BioWare Blog: GenCon Indy, Part Two

BioWare community coordinator Chris Priestly wraps up his discussion of Dragon Age’s appearance at this year’s GenCon Indy in the second of two blog entries.

If you read part 1 of my Gen Con blog (and if you haven’t go do so now, I’ll wait) you know that me, Fernando Melo (Producer), David Gaider (Lead Writer), Cori May (Technical Designer), Randall Bishop (Assistant Brand Manager), Derek Beland (Senior Programmer), Bryan Derksen (Toolset Programmer) and Vanessa Prinsen (QA Analyst) all came to this years Gen Con in Indianapolis Indiana to show off Dragon Age: Origins. We had 4 stations each for hands on demos of the PC and Xbox 360 versions. We also had a stage where we gave presentations and toolset demos to the crowd. Everyone had a great time meeting and talking DAO with fans. I think 99% of the people who came to the booth walked away impressed with the game. The 1% who walked away unhappy wanted it to be an MMO (too bad for them as they missed out a great single player RPG. We told them to check out Star Wars The Old Republic for cool upcoming MMO goodness).

The game went over great and even the people who only watched walked away talking about how cool it was or how much it reminded them on NwN or Baldur’s Gate. I had a large number of people pull out PDAs and pre-order on the spot, which was great to see. We did have a few minor tech issues, all caused by Xboxes overheating in their tiny cabinets in the hot Convention hall, but otherwise the builds performed great. Our biggest disappointment was that our swag never did arrive. We were supposed to give out 18 thousand inflatable Dragon Age swords, but the truck never showed, so our apologies to fans that didn’t get any. Our biggest surprise was likely the transformation of Vanessa from knowledgeable game assistant in to (booth babe). Never underestimate the power of an attractive woman who is also a huge gamer and fellow nerd.