Connecting Players and Franchise Across Console Generations in the Dragon Age Keep

[Music] and again thank you all so much for coming out so by way of introduction my name is Li Shan Kooskia I'm the producer for the Dragon Age keep I've been on the project really I joined Bioware to help build the Cape and it's just been an amazing project and something I've been incredibly passionate about so really happy to represent and kind of talk to you today about the keep so in terms of what we'll learn the really the focus of this is to tackle the technical cross platform challenge and kind of how our team at Bioware got around this as well as we really feel like we created an amazing web experience for players and something that we hope that you can also accomplish no matter what size your team is is we were a relatively small internal team at Bioware in the online services department as well as work with your community to develop better products with the built-in following so we actually had a community beta program that really took us from what was an

idea or concept and helped us get there so we'll kind of give you some tools and tips as to how we did that so in terms of the presentation outline will take you through sort of the driving force behind this and choice and why choice matters and why we decided to tackle this and how we went through this looking at the savegame challenge developing what we call the world fault which is the system that stores all those plot choices for the future as well the franchise ecosystem is another piece that we'd like to talk about it's kind of the way that we started to look at both the challenge and then translate it into the player experience using the tapestry and the interactive story summary the keep has a few more features but this is kind of the focus of our presentation as well we'll take you through our community beta program and kind of show you how the keep progressed with that feedback and then just some closing thoughts to wrap up so let's get started choice matters so for a bit of background I want to talk about choice

choice is really a key pillar for Bioware games and RPG games in general and Dragon Age is no exception to this so over hundreds of hours of gameplay players have shaped and become attached their Dragon Age universe and historically all these choices have been stored in a single local save game file I love this quote because it kind of looks at how difficult it was to make decisions across the franchises and really how much emotion and meaning people put into the choices being made so that really brings us to the savegame challenge but first a bit of history so Dragon Age Origins launched in 2009 and we had 2010 awakenings came out but then finally when we started on Dragon Age 2 is where oops sorry these transitions are a little finicky ok yes so starting on Dragon Age 2 is when the challenges really began to show up it

quickly became apparent that there were problems in the save import system and that it was impossible to obviously move to a new platform characters that should have been dead magically reappeared the choices you made were overturned and really it's the import logic that was kind of the Achilles heel of this system and of course this made fans somewhat upset and you know over hundreds of hours a gameplay that makes a lot of sense so what we wanted to do is look at traditional save game import and say okay what are the problems here well first off errors are inevitable here's kind of the mapping of the plot actually it's sort of one of the clusters the plot systems and it's incredibly complex very difficult to QA and really fixes require patches to the client so you know players may not take the patches different things like that and really at the end of the day there's no guarantee that we won't introduce further knock-on into the system so that's why when Dragon Age Inquisition was coming out we

thought that we needed to look forward for a better solution and really preserve that investment that our fans have made into the franchise the really big problem for us came with the launch of the next gen consoles meaning that his players switched to new ones those choices all that investment would be left behind and that's where we came with the world vault so like I said the import logic was really the Achilles heel this system and solving this through a normal safe import system was merely going to create the same types of problems so the challenge for our team was to build a future-proof solution something that would preserve our players data after sunset of the different games or you lose a particular console or just decide to switch over as well as we needed the ability to support any platform and multiple clients and I'll talk a little a bit about kind of the concept of the franchise ecosystem and why we wanted to be able to support all these different things so here's kind of what the world

vault looks like at its basic so what we did was we worked with the game team to identify key choices against all the different games from Dragon Age Origins Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition then we coupled that with the plot logic and the rules behind each of them and then we created a technology called the auto solver this was the ability to solve for plot conflicts so essentially what it does is it looks at what choices players are making and says ok well you can't make this particular choice but let me find the next available option for you this is what we all combined into what's called the world vault and the key here is that no matter what players do they always have a valid world state so they can't get into kind of a weird position where there's import errors and different things like that finally what we needed was for clients to be able to read what they care about so if you created a different companion experience or you're looking at importing into

