The Shattered War - RELEASED!

You can now play The Shattered War!

Please download it from:
http://www.nexusmods.com/dragonage/mods/4606?

Download, upvote, tell your friends, play and enjoy.  I sincerely hope you enjoy the adventure, as it's been a tremendous undertaking to complete.

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of ridiculous amounts of testing, bug fixing and overall improvements to the mod in terms of flow, appearance, and overall polish. While I'll be the first to admit it's still by no means perfect, it's now reached a state where I'm happy to say that I've put in the required effort to be happy with it as a release. I am hopefully that there will not be a need to do any significant bug-fix updates to the mod.

Please, download The Shattered War and enjoy another adventure in Thedas.

Release Update

Just a quick note that I have been dedicating a lot of time to a whole bunch of testing - particularly focusing on the end of the game and all the possible ending variants.  There are a lot of different combinations of decisions that players can make, so this has been fairly involved to try to cover off on every possibility. I've also been tweaking a few things to make sure that people get a better sense of the ramifications of their decisions.

There have been a bunch of other improvements and fixes I've been able to at the same time, varying from minor to potentially show-stopping, and I've put in some effort to tweak the final conflicts of the adventure.

As a result of all this, I'd like to reiterate that I am still on track to have a release out this month. It's been a very long journey, and though there will still be some things that I would like to improve, I'd rather have it out there for people to play and experience.

Release Schedule

I realise I have been posting extremely infrequently here, but I have reached the point where I am going to commit to having a release of the Shattered War before the end of the year.

My posts have been infrequent not only due to me being able to spend less time on the project than I would like due to other personal commitments, but also because updates on bug fixes don't really seem as though they would be that interesting to people. I can assure you that they're not particularly interesting to write.

But more importantly, there will be a release coming within the next two months. In anticipation of this, I'd like to share some stats about the size and scope of The Shattered War:

• Over 3500 lines of voiced dialogue across dozens of characters.
• 30 completely new hand crafted areas to explore, including, villages, forests, ruins and mountains.
• Lots of side-quests, each with multiple options for resolution.
• Special hidden set-items that require puzzle solving to find.
• Fully fleshed out companions, each with their own backstory and romance subplot.
• An adventure of substantial size: a testing run takes me over 10 hours from start to finish, and I know exactly where I'm going and what I'm doing.
• A main plot where you can't do everything, you must make choices and take sides, and this will affect how characters treat you and your ultimate ending.

Needless to say, this has been a massive undertaking, and processing voice acted lines and ironing out all the potential issues relating to the various choices the player can make has been a far more time consuming process than I expected. I've had some amazing voice acting from a bunch of people, and I'm grateful for all the talent that they have provided.  However, effectively creating an expansion for Dragon Age: Origins has been no small undertaking.

I should say that there are certain issues that I have been unable to rectify. For example, there are a few characters I was unable to find voice actors for, but I want to get a playable form of the adventure out for people. I can potentially revisit some of these issues if the release garners enough interest from people to help me solve such problems.

In short, stay tuned for more information in the near future, and I hope you'll be keen to play The Shattered War.

Bug Testing

Despite the long time between posts, The Shattered War is drawing nearer to release. I'm currently going through what I hope will be my final phase of playtesting and tweaking now that voice work integration is essentially complete.

I'm about two hours into my current playthrough, and while there are some minor cosmetic issues, everything is mostly looking pretty good by now. A complete run of the game will probably add up to at least 10 hours (though likely more), and the wide variety of choices means that it is absolutely impossible to experience all the content of the game in a single run.

No one wants to see this released more than me, and I feel more than a little disappointed and frankly a bit sheepish that it's taken me so long to get the mod to a releasable state. The scope and scale of this project were possibly a little too bold, and the sheer time and dedication required to get full voice acting means it has been a massive undertaking for one person. While my efforts have probably been a bit lax for a while, I'm keen to get The Shattered War completed and in the hands of anyone who still wants to revisit the world of Dragon Age in its Origins incarnation.

I'm hoping there are still people out there who want so explore the world of Thedas and a new adventure and story within its bounds.

Shattered War Status

I have important news about The Shattered War.

Firstly, I have been ticking along with getting more and more lines of recorded dialogue integrated into the game. There are only a few characters left now, and some of those I've already received partial dialogue for. That said, there are a couple of (Orlesian) characters that I still have not found voice actors for. Even so, we are talking about several thousand lines of dialogue - each of which I have listened to numerous (say 3 to 12 or more) times before it is completely integrated into the game.

It is my aim to have the mod released this year - preferably by the middle of the year. At the current point in time, it seems highly likely that these characters will unfortunately remain unvoiced. While I really do not want to release the mod with some characters unvoiced, if it is a choice between releasing it with unvoiced characters, or not releasing it at all, I will release it in as finished as state as I can manage.  If voice actors come forward after release, I may do an update for it.

I am going to be away for a few weeks on holiday as of tomorrow, and won't be working on Shattered War during that time, but I will be hitting it hard when I get back. I am aiming to have a version of the mod ready for beta testing by April. At the current point in time, I do not have any beta testers, so if you would be interested, please let me know - I have a gmail address of AmstradHero.

I am expecting the beta / final release of the mod to be somewhere in the realm of 800MB to 1GB in size given all the resources it includes.