Dragon Age: Origins Return to Ostagar DLC Fiasco Explained

Dragon Age: Origins online producer Fernando Melo took a moment to bring us up to speed on the status of Return to Ostagar and the game’s pulled Xbox 360 title update. The post comes to us via community manager Victor Wachter:

To those 360 players affected by the Title Update issue this week, our sincere apologies.

The situation is something we are taking very seriously and the team is continuing to work around the clock to rectify.

DA:O is an incredibly large, very deep and complex game, making it virtually impossible to test every system and permutation possible for each update/DLC.

When testing any large endeavor like that, we depend on selectively targeting systems related to the changes being made, prioritized by order of perceived risk.

Unfortunately we did not foresee the changes being made to impact the systems it did, which is how something seemingly so visible still managed to avoid the dev team, and multiple test cycles of seasoned QA all through our internal teams, and EA & MS cert teams, and ultimately ended up out to the public.

To help us avoid similar problems in the future, we’re updating all our test plans across all platforms to take additional edge cases into account, as well as committing to more detailed test passes that will also prevent something like this happening again.

Short term, this means another delay across all platforms for the immediate console patches and Return to Ostagar DLC releases as this is a substantial increase in test coverage, and that time is needed to do so and ensure there are no other knock on issues with either the main game, the updates or the DLC.

In the meantime, there is good news – a fix is already in test for the 360 issue and looking very good, we hope to have a new update out as soon as possible and will update you as best as we can. If successful through the updated test plans, it will still deliver the expected fixes as well as restore the game saves for anyone affected by this week’s title update. For now, we do not have a timeframe for when the fix will pass approval and certification, but we will keep you updated.

In addition, while this creates a delay with the immediate content already expected to have released, the additional testing actually benefits some of the upcoming DLC and expansion pack, and as such is not expected to impact dates of the future content.

Thank you again for your patience.

Sounds like we have a small wait ahead of us yet.