Dragon Age Inquisition that game or that client only reads what they care about so we can have any number of these and we'll show you when we get to the interactive story summary kind of how we managed to pull that off but here's our system diagram so really to solve for all this the world vault needed to abstract the logic and the choices from the clients and we move them into the web so for us we have a system called orbit and it stores all of our online systems of which the world vault is one of them so both the game and the keep read and write to orbit and that way when we need to make changes to the plot system or the logic we can do so outside of the game which gives us a ton of flexibility in fixing errors and moving forward we can use different experiences to tie in from this perspective so when we look at the world vault and how the plot flags in the solver work I'll kind of give you a bit more of a tangible example it's simplified a little bit but we have if

you're trying to figure out let's say what happened to the warden at the end of Dragon Age Origins it's going to depend on a few different plots again this is a simplified example but we have who killed the Archdemon it could have been the warden Alistair Logan and did Morgan have a baby no yes with the warden with Alistair with Logan so in order to make this valid we have to figure out these preconditions so if the warden ended up sacrificing him or herself the warden couldn't have had a baby with Morgan obviously gender also has an impact on this but if the warden's alive or well then Morgan didn't have a baby and either Alistair or Logan killed the Archdemon so to kind of make this a little bit easier to see this is how we took it into the keep and it should show you basically how the auto solver works to take those rules and precondition logic and say okay I'll find you an example of what we need to do next so here I'm just selecting Alistair you can

see that it wants to change the state of my warden if I make that choice but you can say no I don't want to do that and my warden remains dead but if you go back and decide to go say okay I'd like to change my Ward into alive and well it's going to ask for Alistair to be killing the Archdemon it could also have Loghain but we Otto solver finds kind of the least path of resistance when it's doing this so now when you look and we add the Morgan baby question in I can go ahead and select that and it's going to say okay great you can do that but your warden is going to then sacrifice to the Archdemon and if I accept that you can see that it's now changed the warden to being alive and well and the Archdemon to being killed by the word and so what this means is that players can essentially make one or 300 choices across all the different franchises and the world state is always valid and intact so this was a really

great example of how we kind of took the the world vault and then made it translatable and have something that other people can use and sort of easier to understand but we first had to kind of look at the results of the world vault and that the client no longer needs to do any logical calculations to figure this out so that means that players are able to use their save game on any platform as well as carry over what's important to the franchise the logic is independent of the client which is a big bonus as well as the Auto solver can manage any knock on zan dependencies and we have the ability to update that on the web so when we take a look Joyce's really do matter to people and I kind of like this quote because it says that you know whether they're small things you're capturing or larger things that this makes a difference for people and their experience with the game so that kind of brings us to our concept of

the franchise ecosystem so really the strength of Dragon Age is a franchise exists not only in the games the story the choices that you make but in all the other experiences across the franchise we have comic books novels the fantastic little plush minbari hounds and we have a really amazing active community devoted to this franchise so really when we took a look at developing the key features for the key it's really about respecting the things that have come before which fans have made an investment in and out of the cross platform challenge came the opportunity for us to preserve our fans investment engagement and emotional connection across the franchises so I'll show you really quickly our kind of our keep trailers something that we came out with to show off what that keeps all about [Music] you're probably asking yourself what is

the keep it's your way to discover shape and share your Dragon Age experience as you obsess over more than 300 choices from the previous two games ensure your theta is exactly as you left it only maybe this time you're a dwarf in your hawk was sassy you can do that and because it's a free web app you can use it on your console pc tablet phone or really any device with an html5 capable browser and an internet connection sorry potatoes sit back and listen as bryan blue the voice of eric recounts major events from thetas where you stood by and did nothing like a little locate or maybe you're a goody two-shoes and like to help people that's your call then after everything is set you can import it into Dragon Age Inquisition and that's in now you're ready to play on your platform of choice so you know go play it Oh

great so that kind of takes you through some of more of our high-level features but we really push for being available on all different devices using responsive design and I think that was a really big bonus for us in terms of the future proofing of the solution and having this available so in terms of the tapestry which you kind of got a look at before this is really the cornerstone of the world vault and how we translated this into the user experience so for us the big challenge on this one was to allow players to customize their world States make conflicts and Nikon's less confusing to navigate as for new players to the franchiser people who are less familiar with the intricacies of this this would be incredibly difficult to manage as well as create an experience not a tool and cater to new and existing fans so something we really wanted to do is make sure that this was easy to use by a whole bunch of people so this is

