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English to Chinese: Dragon Age: Inquisition General field: Other Detailed field: Gaming/Video-games/E-sports
Source text - English DRAGON AGE: INQUISITION
The website Consumerist once held an annual poll for "Worst Company in America," asking readers to select the country's most reviled corporation through a March Madness-style elimination tournament. In 2008, as the US economy collapsed, the insurance salesmen at AIG took top honors. In 2011 the award went to BP, whose oil rigs had just spilled 210 million gallons of crude in the Gulf Coast. But in 2012 and 2013, a different type of company won the award, beating out the likes of Comcast and Bank of America, as over 250,000 voters flocked to declare that the United States' worst company was in fact the video game publisher Electronic Arts (EA).
There were many reasons for this ignominious victory, including the rise of optional "microtransaction " payments in EA games and the spectacular disaster of the publisher's online-only SimCity reboot . What may have rankled gamers most, however, was what they believed EA had done to BioWare.
BioWare, a development studio founded in 1995 by three medical doctors who thought making games might be a cool hobby, leaped into fame in 1998 with the Dungeons & Dragons based role-playing game Baldur's Gate (a game so influential it would play a major role in the stories of two other games in this book, Pillars of Eternity and The Witcher 3).In the following years, BioWare became renowned for a string of top-tier RPGs like Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and a space opera called Mass Effect that appealed not just to people who liked to shoot aliens, but also to people who liked to smooch them.
In 2007, Electronic Arts bought BioWare, and in recent years it had seemed to fans that the studio was in a funk. BioWare's two new flagship franchises, Mass Effect and the Tolkien-ish Dragon Age, were beloved but stalling. Dragon Age 2, released in 2011, was panned for feeling incomplete. And 2012's Mass Effect 3, which put a bow on the spacefaring trilogy, angered hard-core fans with a controversial ending in which the player's choices didn't seem to matter. *
(*: BioWare later released free downloadable content that expanded and added more choices to Mass Effect 3's ending. EA's labels president, Frank Gibeau, endorsed the decision. Recalled BioWare studio head Aaryn Flynn: "Frank once said to [Mass Effect 3 lead] Casey [Hudson] and I, 'Are you sure you guys even want to do this? Are you just going to feed the trolls up there?' We’re like, 'No, we want to do this, we really want to get this right, do this thing.' He said, ‘OK if you want to.")
Surely, fans thought, these missteps were EA's fault. The problems started when EA purchased the studio, didn't they? All you had to do was look at the long list of iconic studios that EA had acquired and then shut down—a list that included Bull-frog (Dungeon Keeper), Westwood (Command & Conquer), and Origin (Ultima) —to fear that BioWare might be next. Fans went to Consumerist to send a message, even if that meant declaring a video game publisher more heinous than a predatory mortgage lender.
Amid these theatrics, BioWare’s studio head, Aaryn Flynn, was staring down a far more relevant challenge: Dragon Age：Inquisition, the third game in the fantasy series. Inquisition was going to be the most ambitious game that BioWare had ever made. It was a game with a lot to prove—that BioWare could return to form; that EA wasn't crippling the studio; that BioWare could make an “open-world" RPG, in which the player could move freely through massive environments. But, as Flynn knew, Dragon Age: Inquisition was already behind schedule thanks to
unfamiliar new technology. Their new game engine, Frostbite, was requiring more work than anyone at the studio had expected.
“The discovery of what's possible on a new engine is both exhilarating and humbling," Flynn wrote on BioWare’s blog in September 2012, just after announcing Dragon Age: Inquisition. Perhaps if he had taken a few shots of vodka beforehand—or if he didn't have to worry about what Electronic Arts' PR staff would think—he might have added what BioWare staffers were really thinking: What's possible is that the new engine is a technical disaster.
BioWare’s main headquarters are nestled in a small office complex near downtown Edmonton, a city best known for its enormous shopping mall and for temperatures that regularly plummet into the obscene. It’s no wonder the studio came up with Dragon Age. If you want to dream up a fantasy world inhabited by fire-breathing mythical creatures, few cities are more suitable for the act than Edmonton.
Dragon Age, which BioWare hoped would become the Lord of the Rings of video games, first entered development in 2002. After a hellish seven-year slog, BioWare released the series, first game. Dragon Age: Origins, in November 2009. It was appealing to all types of gamers. Hard-core RPG fans dug the strategic combat and consequential choices, while the more romantically inclined loved that they could seduce their dreamy party members, like the snarky knight Alistair and the sultry wizard Morrigan. Dragon Age: Origins became a massive success, selling millions of copies and, most important, inspiring hundreds of thousands of lines of fan fiction.
