Wow, great stuff. It's hard to imagine that soup-kitchen like back and forth going on with such a massive, layered, and extremely complex system like Dragon Age, but when you think about it, those little details that programmers agonize over and fight for are usually the things that end up royally pissing off gamers (or causing waves of joy in some cases)
What I worry about now is, if they do indeed have a 'chunk' of fixes that were already finished and are waiting in the first patch, we'll get those, but what about the inevitable things that group of fixes missed? How much turnover is there for the hard working programmers who now are faced with issues that might not have occurred to them and might take more than the budget they are allowed to fix?
I know patches traditionally do not come out every other day for such a huge game. But I'm in a precarious position of waiting until I can at least play DAI somewhat with the mouse and spacebar only, and I really don't mind waiting till that's possible. But it's getting kinda hard to go back to main menu after creating my 20th character in a row in the CC.
What people need to realize is that it is rarely one dude making all the decisions. There are multiple teams involved. There isn't one guy sitting behind a desk saying "Oh, hell no. I want everyone to run their asses off. Everywhere!" In my experience, it was a collection of team leads that discussed design and feature decisions, which was then passed down to the respective teams. The team involved depended on the prevue of the issue. "We can do that," or "No, we can't do that," or "Not sure, I'll get back with you," or "Well, will that mess up anything on (insert team) end? Freddy and I will get together with our guys and discuss it," That sort of thing.
Lead designers and producers are in that position for a reason, most often for production experience and a final yay or nay in discussions, if necessary. Design meetings can get pretty heated. They're managers. Their primary objective is to keep everyone on task, meet deadlines and keep production costs as close to budget as possible while preserving the integrity of the overall design goal and vision of the game. It's very much like movie production. They also serve as the PR front man, in many cases. The coach and quarterback rolled into one.
Regarding patches, it's hard to say. Normally, you first focus on technical issues that are affecting game play. Content can come after you fix the problems that are causing people to not be able to use the product they paid for. In the days of digital downloads and infinite product, money is only really lost on refunds because that was money they had in their coffers and then lost, and believe it or not, most refunds come from people not able to play the game due to technical issues. The philosophy tends to be to get as many people playing as possible, first. Handle everything else later with patches and DLC.
This is evident in their first "press release". "We've been hearing these things. Update, for DirectX try this. If you run this card, try this. We're working with Nvidia on this," and so on. I think this is a good sign. Why elaborate on features and content if it's already on the table? Content and features will be discussed. Technical problems, on the other hand, have to be fixed, and quickly.
It's hard to say how they'll decide to handle patches. I suppose we'll all find out. I'm in the same boat many are. I'm playing a mage because what I really want to play, a dagger rogue, in melee combat, is about as entertaining as getting an enema with a hydraulic press . I'm giving them a couple of patches before I throw in the towel.
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