Dragon Age: The Veilguard is set to launch this fall, by which time it will have been an entire decade since the series’ last instalment, Dragon Age: Inquisition, came out. And while it’s understandable that fans have been frustrated with how long it has taken to get from a successful series’ third instalment to its fourth, members of its development team say that the scale of the project necessitated the long development time.
Speaking with GamesRadar, while talking about Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s development cycle, creative director John Epler said BioWare “wanted to make sure we got this one right”, calling the action RPG “the best version [it] could possibly be.”
The game’s voice cast has been working on it for five years, as per Epler, while creative performance director Ashley Barlow says the RPG touts a whopping 140,000 lines of recorded dialogue. 60,000 of those are just for protagonist Rook alone, with each variant of the character (each portrayed by a different actor) having about 15,000 lines of their own.
“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,” Barlow said.
It’s worth pointing out, of course, that Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s early development years were reported to be marked with behind-the-scenes issues and reboots, with BioWare having taken some time to land on the exclusively single-player vision for the game that it ultimately settled on.
Either way, The Veilguard’s scale is undeniably massive. At over 140,000 lines of recorded dialogue, it outweighs all past BioWare titles by that metric, with Dragon Age: Inquisition having had 80,000 lines of recorded dialogue, and Mass Effect: Andromeda capping out at 65,000 (which, interestingly, was more than Mass Effect 2 and 3 combined).
Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s full voice cast was also recently revealed. Get more details on that through here.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard launches for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC this fall, and will also be Steam Deck Verified. A specific release date will be announced later this summer.