Leading the Dragon Age development team was Mark Darrah, a well-liked BioWare veteran who had been at the company since the late 1990s. Darrah had a dry sense of humor and a bushy beard that had been bright red in 2013, when I first met him, but three years later was invaded by blotches of gray. "Mark is very good at the business of game development," said Cameron Lee, a producer at BioWare. "Internally, we call the Dragon Age team the pirate ship. It'll get where it needs to go, but it’s going to go all over the place. Sail over here. Drink some rum. Go over here. Do something else. That's how Mark likes to run his team.” (An alternative take, from someone else who worked on the game: “Dragon Age was referred to as the pirate ship because it was chaotic and the loudest voice in the room usually set the direction. I think they smartly adopted the name and morphed it into something better.")
After shipping Dragon Age: Origins in 2009, Darrah and his crew of pirates already had some ideas for their next big game. Whereas in Origins you played a fanatical Grey Warden whose life was dedicated to thwarting demons, the next Dragon Age game would be about larger-scale political conflict. Darrah envisioned a game about an Inquisition—in Dragon Age lore, an autonomous organization that solves conflicts across the globe—with the player as leader and Inquisitor.
Then, plans changed. Progress had stalled on one of BioWare's other games, the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic. Developed at BioWares studio in Austin, Texas, The Old Republic kept missing release dates, gradually slipping from 2009 to 2010 to 2011. Frustrated EA executives wanted a new product from BioWare to bolster their quarterly sales targets, and they decided that the Dragon Age team would have to fill the gap. After some lengthy discussions, Mark Darrah and Aaryn Flynn agreed to deliver Dragon Age 2 in March 2011, just sixteen months after the release of Dragon Age: Origins.
“The Old Republic moved, and there was a hole," said Darrah. “Basically, Dragon Age 2 exists to fill that hole. That was the inception. It was always intended to be a game made to fit in that.” Darrah wanted to call it Dragon Age: Exodus ("Which I wish we’d stuck with") but EAs marketing executives insisted that they call it Dragon Age 2, no matter what that name implied.
The first Dragon Age had taken seven years to make. Now BioWare would have just over a year to build a sequel. For any big game, that would be difficult; for a role-playing game, it was near impossible. There were just so many variables. Dragon Age: Origins had contained four giant areas, each with its own factions, monsters, and quests. Decisions the player made at the beginning of Origins—like how the characters "origin" story unfolded—had a significant impact on the rest of the story, which meant that BioWare's writers and designers had to build different scenes to account for every possibility. If you played as a dwarf noble who had been exiled from the labyrinthine city of Orzammar, the other dwarves would have to react accordingly upon your return. If you were a human, they wouldn’t care nearly as much.
None of this was achievable in a year. Even if BioWare forced everyone to work nonstop overtime on Dragon Age 2, they just wouldn't have the bandwidth to make a sequel as ambition as fans expected. To solve this problem, Mark Darrah and crew shelved the old Inquisition idea and made a risky call: instead of taking you through multiple areas of their fantasy world, Dragon Age 2 would unfold within a single city, Kirkwall, over the course of a decade. That way, the Dragon Age team could recycle locations for many of the game’s encounters, shaving months off their development time. They also axed features that had been in Dragon Age: Origins, like the ability to customize your party members’ equipment. "It didn't pan out perfectly, but had we not made those decisions it would've been significantly more troubled," said Mike Laidlaw, the creative director of Dragon Age. "So we made the best calls we could on a fairly tight time line."
When Dragon Age 2 came out in March 2011, players reacted poorly. They were loud about their anger, hammering the game for its tedious side quests and reused environments. Wrote one blogger, “The drop in overall quality is staggering on a cosmic level, and there's no way I'd ever recommend anyone buying this game under any circumstances." The game didn't sell as well as Dragon Age：Origins—although “in certain dark accounting corners of EA, it’s considered a wild success,” Darrah said—and by the summer of 2011, BioWare had decided to cancel Dragon Age 2's expansion pack, Exalted March, in favor of a totally new game. They needed to get away from the stigma of Dragon Age 2.
Really, they needed to reboot the franchise. "There was something to be proven, I think, from the Dragon Age team coming off Dragon Age 2, that this was a team that could make ‘triple-A quality’ good games,” Darrah said. “There was a bit of a tone, not within the studio but around the industry, that there were essentially two tiers of BioWare: there was the Mass Effect team and then there was everyone else. And I think there was a lot of desire to fight back against that. The Dragon Age team is a scrappy bunch."
