While there, Creative Director John Epler and Creative Performance Director Ashley Barlow spoke briefly with 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 game right. It's the best version it could 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 shoot 700 characters, you know - 80,000 lines or 140,000 lines with all the Rooks. It just takes time to make something good. "
That's a lot of characters, but some of them will probably only have 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 far fewer than other games. Red Dead Redemption 2 had over 500K voice lines and Starfield had over 250K.
Larian never gave a firm figure for Baldur's Gate 3, but it's a safe bet that it has far more voice lines, considering 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 it is necessary to read the comics and novels before playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
"One of the things we're trying to ensure with the games is that you don't have to have consumed all the peripheral content to understand what's going on. Still, there are characters from the comics, especially The Missing, the most recent up in the game. One is a couple of characters we've talked about before, the two Gray Wardens. We just love to make sure there's a continuity. Again, if you don't read the comics or the books, you know still what's going on, but if you do, it gives you that extra level of texture. Honestly, the same goes 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 give the players who don't necessarily consume all the peripheral media the opportunity to really get into the story of the game and understand what's going on."
Dragon Age: The Veilguard will not be shown at Gamescom 2024. Despite the absence, according to EA, the game is still scheduled for a fall 2024 release on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X.