the very first look at what it was like to interact with the world vault it was a series of check boxes it's not very user friendly or intuitive and players who might not remember their choices would have probably a difficult time navigating this so in the process we worked with an external company work at play to help us sort of look at how to get this off the ground and we came up with some ideas we did some research on this and this is really similar to I think how many people would go about developing it we did prototyping so tested it with users as well as development when we were finally okay with some of the mechanics and how this was going to work when we refined the concept we added the art in it made a massive difference but then we needed to go to the beta program and this was really because we hadn't solved all the challenges that we had with this feature when you look at it it may be somewhat simple but it was very complex to navigate it was hard to understand and

we knew that we needed to reach out to our fans to say how can we make this better and what can we do to really make this your store your world so with the tapestry in this very early stage we knew we were on the right track that the complex logic was simplified to the player whereas in the checklist version this was not something we could easily simplify as well as the imagery aided in the memory of the plot so it was kind of a extra benefit but something that made a big difference and we were able to take what was developed and start the beta program and I think that as a smaller team this was a huge benefit to us to get something to a point where it was stood up enough that players could understand what we were trying to get at and then hopefully push it forward so when we had sort of our initial beta feedback first impressions survey what we found was that people thought it was a lot more than they expected they they did think we were going to have a list of check boxes and

they were really impressed by the art style I think that stood out beyond kind of the initial feedback we got was some of the biggest pieces now in terms of the interactive story summary this is kind of why we needed to make this feature this is the total number of valid world states that you're able to create in the keep there are so many of them I think we did calculations there's no way that you can just sit through and do this all by yourself so for us the challenge was to really help people get caught up on the Dragon Age story so far as well as set a few high-level choices in real time we needed it to work across modern browsers and devices without using plugins this was a big thing for us as you saw we wanted to target responsive design have this work on all these devices and having animations like this in the browser is of course technically quite challenging we also had we wanted to be localized in eight different languages with French German audio this is because this is sort of

what Dragon Age Inquisition did and we wanted to match them again it was quite the technical challenge so we came up with the experience that we wanted to have for this and that was that people would basically see an introduction module then they would be able to edit their decisions in real time when playing it so if they decided that they wanted to go with what the world had already said or how their world state was already set up they could do that and if not if they would play the introduction again versus the outcome so it was really quite simple but the reason that we did this and then it moved on to the next module introduction but the reason that we did this was because in the future as these modules expand we can take and remove them out and this gives us a ton of flexibility going forward to ensure that our interactive story summary doesn't become three hours when new games come out so the process for this was a little bit simpler than the tapestry we really knew what we wanted and we are able to

develop the script create art assets set up the ISS in the world vault with those filters provide the API endpoints to our external development team at G Skinner and then they were able to help us create the player and the animations and we integrated it back into the key this was really valuable for us as a smaller team because what we could do was continue to work on development while people created experiences based on what was in the world vault this was really very very helpful for us and the hardest part was really integrating it back into the keep at the end of the day but we are how very very happy with the outcomes so here's a quick video demonstration all the animations are done html5 using vector images and you're able to edit all the choices in real time so I'll show you a quick example of how this works you're able to press play if you believe the stories mankind's pride gave rise to the darkspawn with the traitor is low gain

now seated on Ferelden throne the warden sought help from the influential Arlene Red Cliff however they arrived in Red Cliff to find the town under siege as each night undead rose in waves and assailed the battered village [Music] with the hero's help the people of Red Cliff stood fast against the undead horde the wardens reached up so you can see there that players are able to make choices in real time and then it adjusts what's on the tapestry so the two things kind of talk to each other so we learned a few lessons when we are developing this one that integrating with the world vault is straightforward and it allows for standalone development that means that in the future other types of companion experiences or products can hook into the world vault and it makes it very easy to sort of extend what we're able to do the player technology

can easily be adapted for future needs as well as we were able to hit our technical challenges with voting in the browser working on consoles and that was a big feet and the Varick narration was a big hit with fans this was one of the things that in our early beta program people kind of called out and speculated that we would do a feature like this and said wouldn't it be great if Varrick narrated it and then when we ended up coming out with that it was just so exciting and something we were really glad to see so in terms of this it's really a nice quote our intention originally was to help fans kind of brush up on the events of Dragon Age but what we found was that people loved having their story narrated by verax so actually being able to have it personalized and customized was really big and then what we also found was that people would really want to customize their tapestries and then watch the interactive story summary is the type of introduction to Dragon Age Inquisition so we found that this feature although we kind of wanted to solve one thing we