There are certain things in role-playing games we've grown to take for granted. Rare is the gamer who comes home from the store with the latest Final Fantasy, pops it into their PlayStation, and goes on Facebook to talk about what a beautiful save system it has. You won't find many reviews raving about the new Fallout's ability to properly toggle between combat and noncombat game states. Skyrim didn't sell millions because it knows how to keep track of your inventory. These systems are necessary but unglamorous, and certainly not fun to make, which is one of the reasons most video games use engines.
The word "engine" calls to mind the guts of a car, but in game development, an engine is more like a car factory. Every time you build a new car, you'll need many of the same components: tires, axles, plush leather seats. Similarly, just about every video game needs the same core features: a physics system, a graphics renderer, a main menu. Coding new versions of those features for every game would be like designing new wheels every time you wanted to manufacture a sedan. Engines, like factories, allow their users to recycle features and avoid unnecessary work.
Even before finishing Dragon Age 2, Aaryn Flynn and Mark Darrah were looking for a new engine for their fantasy franchise. Their in-house game engine, Eclipse, felt creaky and obsolete for the type of gorgeous high-end games they hoped to make. Basic cinematic effects, like lens flares, were impossible for Eclipse to handle. "Graphically, it wasn't fully featured, Darrah said. "It was getting long in the tooth from that perspective."
On top of that, the Mass Effect series used the third-party Unreal Engine, which made it difficult for the two BioWare teams to collaborate. Basic tasks like rendering a 3-Dmodel required a totally different process on Eclipse than they did on Unreal. "Our technology strategy was just a mess," said Flynn. "Every time we'd start a new game, people would say, Oh, we should just pick a new engine."
Flynn and Darrah powwowed with one of their bosses, EA executive Patrick Soderlund, and came back with a solution: the Frostbite engine, which the EA-owned studio DICE, in Sweden, had developed for its Battlefield games. Although nobody had ever used Frostbite to make RPGs, Flynn and Darrah found it appealing for a few reasons. It was powerful, for one. DICE had a team of engineers who worked full-time on Frostbite's graphic capabilities, beefing up the visual effects that made, for example, trees sway in the wind. Because this was the video game industry, they also spent a lot of time making it look pretty to blow things up.
The other big advantage of Frostbite was that EA owned it. If BioWare started developing all its games on the Frostbite engine, it could share technology with its sister studios, borrowing tools from other EA-owned developers like Visceral (Dead Space) or Criterion (Need for Sped) whenever those companies learned cool new tricks for enhancing facial capture or making it look even prettier to blow things up.
In the fall of 2010, as the bulk of the Dragon Age team was finishing up DA2, Mark Darrah pulled together a small group to work on a prototype they called Blackfoot. This prototype had two major goals: to start getting a feel for the Frostbite engine, and to make a free-to-play multiplayer game set in the Dragon Age universe. The latter never happened, and after a few months Blackfoot fizzled, hinting at bigger challenges to come. "It wasn't making enough progress, ultimately because its team was too small," Darrah said. "Frostbite's a hard engine to make progress with if your team is too small. It takes a certain number of people to just keep it on."
By the end of 2011, with both Blackfoot and the Dragon Age 2 expansion pack canceled, Darrah had a substantial team available to start working on BioWare's next big game. They resurfaced the old Inquisition idea and began to talk about what a Dragon Age 3 might look like on Frostbite. By 2012 they had a plan in place. Dragon Age 3: Inquisition (which later ditched the "3") would be an open-world RPG, inspired heavily by Bethesda's smash hit Skyrim. It would take place all across new areas of Dragon Age’s world, and it would hit all the beats that Dragon Age 2 couldn't. "My secret mission was to shock and awe the players with the massive amounts of content,” said Matt Goldman, the art director. "People were complaining, 'Oh there wasn't enough in Dragon Age 2.’ OK, you’re not going to say that. At the end of Inquisition, I actually want people to go, “Oh god, not [another] level.”
BioWare wanted Dragon Age: Inquisition to be a launch title for the next generation of game consoles, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. But EA's profit forecasters, caught up in the rise of iPad and iPhone gaming, were worried that the PS4 and Xbox One wouldn't sell very well. As a safeguard, the publisher insisted that they also ship on the older PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, both of which were already in tens of millions of homes. (Most early PS4/Xbox One games followed the same strategy, except for a certain Polish RPG that we'll cover in chapter 9.) With personal computers added to the mix, this meant Inquisition would have to ship on five platforms at once—a first for BioWare.
Ambitions were piling up. This was to be BioWare’s first 3-D open-world game and their first game on Frostbite, an engine that had never been used to make RPGs. It needed to be made in roughly two years, it needed to ship on five platforms, and, oh yeah, it needed to help restore the reputation of a studio that had been beaten up pretty badly. "Basically we had to do new consoles, a new engine, new gameplay, build the hugest game that we’ve ever made, and build it to a higher standard than we ever did," said Matt Goldman. "With tools that don't exist.”
