Haven's Finest
Proud to be your one-stop shop for all blood magic rituals which may or may not bring your glitched files some much-needed party banter!
Think you're bugged? Try these obscure workarounds! We can't guarantee their success, but we can tell you that many (not all, sadly) of us have experienced at least temporary bouts of relatively normalized chatter ratios, as well as more music and other often-missing audio bits, upon trying these out. Many users with files approaching triple-digit play time and less than ten banter instances gave these tricks a whirl and suddenly experienced the simple joy of companions conversing much more frequently. Good luck!
Asterisks in the Hinterlands
* "this miiight work."
** "we've had several people report favorable results."
*** "this is helping so many people, Cole greatly approves."
In Your File Shall Work
-Today's newest possible lifesaver comes courtesy reddit user spaceclarkson. Here's the official scoop: go offline from Origin's servers and then access Skyhold's war table to fast-travel to a location of your choice. From there, fast-travel directly to Val Royeaux. If things are going as planned, you'll hear Val's music. For many of us hit by these audio glitches, this may well be your first time hearing it. Anyway, go ahead and fast-travel to wherever you intend to play after that. Hopefully intermittent music will be more constant and banter will improve. One important note here is that in the future you'll only want to exit the war table by fast-traveling to a location. Testing illustrates a high probability that leaving it just to head back into Skyhold triggers the bug again, at which point I guess you'll just want to repeat what I've listed. ***
-Fast travel between camps. Wait around a bit. See what happens. There have been limited reports of this causing stuff to fire off after a while. *
-While at a camp, mount/unmount and then rest. When your party wakes up, either idle in place or go about your questing business -- try both and see if one works for you. This method has had an appreciable number of results for many of us whose companions were effectively mutes all game beforehand, but like the rest of our list, it seems to get "clogged up" again fairly quickly. Rinse and repeat if you find success with this. ***
-Here's a winner: go into your journal and hover over everything, everywhere, until it no longer has the ticker next to it that designates that it's new. Of tremendous importance here is that many times completed quests have to be hovered over in their section as well. Likely a bug, and it probably causes interference in the system, messing around with other stuff in the process. Now do the same with your inventory and codex... yes, it's annoying. But it seems to clean things up for many players. You might try doing all this while disconnected from all account settings too; in my experience that has helped greatly. Once you're done, save your game, exit to the main menu, and then jump back in. ***
-Fiddle with the audio settings. DAI incorporates multiple levels here: home theater, TV, night, and headphones. Oftentimes users have reported that switching these around triggers music they've otherwise never heard, fuller sound effects representation, and, yes, possibly even banter. There's no consensus on which settings work and which ones don't work, so switch it up and hope for the best. **
-Try rolling a new character. Unfortunately this one rarely works, but a couple of regulars here may have somehow pulled it off. Might be too early to tell. In most cases it doesn't seem to get rid of the problem, or it comes back eventually, but hey. *
More to come as it's devised. If you find any of these methods workable, take a moment to thank the contributors who have developed them. I'm honored to host a thread brimming with such passion for the game and motivation to patch it through blood, sweat, and tears.
And by blood I totally mean blood magic, yeah.
Codex Unlocked: A Brief History of Glitch Thread Updates
UPDATE 11/30: Since last night I've been tidying things up to look presentable and such. More importantly by far, I've begun utilizing the OP as a database of user-constructed workarounds. This was something I'd intended to do since the 27th, certainly the 28th once the official BioWare update hit the forums and gave us all a big sigh, and I definitely heard the requests to do a good job at it. I hope it's all-inclusive, and I will absolutely continue updating with new techniques. Once BioWare has more to say on the matter, that too shall arrive here for discussion, so long as the mods continue to allow this topic to coexist with the recent News & Announcements piece.