ended up really answering to a few different use cases and that kind of brings us to our community beta program so while the ISS was underdeveloped we took the features that we already had in to keep the tapestry we had a hero section a career section and we started on our community beta and like I said this was very early on in our process I think we were about eight ten months to shipping out when we just kind of had the idea for what we wanted to keep to be and to do this we knew that we needed to get valuable feedback from a variety of fans and we wanted to ensure that we were able to really work in an agile fashion and adapt to what we were hearing and this kind of was a challenge for our team but something that was really big was that we were able to respond and do something with what feedback we were hearing the other thing we wanted to look at was being able to manage the feedback with a small team again you could get lots of feedback in so having we have one QA lead basically looking at

all these things was quite difficult as well as preparing for load at launch so we designed kind of a beta onboarding flow that might look a little bit complicated but I think it worked really well for what we were doing so what we asked people to do is log on sign up to the key beta and once they were accepted they would log on to this site they would accept the NDA and then we would have them basically move over to the Bioware forums where we prepare kind of a welcome post that talked about you know what the beta program was about the different expectations we had how to give feedback so it was really kind of an introduction to what we were looking for and I highly suggest if you're doing a beta program or something similar to kind of have something like this out there to help people set the tone and why you're doing this program then after you got to read a whole big introduction post we asked you to confirm your participation and this may seem like an extra step but we really wanted people to know what we were asking them and and

let them know that you know if you want to participate that's great if you don't that's totally fine too so from there we have this wait step and this step was mainly for our team and I'll show you in the next slide kind of how we needed this step to help us onboard people onto the kief while making sure that we could still do regular releases and once you finish the wait step you would receive a welcome email and then you'd be able to access the keep and the beta forums so these tools we really used to help people kind of get into the flow it kept our team freed up to make sure that we didn't get too many people all at once signing up and coming in so this was really really important to us so for our process we used agile development and we went in two-week release cycles so every two weeks we would try and put out something new on the keep as well as we would do cohort-based invites so we would look at everyone who

would apply look at how far along the keep was and then invite them in based on specific criteria we also used open discussions this was all done on the Bioware forums so these kind of changed and took shape as we move forward in the process and we also needed entire dev team involvement so our team actively participated on the forums with the beta participants to say okay what do you think of this and really got involved this was something our team loved doing and it was incredibly rewarding and positive so when we looked at kind of how our week broke out because we were doing these two week cycles on Tuesday we would always try and hit our release where we would post our release notes we would start new open discussions and close out old open discussions so our open discussions would be around things like how do you think we can improve this or in this particular section what would you like to see here and they were more of a guideline to say you know how would we like to get feedback and really

help us move our sort of development roadmap in the right direction and then we would close off discussions that we didn't want to have anymore then we would send out invites to participants and announce them typically on Twitter and then the next week we would start onboarding all of our new participants as well as collecting feedback and adjusting priorities so if we would see major bugs come up or things similar to that we would investigate using typically surveys or things like that to say okay who's having problems how can we get a hold of you as well we would monitor for different feedback and trends we were seeing so when we looked at getting feedback we used a beta feedback button in the keep this was to allow us to have continuous feedback and feedback in the moment and I'll show you in the next slide kind of how this work for us we also use the Bioware forms very like heavily to have our open discussions but

we always kept them fairly restricted in terms of what participants were allowed to do they weren't allowed to create their own discussions and this really helped us keep control of sort of the scope of everything as well we used google analytics it was a great tool for us mainly just to monitor site traffic do some comparisons and then surveys when we needed them we didn't do them too often but it was more to collect additional insights we needed a dedicated email account for troubleshooting we also installed a role gating system on the key this helped us with a few different things but one of them is that we can allow different cohorts the ability to see different features as they were going through beta so if we knew something was going to be particularly troublesome or maybe we needed a little bit more help on certain areas we wouldn't release them as broadly but we would take small feedback get the bugs fixed and then release it larger out finally we had a Twitter and