If an engine is like a car factory, then in 2012, as Inquisition entered development, the Frostbite engine was like a car factory without the proper assembly lines. Before Dragon Age: Inquisition, developers at EA had used Frostbite mostly to make first-person shooters like Battlefield and Medal of Honor. Frostbites engineers had never built tools that would, say, make the main character visible to the player. Why would they need to? In first-person shooters, you see through the characters eyes. Your body consists of disembodied hands, a gun, and, if you’re really lucky, some legs. Battlefield didn’t need RPG stats, magical spells, or even save systems—the campaign kept track of your progress with automatic checkpoints. As a result, Frostbite couldn't create any of those things.
“It was an engine that was designed to build shooters,” said Darrah. “We had to build everything on top of it." At first, the Dragon Age team underestimated just how much work this would be. “Characters need to move and walk and talk and put on swords, and those swords need to do damage when you swing them, and you need to be able to press a button to swing them,” said Mike Laidlaw. Frostbite could do some of that, Laidlaw added, but not all of it.
Darrah and his team knew that they were the Frostbite guinea pigs—that they were exchanging short-term pain for long-term benefits—but during early development on Dragon Age: Inquisition, even the most basic tasks were excruciating. Frostbite didn't yet have the tools they needed to make an RPG. Without those tools in place, a designer had no idea how long it might take to do something as fundamental as making areas. Dragon Age: Inquisition was supposed to allow the player to control a party of four people, but that system wasn't in the game yet. How could a level designer figure out where to place obstacles on a map if he couldn’t test it out with a full party of characters?
Even when Frostbites tools did start functioning, they were finicky and difficult to use. John Epler, a cinematic designer, recalled one internal demo for which he had to go through a Sisyphean ritual just to build a cut scene. "I had to get to the conversation in-game, open my tools at the same time, and then as soon as I hit the line, I had to hit the pause button really, really quickly,” Epler said. "Because otherwise it would just play through to the next line. Then I had to add animations, and then I could scrub it two or three times before it would crash and then I'd have to start the process all over again. It was absolutely the worst tools experience I've ever had."
The Frostbite team at DICE spent time supporting Epler and the other designers, answering their questions and fixing bugs, but their resources were limited. It didn’t help that Sweden was eight hours ahead of Edmonton. If one of BioWare’s designers had a question tor DICE in the afternoon, it could take a full day before they heard an answer.
Since creating new content in Frostbite was so difficult, trying to evaluate its quality became impossible. At one point, Patrick Weekes, a writer, had finished a scene between several characters and inserted it into the game. He then took it to some of BioWare’s leads for one of their standard quality reviews. When they turned on the game, they discovered that only the main character could talk. "The engine would not hook up the nonplayer character lines," Weekes said. “You would say something, and then it would go 'blip blip blip blip blip’ and then you would say something again, and you’d go OK, I don't know if I can judge the level of quality without any of the words that happen."
Engine updates made this process even more challenging. Every time the Frostbite team updated the engine with new fixes and features, BioWare’s programmers would have to merge it with the changes they’d made to the previous version. They’d have to go through the new code and copy-paste all the older stuff they'd built—inventory, save files, characters—then test it all out to ensure they hadn't broken anything. They couldn’t find a way to automate the process, so they had to do it manually. "It was debilitating,” said Cameron Lee. "There'd be times when the build wouldn’t work for a month, or it was unstable as hell. Because the new version of the engine would come in, the tools team would start doing the integration. All the while, the team is still working and moving ahead, so it gets worse and worse and worse.”
The art department, meanwhile, was having a blast. For all its weaknesses as an RPG engine, Frostbite was the perfect tool for creating big, gorgeous environments, and the studios artists took advantage to build out the dense forests and murky swamps that would populate Dragon Age: Inquisition. Under Matt Goldman’s “shock and awe" approach, BioWare’s environment artists spent months making as much as possible, taking educated guesses when they didn't yet know what the designers needed. "The environment art came together quicker than any other aspect of the game," said the lead environment artist, Ben McGrath. "For a long time there was a joke on the project that we'd made a fantastic-looking screenshot generator, because you could walk around these levels with nothing to do. You could take great pictures."
Great pictures didn't make for much of a video game, though. Mike Laidlaw, who leaded the story and gameplay teams, had been working with the writers and designers to come up with basic beats for Dragon Age: Inquisition. Sketching out the story wasn't too hard. They knew the player would organize and lead an Inquisition of like-minded soldiers; they knew the big bad would be a demonic wizard named Corypheus; and they knew that, as always, there would be a crew of companions that the player could recruit and seduce. But the concept of Dragon Age: Inquisition as an "open world" game was stymying Laidlaw and his team. The art team had constructed all these sprawling landscapes, but what were players going to do there? And how could BioWare ensure that Inquisition’s giant world remained fun to explore after dozens of hours?