2nd UPDATE 11/28: Yep, so, the devs have done plenty and can't replicate our collective wonky conditions even still. Utterly dumbfounding. As Allan experienced days ago, the saves we've submitted work as intended at the BioWare offices. But some of you have gotten so incredibly little banter -- single digits heading into triple-digit hours of total play time -- that there's just... seven hells, my loves. I just don't know. Keep those streams and recordings coming, maybe that'll help. In the meantime, brace yourselves in case it's decided to "consolidate discussion" into the announcement thread. This one is very big, and rightly so, but I worry that'll mean its eventual closure. Maybe not though, we'll see. If it happens, let's all just continue our work there. *takes a shot*
UPDATE 11/28: Yes, Mark Darrah's phrasing in responding to tweets about this issue feels like a bit of a blow. It's true that his mentioning that some of this is perception, his reaction to a comment about music, and his post about how it's possible to exhaust all dialogue all comes together to show he hasn't read up on this thread or any of the others on various DA-related sites. But let's also consider, of course, that he's literally Mark Darrah. I'm not too surprised he's out of the loop on this, he's in charge of a lot of stuff. Still, it does kind of hurt. It feels a bit like he's partially washing hands of the affair when thousands of players are getting near-zilch from the get-go with their files and many of us are putting in overtime trying to help identify the issue. They are investigating. It is being looked into. But we might still hold more cards to ourselves re: our findings than is remotely optimal. The truth is, right now it feels like we know more than they do. It's probably illusory, but it's possible it isn't. So if you feel like tweeting devs with specific findings from your playtesting, I won't disagree with that move. Just remember to be civil. We need them to know we do this out of love for the writing we paid good money to hear. Because, well, dammit, we love Dragon Age. Right now it's just kinda on mute for us.
UPDATE 11/27: Allan has enough saves for an analysis, folks! No need to send him more, at least not for now. I'll let you know if that changes, of course. Also, we've apparently gained press coverage! Whoa. IGN, EuroGamer, and VG247 have all run articles on the glitch, which means more people are going to pour in than ever before. If you're around when they ask for details, please fill them in! 'Cause remember, many impacted players would never have known this wasn't simply a case of the game having profoundly sparse banter (and ceaselessly glitchy environmental music) in general before we united with our findings. And, to my American friends: Happy Thanksgiving! Something something... let's be grateful the devs are testing. ;D
2nd UPDATE 11/26: Even as I made the previous edit, ALLAN SCHUMACHER FORMALLY REQUESTED THAT PC PLAYERS AFFLICTED WITH THIS GLITCH AND ROUGHLY 60-70+ HOURS INTO THE GAME PLEASE PM HIM ASAP. BioWare is investigating and needs your files to do so! I'm under the impression being a few hours below that level should also prove acceptable, just not necessarily quite as handy. Please PM Allan your save data today if possible!
UPDATE 11/26: shinobi602, of NeoGAF fame, helped pass along the message of mass banter glitch outbreak to BioWare's very own Aaryn Flynn today. He pledged to look into it -- but here's where we come in. He also said they may be requesting PC user save files today. It's important that PC players active in this thread stand ready to send in their data if so! It's also important to remember that Allan fiddled around with one such file only for banter to function properly in the limited time he had with it, too, so this may not solve the matter. Or it might! Only one way to find out. So if we're asked, be ready.
2nd UPDATE 11/25: Allan clarified he's looking into things on his own time, as time permits, but David Hulegaard addressed Origin's thread apologizing for the trouble we're going through and assuring us it's under investigation, Mark Darrah addressed a tweet saying he'd have people look into it, and another dev took to a Reddit thread on the subject with echoed sentiment. We definitely have their attention! But no, there's no way of knowing when it'll be fixed. The cause(s?) are as yet undetermined and although it appears to have impacted a lot of players, it's still an intermittent thing, ergo, still a royal head-scratcher. Stay loud (but polite) my friends, and know that as frustratingly quiet as your companions may be, we'll all stay loud with you!
UPDATE 11/25: Allan Schumacher arrived at the scene last night and it sounds like he'll be taking a look at it. Due to its intermittent nature and the varied reports this is going to be a tough one, but we have their attention. This bug is getting more reports than I anticipated, which is sad for the many players here, on tumblr, on reddit, GameFAQs, Origin, and "in the wild" who have been hit with it, but good in that it'll garner more consideration from the developers. In the meantime, if you believe you have been impacted please report your findings here and on the EA Origin site for research purposes. Thanks, and good luck everyone!
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