retail expansion , which is really what it is — it’ll just have a downloadable version as well. But it’ll be fairly massive. It’ll be bigger than most retail games.”
Melo also said that the delay of Return to Ostagar was a matter of Bioware discovering a problem at the last minute, something that had made it through their testing but that they felt would deteriorate from the experience if it was not resolved immediately. Though he didn’t elaborate on the problem, he said it crossed all platforms and that, “there’s a delay there, but I think it was the right one to make sure that the quality was good. It’s more to do with the long term view that we have a lot more coming and we don’t want to do anything short term that would put people off. That’s never a good decision in our mind.”
The lengthy interview can be found at IGN.
No new release date has been announced for Return to Ostagar, and Awakening will be released in March.
Source: IGN
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/01/07/dragon-age-awakening-explansion-detailed/