In an ideal world, a big project like Dragon Age: Inquisition would have a dedicated team of system designers who were solely responsible for solving those problems. They'd devise quests, activities, and all the other encounters that could keep players entertained while exploring Inquisition's massive world. They'd try to envision what designers call the "core gameplay loop"—what does a thirty-minute play session look like?—and then they'd keep prototyping and iterating until that gameplay felt good.
In the real world, Laidlaw and his team didn't have time for that. Frostbite wouldn’t allow it. As they plugged away at the game Inquisition’s designers found that they couldn't test out new ideas because so many basic features were missing. Was there enough stuff to do in each area of the game? The camera wasn't working so they couldn't tell. Were the quests interesting enough? The couldn’t answer that yet, because their combat system didn’t exist.
Laidlaw and crew came up with the abstract idea that the player, as the Inquisitor, would roam the world solving problem and building some level of power, or influence, that he or she could then use to affect events on a global scale. Yet for a very long time it remained unclear how that would look in the game. The team played around with the idea of "influence” as a currency, like gold, but that system didn’t seem to click. “It really could’ve used more small-scale refinement and testing and 'Let's try three different ways of doing this,” Laidlaw said. "Instead [we said], 'Let build some levels and let’s hope we can figure this out as we go.”
One day in late 2012, after a year of strained development on Inquisition, Mark Darrah asked Mike Laidlaw to go to lunch. “We're walking out to his car,” Laidlaw said, “and I think he might have had a bit of a script in his head. [Darrah] said, 'All right, I don't actually know how to approach this, so I'm just going to say it. On a scale of one to apocalyptic.... How upset would you be I said [the player] could be, I dunno, a Qunari Inquisitor?”
Laidlaw was baffled. They'd decided that the player could be only a human in Inquisition. Adding other playable races, like the horned Qunari that Darrah was asking for, would mean they’d need to quadruple their budget for animation, voice acting, and scripting.
“I went, 'I think we could make that work,'” Laidlaw said, asking Darrah if he could have more budget for dialogue.
Darrah answered that if Laidlaw could make playable races happen, he couldn't just have more dialogue. He could have an entire extra year of production.
Laidlaw was thrilled. "Fuck yeah, OK," he recalled saying.
As it turned out, Mark Darrah had already determined that it would be impossible to finish Dragon Age: Inquisition in 2013. The game was too big, and they had underestimated the length of too many tasks because of their Frostbite issues. To make Inquisition as good an open-world RPG as Darrah and his crew imagined it could be, they'd have to delay it at least another year. Darrah was in the process of putting together a pitch for EA: let BioWare delay the game, and in exchange, it'd be even bigger and better than anyone at EA had envisioned.
Sitting in a second-floor conference room overlooking the hotel promenade that shared a building with BioWare, Darrah and his leads hashed out an outline of new marketing points that included mounts, a sleek new tactical camera, and the big one: playable races. They put together what they called "peelable scope” proposals: here was what they could do with an extra month; here was what they could do with six more months; here was what they could do with a year. And, worst-case scenario, here were all the things they’d have to cut if EA wouldn't let them delay Dragon Age: Inquisition at all.
One day in March 2013, Mark Darrah and BioWare’s studio boss, Aaryn Flynn, took an early flight to the EA offices in Redwood Shores, California. They were confident that EA would give them some leeway, but it was still nerve-racking, especially in the wake of EA’s recent turmoil. The publisher had just parted ways with its CEO, John Riccitiello, and had recruited a board member, Larry Probst, to keep the seat warm while it hunted for a new top executive. It was impossible to know how Probst would react to BioWare's request. Delaying Dragon Age: Inquisition would affect EA’s financial projections for that fiscal year, which was never good news.
Darrah and Flynn arrived at EA’s headquarters first thing in the morning. As they walked in, the first person they saw was their new boss, Larry Probst. “We walked in with Larry, and then we ended up leaving at the end of the day with him as well, which I think made a good impression on him,” Darrah said. The meeting lasted around two hours. “You're talking over scenarios, you’re talking over impact on finances,” Darrah said. "There's some yelling."