a twitch account this was really important for us both as we got towards launch and we started to need to communicate quite a bit more in terms of where the keep was what was happening and it gave us especially twitch a vehicle for people to ask questions us to demo features while we were still in beta and I think that gave us a bit of a jumpstart on what to do when we got to launch the kind of questions to expect and the trouble to expect so here's kind of the beta feedback button and the really great thing about this button was it allowed our participants to give us feedback kind of at any point in time so they were able to select feedback from the menu and then what you would do is be able to select specific feedback and choose an area on the key that you wanted to let us know about so from there we had this little emotional indicator which we used quite a bit to help us find things that weren't as good or things that people were liking as

well we are able to segment our feedback based on the types of things that we saw that people are giving us and this really helped us in terms of scalability on the feedback so you're able to select the different things that you wanted to tell us about and then we would get them all kind of on the back end of the keep and we kept a dashboard running up at our office showing all the differ feedback that was coming in continuously so this was incredibly helpful for us it's even to take things like localization feedback and it was one of the bigger things that we used on the key so this was sort of the culture that developed around the beta program that was something that we really wanted to make feel truly collaborative we wanted to listen to people and make sure that their ideas got integrated into the key the team actively posted and communicated and release updates about what we'd heard and how the team addressed it and when we didn't we weren't able to fix things we let people know why so in terms of our beta program

phases each phase was designed to help us get the most out of where we were in development so during Alpha we had a lot of things that we just needed people to help us give an idea of how to close them off how to make them better one of the big suggestion changes that came out of this space was helping us solve conflicts we talked about an open discussion and someone said well why don't you just show the things that I've changed instead of an entire giant list of everything you've changed and this really helped us completely solve a problem that we had since the very beginning so I think during our alpha phase this is really what we looked for we had limited participation so we could kind of be very hands-on and we hadn't firmed up our development roadmap so there's lots of room to move and shift we started our Twitter account about this time and we also introduced a talk about the key program so while we were in beta to keep was under NDA we asked people not to share pictures don't talk about it publicly but if people wanted

to they could contact us and say I have a blog a YouTube channel and I'd really like to do this and we would just work with them to make sure that that was something we're okay and we could put out and this was really helpful for us both going towards launch and kind of getting the community to know about the keep from someone that wasn't us essentially then we moved into our closed beta and we did our first public reveal around pax and this is where we changed over the site that was very gray to the more colorful one so we have been working kind of in tandem behind the scenes with all the feedback that we getting and we revealed this all at pax so from there what we kind of looked at was feedback more around how do we improve some of the small things to make it better we added a randomized world state button we added the ability to for while we did that now we have the now ability to add hero biographies but it was something that came up during this face so we looked for the really kind of quick hit

things that we could do that made a big difference but wouldn't necessarily severely alter what we were doing we also started a friends-and-family beta program as we had many people who wanted their their friends or their family to be able to come check out the keep and this was a really easy way to get some extra people in finally we moved into open beta and we started our regular twitch Q&A sessions our focus around open beta was more scalability at launch making sure that what we had worked and that it worked well and would hold through when we launched we also knew that people who had created World States they'd be able to put them into Dragon Age Inquisition so there was kind of the it was sort of both preparation for launch as well as making sure that people were also ready for their Dragon Age launched ahead of time and that we didn't have everyone flood in all at once so finally for keep launch we had unrestricted access we decided to close out the beta forums and really

transition over to more of the open style beta forums that the Bioware forums have right now and then in terms of the beta program results this is something that we're really excited about because before we were even in the hands of public right at launch time we had had six point five million sessions on the key and 350,000 World States created people could create more than one world state so at the end we had about 300,000 beta program signups which was really big for us we didn't expect to have so much as well as almost 50,000 items of feedback received through the beta feedback button and we're averaging about 575 per day so there was a certainly a significant amount of feedback we were getting we all had about 85,000 unique users on the keep forums I think this was great with our original goal of having people be collaborative check into these open discussions and we never really had any major flare-ups on the forums this was

kind of great to see so many people participating in this as well with our talk about the key program we also got a lot of YouTube views and collaborations so I think this was a really important thing for us because while we were under NDA and it was secret we were also able to help the community talk about the key and get more word out about what it is is it was quite a different thing at the time and you know how to use it there was lots of helpful guides so we really couldn't thank the community enough for sort of putting all that into what we were doing as well we ended up with about 10,000 social mentions during launch and this was really neat for us to see so much I guess word of mouth and chat about the keep right up to launch because more people that came in earlier on the better prepared we were for launching so that was really awesome so here I'm going to show you basically what the keep looked like when we went into alpha so you can

