BioWare Responds to Critcism About Dragon Age: Origins Storage

After Fidgit’s Tom Chick voiced his concerns over having to spend $7 on the Warden’s Keep DLC in order to increase the inventory space available to our characters in Dragon Age: Origins, BioWare’s Georg Zoeller made a few comments in an attempt to dispel the notion that it was just about “bilking” us for more money. First, Tom’s complaint:

Sixty slots fill up quickly. So a lot of this stuff you’ll sell, but not nearly enough of it. You might find a really nice pair of gloves for a mage, but your one mage already has nice gloves. But what about when or if you recruit another mage into your party? And you’ll want to keep all those consumables, right? Surely the salves that protect against electricity damage or cold damage will come in handy at some point. Then there are the sets of armor that give you a bonus, but you’ll only find them one piece at a time. Do you dare sell off those Juggernaut plate mail boots? Or do you hold out hoping to get the hat and breastplate?

In every longer storyline mission, I’ve left behind items that I wanted to sell. Loot has been abandoned for lack of a place to carry it. I have literally left money on the floor. What’s worse, I’ve had to sift through loot guessing what’s worth what, because the prices aren’t listed until you visit a merchant.

…

But then there’s the third step. It’s called Warden’s Keep and it’ll cost you seven dollars to download. It adds a new party camp that includes storage so you can free up backpack slots when you’re adventuring. Bioware claims this was created after early reviews complained about the lack of inventory space. But rather than fixing the game by giving everyone a storage locker, they opted to use the problem as a way to make more money.

The bottom line is this: the lack of inventory space is a problem given the way the game was designed. The solution to this problem will cost you seven dollars above and beyond the money you paid when you bought the game. Dragon Age, as sold, is slightly crippled by design. Once again, Electronic Arts pushes the limit for how to bilk you for more money.

And Mr. Zoeller’s response:

For what it’s worth, ‘EA’ has nothing to do with this (apart from being the parent company of BioWare).

The game was designed with limited inventory for a number of reasons, the least of which being to limit savegame size and therefore loadtimes.

Originally there was a small storage chest in the party camp, until we realized that due to the fact that there are several versions of the camp area (for reasons evident in the story) and that people were losing their items (as they were stored in the area).

By the time this problem was discovered, we had not enough time to fix the problem, plus, we decided that it was not really necessary anyway since the item limitation was rather generous compared to the initial designs at least.

The game was finalized tested without a storage chest. The item limit was never questioned or brought up during the QA phase, after all, it was part of the design.

The ‘storage chest’ in Warden’s Keep DLC was added by the DLC team as part of their ‘hey, what would be a cool feature for your own keep’ brainstorming.

I’m fine with you being upset about the item limit design in the game – and fine with you being upset about the chest being included in the DLC, but I must protest the ‘Oh, EA is pushing the limit for more money’ tagline, because that’s just not what has happened.

I categorically reject that any features or game systems in this game were designed or removed to ‘bilk users for more money’

I gotta go with Tom on this one. If adding more inventory storage was a technical hurdle in the base game, why is it suddenly not an issue in a $7 expansion?