Maybe it was a convincing pitch, or maybe it was the executive turmoil. Maybe the specter of Dragon Age 2 had an effect on Probst and crew, or maybe it was that EA didn't like being called the "Worst Company in America.” An Internet poll wasn't exactly causing EA’s stock to plummet, but winning the Consumerist award two years in a row had made a tangible impact on the publisher’s executives, leading to some feisty internal meetings about how EA could repair its image. Whatever the reasons, EA greenlit the delay. Moving Dragon Age: Inquisition back a year might hurt Q3 earnings, but if it led to a better game, that would be a win for everyone.
I first saw Dragon Age: Inquisition in a lavish suite at the Grand Hyatt hotel in downtown Seattle. It was August 2013, and the next day BioWare planned to show the game to fans at the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) next door, so the studio had invited journalists to get a preemptive peek. Sipping from a complimentary water bottle, I watched Mark Darrah and Mike Laidlaw play through a beautiful thirty-minute demo set across two war-torn regions, called Crestwood and the Western Approach. In the demo, the player-controlled Inquisitor would rush to defend a keep from invading forces, burn down boats to prevent enemy
soldiers from escaping, and capture a fortress for the Inquisition.
It all looked fantastic. None of it made it into Dragon Age: Inquisition.
That demo, like many of the sizzling trailers we see at shows like E3, was almost entirely fake. By the fall of 2013, the Dragon Age team had implemented many of Frostbites parts—the tires, the axles, the gears—but they still didn't know what kind of car they were making. Laidlaw and crew had scripted the PAX demo by hand, entirely based on what BioWare thought might be in the game. Most of the levels and art assets were real, but the gameplay was not. "We did not have that benefit of rock-solid prototypes," said Laidlaw. "Part of what we had to do is go out early and try to be transparent because of Dragon Age 2. And just say, 'Look, here, it’s the game, its running live, it’s at PAX.’ Because we wanted to make that statement that were here for fans."
Dragon Age 2 hung on the team like a shadow, haunting Laidlaw and other leads as they tried to figure out which gameplay mechanics would work best for Inquisition. Even after the PAX showing, they had trouble sticking to one vision. "There was insecurity, and I think that’s a function of coming out of a rough spell," said Laidlaw. “Which of the things that were called out on Dragon Age 2 were a product of time and which were just a bad call? Which things should we reinvent because we have an opportunity moving into this? It leads to a ton of uncertainty." There were debates over combat—should they iterate on the fast-paced action of Dragon Age 2 or go back to the tactical focus of Origins? —and many, many arguments over how to populate the wilderness areas.
In the months after PAX 2013, the BioWare team ditched much of what they'd shown during that demo, like boat burning and keep capturing. Even small features, like the "search" tool, went through dozens of permutations. Because Dragon Age: Inquisition didn’t have a proper preproduction phase, in which the designers could fool around with prototypes and discard the ones that didn't work, Laidlaw found himself stretched thin. He had to make impulsive decisions. "I'm sure, depending who you ask, there are members of my team who would say, 'Wow, I think we did a good job in a rough situation,’” said Laidlaw, “and others who would say, 'That Mike guy is a giant asshole.’”
Previous BioWare games had been big, but none were as massive as this. By the end of 2013, the Dragon Age: Inquisition team comprised more than two hundred people, with dozens of additional outsourced artists in Russia and China. Every department had its own leads, but nobody worked in a vacuum. If a writer wanted to pen a scene about two dragons fighting, she would have to take it to the design team for a layout, then
to the art team for modeling, and then to the cinematics team to make sure the cameras all pointed at the right places. They needed animation; otherwise the two dragons would just stand there staring at one another. Then there was audio, visual effects, and quality assurance. Coordinating all this work was a full-time job for several people. "It was a real challenge to get everyone working in the same direction," said Shane Hawco, the lead character artist.
"I think to get more specific on the complexities at this scale of game development, it’s the dependencies,” said Aaryn Flynn. "It's the things that have to happen for the other things to work and be successful.” The common term in game development circles is “blocking,” which describes when a developer can't get work done because he or she is waiting for someone else to send over some integral art asset or piece of code. "'OK, well I was going to do this today, but I can't because we have a crash, so I'm going to go to this other thing,'" said Flynn. “Good developers are constantly juggling these little tasks on a daily level.”
Blocking was always an issue, but as engineers at both BioWare and DICE added more and more features to Frostbite, work on Dragon Age: Inquisition became significantly less tedious. Tools started functioning properly. Levels began to shape up. People on the Dragon Age team who had been slowed down by Frostbite before, such as the systems designers, were finally able to implement and test ideas in the open world. They were running out of time, though, and another delay was off the table.
