The studio has given a new reason why Dragon Age 4 is coming a decade after the previous installment, Dragon Age: Inquisition.

BioWare was at San Diego Comic-Con, and here they introduced the team that voices the main characters. John Epler (creative director) and Ashley Barlow (creative performance director) of the team spoke with Gamesradar. Epler said that BioWare had other projects and wanted to make sure they got this one right, and this is the best version he thinks they can do. Barlow added that they started putting the crew together five years ago. It took a long time to record seven hundred (!!!) characters. That’s a total of 80,000 lines of text for them, and if you add in the performance of the main character, Rook, it jumps to 140,000. He says it took time to make something good.

However, many of them will probably only have 1-2 lines to say. Still, there is more speech than in Dragon Age: Inquisition, where there were 88,000 lines in total. However, Red Dead Redemption 2 (500,000!) and Starfield (250,000) are way ahead of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Larian never gave a specific number for Baldur’s Gate 3, but with over 140 hours of scenes and 1.3 million words in their game, they probably have a lot to work with…

In another interview with The Gamer (which we’ve embedded), Epler also addressed the question of whether knowledge of the Dragon Age books and comics is necessary for The Veilguard: “One of the things we’re trying to do with the games is that you don’t need to have consumed all of the ancillary content to understand what’s going on. Still, there are characters from the comics, especially The Missing, the latest one, that show up in the game. One is a couple of characters we’ve talked about before, Evka Ivo and Antoine, two Grey Wardens.

In general, we just like to make sure that there’s continuity. Again, if you don’t read the comics or the books, you still know 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 we also want to allow players who don’t necessarily consume all of those ancillary media to really get into the story of the game and understand what’s going on,” Epler said.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard will be available this fall for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and PC.

Source: WCCFTech, Gamesradar