Translation - English Due to the evident incompatibility between the Parties, they agree to live separate and apart from each other, subject to terms and conditions in this Agreement:
1. Both Party agree to dissolve the marriage voluntarily.
2. Child residence and contact:
Daughter Li an will reside with the woman, and the man will pay full child maintenance (including residence fee, tuition fee, and medical fee). The man will pay in total ￥100000 RMB to the woman on 31 December 2013 for child maintenance. (The man will pay a total of ￥3000 RMB monthly to the woman for child maintenance. The payment will be paid by either sending to the woman or transferring to specific China Bank account before the 5th day of each and every month. )
In the case of not violating the child’s study and life, the man maintains his visitation right to the child. (The man can visit the child once or take her outside every weekend in the case of informing the woman in advance. The woman shall guarantee the man can visit for longer than one day every week.)
3. Division of property:
(1) Deposit: the amount of deposit under the name of both parties is ￥200000 RMB. Distribution: Both parties can retain the deposit under their own names. But the man shall pay a total of ￥100000 RMB to the woman before 31 December 2013.
(2) House: the ownership of all the common property in Chaoyang district belongs to the woman. The formality of changing the name of owner on property ownership certificate will be done within a month after the divorce. The man must assist the woman to handle any necessary formalities for the change. The woman will be responsible for any essential fee. The woman will pay a total of ￥ 100,0000 RMB to the man before 31 December 2019 for the spread.
(3) Other property: both parties can retain their premarital respective property along with their personal daily necessities and accessories (list attached).
4. Debts and the treatment of debts.
Both parties confirm that there are no joint debts during the subsisting of marriage. Any party who is in external debt need to bear it themselves.
5. In case any party conceals or transfers joint property of the spouses:
Both parties confirm that the joint property of spouses are clearly listed in the third foregoing statement, that there is no more joint property other than the aforementioned house, furniture, home appliances, and bank deposit. Any party shall guarantee the authenticity of all the aforementioned joint property of spouses.
This agreement of property division is based on the aforementioned property. Any party is not allowed to conceal, falsely report, and transfer either the joint property of spouses or their own premarital property. If any party conceals and falsely reports any property other than the afore-mentioned ones, or transfers and surreptitiously withdraws property in the two years before signing on this agreement, the other party has the right to take the amount of property that is concealed, falsely reported, and transferred, and investigate the legal responsibility of this concealing, falsely reporting, and transferring of property. The party that is responsible for concealing, falsely reporting, and transferring has no right to divide the property.
6. Financial support and Mental compensation:
The man agrees to pay in total of ￥50000 RMB to the woman for financial support because of the woman’s survival difficulties. Due to the fact that the man asks for the divorce, the man will pay in total of ￥25000 RMB to the woman for mental damage compensation. The afore-mentioned payment will be paid before 31 December 2019.
7. Agreement on violation responsibilities:
Any party that does not fulfill the responsibility of paying before the agreed deadline of this agreement will pay ￥10000 RMB to the other party for default penalty.
8. Agreement on the effective date:
This agreement is in triplicate, both parties shall hold one copy, the marriage registration department will keep one copy. This agreement will become effective on the day the marriage registration department issues the divorce certificate.
English to Chinese: Aesthetic Education and National Progress General field: Social Sciences Detailed field: Social Science, Sociology, Ethics, etc.
Source text - English Aesthetic Education and National Progress
[1]
The diminution of emphasis on the arts and the humanities and the corresponding increased emphasis on business and STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) has resulted in a normative conception of national progress that excludes aesthetic education. In this essay, I argue that aesthetic educators should challenge the normative understanding of national progress. In the humanities, aesthetic educators typically are educators of English , foreign languages and literature, philosophy, art history and film studies. To this end, I call attention to the writings of the French philosopher Germaine de Staël (1766 1817) because in the adaptation of her notion of progress lies possible hope for the future of the humanities
and the arts.
[2]
In contemporary American society, national progress is more often than not equated with job creation, and job creation is linked to advancement in business and the STEM disciplines. For example, in his 2012 ac ceptance speech after the national election, President Obama called for the United States to remain the leader in science and technology, and then he exclaimed, America, I believe we can build on the progress we've made and continue to fight for new jobs and new opportunities and new security for the middle class.
[3]
Lip service is paid to civic responsibility and its role in national progress, while federal and state governments, as well as institutions of higher educati on, drastically cut budgets and/ or entire programs in the humanities and the arts. Aesthetic educators know that these cuts will, in the long term, be devastating to civil society because the humanities and the arts are precisely the programs that convey cultural capital. More precisely, they cultivate in students the critical judgment and the independence of though t needed to be able to make informed decision s about their place in civil society. Given the number of indicators that point to a decline in public and institutional support fo r the humanities and the arts, however, it has become easy for aesthetic educators to become demoralized, feel irrelevant, and even believe that we, in fact, have little or no role in national progress.
[4]
As examples of indicators that point to the incre asing irrelevance of the humanities, in FY 2014, the appropriations to both the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts(NEA) were cut by 13 percent from their peak 2010 numbers, while the N ational Science Foundat ion (NSF) appropriations increased by almost 4 percent from 2010. Perhaps the 13 percent cut would not have been so shocking if the NEH and NEA allocations did not represent a mere 2 percent of the total NSF allocation. The pill is even harder to swallow when one considers that, in 1979, the NEH and the NEA, respectively, received funding equivalent to approximately 16 percent of the NSF.
[5]
Salaries represent a second measure of the diminishing consideration for the humanities and the arts within univer sity structures. The Oklahoma Faculty Survey by Discipline, a study that surveys the salaries of professors at 114 “Research University/ Very High Research Activity institutions, lists average salaries for all ranks of tenure track faculty in a number of d isciplines. According to the 2013-14 study, the average salary of a faculty member in the arts was $71,463; in English, $76,627; in philosophy and religious studies, $81,971; in physical sciences, $102,636; in engineering, $114,827; and in business managem ent, $139,093. While salaries in 2013-14 increased from 2011-12 in the physical science, engineering, and business management, they decreased in the fine arts, English, and philosophy. If markets drive salaries, the arts and the humanities are clearly not high in market demand. This lack of demand for the humanities and the arts is further underscored in Governor Rick Scott's proposal that tuition rates for Florida state universities be frozen for students who major in strategic areas ””. Lizette Alvarez from the New York Times states of Scott s proposal, The message from Tallahassee could not be blunter: Give us engineers, scientists, health care specialists and technology experts. Do not worry so much about historians, philosophers, anthropologists and English majors. From multiple perspectives, then we see an explicit shift to S TEM disciplines and a discouragement of humanities and arts education, whether in program development, faculty salaries, or student tuitions. Faced with what seems to be such over whelming confirmation of aesthetic educators irrelevance to today s understanding of national progress namely, advancement in business, science and technology aesthetic educators in the humanities and the arts are struggling to communicate to others outside our field, and to the public at large, our vital role.
[6]
As demoralizing as the perceived irrelevance of arts and humanities education may be and as disappointing as our attempts to articulate our relevance have been, we may be able to begin to find hope and purpose in renewed debate around how we think about progress and, more precisely, the role of aesthetic education in “progress”. The writings of Germaine de Staël are particularly illuminating because they situate aesthetic education squarely in the progress of the nation and have bearing on the dilemma facing the humanities and the arts today. Her prescient philosophy turns the definition of progress on its head and could give aesthetic educators a powerful tool to fight for the increased relevance and vitality of the humanities and the arts in the broader notion of progress.
[7]
Germaine de Staël’s notion of progress namely, the alignment of the perfectibility of the human mind (accretion of knowledge) with the perfectibility of the human species (interplay between individual morality and public morality) has direct bearing on the difficulties that we as aesthetic educators are having today in articulating our essential role in national progress. Obviously, both types of progress (perfectibility of the human mind and perfectibility of the human species) are essential to the progress of the nation, but Germaine de Staël argues convincingly that they must align. Aesthetic educators might thus remind the public that business and the STEM disciplines neither have as their mandate the watchful alignment of individual and public morality (the vector that guarantees freedom and the continual perfecting of the nation) nor do they have as their directive resistance against dogma. Furthermore, investment in STEM at the expense of the arts and the humanities parallels the Enlightenment s obsession with progress as defined as the conservation and accretion of empirical knowledge and material gain. This obsession, at least in Germaine de Staël s view, contribute d to the neglect of the interior moral life of the individual. It, furthermore, diminished emphasis on moral responsibility and independence of judgment, which consequently led to increased partisanship, culminating in the fanaticism of the Reign of Terror. While it is hard to imagine the advent of a Reign of Terror in the United States, it can be argued that obsession with unbridled advancement in science and business at the expense of aesthetic education could lead to the weakening of individual morality defined by Staël as the devotion to freedom, human rights, and the possibility of collective happiness for all.
[8]
If Germaine de Staël were alive today, she might argue that the solution to our current humanities and arts crisis is a relatively simple one. First, argue for national progress to be understood as the alignment of the perfectibility of the human mind with the perfectibility of the human species. Scientific advancement at the expense of the watchful alignment of individual and public morality poses a threat to the stability of our nation. Consequently, any call for national progress must include sufficient support of and funding for precisely the disciplines (the humanities and the arts) that have this alignment as their mandate. Secondly, enc ourage educational models that allow for the combination of a useful subject that contributes to a knowledge-based economy and a subject in which they will receive an aesthetic education.
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