see it was quite grey you had to click on all the different tiles and then click back out of them again to use the site which was a big pain for a lot of beta users commenting on so we just had little usability things that we wanted to work on as well resolving conflicts this was again one of our bigger challenges when looking at the Cape and you used to get this big long list of essentially everything that was going to change and it might not make that much sense to you as well managing World States was done basically in a little list format because you could have at the time about five world states we changed it to ten based on feedback so you can see that we had a really far away to go and looking at the feedback this was kind of the main themes that started to pop up and we really focused on kind of this theme based approach to say how do we get this to the right spot so one of the things that came up

massively was color so people like the the imagery they found the evocative and it worked well but the color was a bit sad and so that's sort of one of the things that we looked at as well sinking sinking was huge we sink with your career data as well as your heroes and having your custom wardens or hop show up on the keep meant a lot to people and we had to do a ton of work on the backend to get this fixed up to a sort of manageable state considering origins came out in 2009 so we're working with titled data and then I turned another category with details no music or sound so it's these the little touches that really made it more and bigger and a better experience that we were just missing in there so I I quite like the comment about no music or sound whatsoever and we did eventually end up adding sound I had to convince the developers so that was an OK thing to add to a website but we added it and then choices I think in the beginning around 90% of our feedback was

about the amount of choices we had we'd started really with just what you needed to get into Dragon Age Inquisition but people found that this wasn't enough this didn't capture their world and so what we needed to do was basically take that beta feedback button we had the plot suggestion and we worked with the creative team to say okay here's what we're hearing can we add these in and I think we added a significant amount of new plots and they some of them even ended up being in Dragon Age Inquisition so while you're maybe not able to have everything poured over to the next new game people wanted to capture sort of the breadth and the depth of their story and that's one of the big big learnings that we had coming out of doing this sort of shifted where the product was going in general so here's where we decided to go in terms of color we added a lot of it and I know that this looks quite different from what we had before and it was a little bit nerve-wracking

because we developed it in secret and then released it out to everyone to say thank you so much here's what we did generally the feedback ended up really positive and it was so exciting to see iPhone screen back show up with the art and we did t-shirts with yarn it was really exciting I think something that fans although it was a little scary at first ended up connecting with you can see we added a few other things based solely on feedback the addition of the banners to designate the different products small thing but really helped the usability as well we moved around the navigation from the different size and probably late in the game we added the ability to see if your world state had been exported to Dragon Age Inquisition or not very early on with that world state manager the little thing that popped out of the side and was kind of just a list people didn't realize what world state they were working on and this could be very dangerous for us when people imported

the wrong one into Dragon Age Inquisition so both based on internal feedback from the QA team as well as kind of hints that we got throughout the beta that I'm not sure people know how World States work and how it's switching we made some pretty substantial changes to the section which I'll show you next but first this modal although very small was certainly one of the things that tripped us up quite a bit and you can see it's much smaller in terms of we only show the choices that you decided to make or change not the entire list of them we also added in the images that you could easily at a glance see what we were changing and some other helpful things such as question mark button that tells you why we're changing things on you so this was really kind of one of our bigger things that we needed to solve but something that we were able to do with the help of the beta team as well here's kind of what you saw before in the video was that world state manager with the little slide-out panel

with the kind of list of five world states what we decided to do is change this section to actually show the current world state you were on as well as the connection like what you were going to import into Inquisition so we had the hero and a few little summary choices that it was kind of this safeguard against maybe importing the wrong State what we found early on in the Alpha group was that people are the Alpha stages that people are telling us that there heroes have a massive connection to their world states so we started to pull in their heroes into a lot of the different places of the keeps us be sort of the cornerstone or the mark to who you were importing in as well you have kind of our big check mark Dai we're exporting this in which was kind of that safeguard and we were able to message and put out on Twitter that if you think you have something and maybe you don't check that you have this big check mark in your keep and that's that means you're good and you're safe and you imported what you wanted so something

that we really needed to do and kind of I think was one of the big things that launched that helped us make sure that people had their right world States and they keep the other thing that we did was we moved the entire world state section into its own brand-new kind of interface and that's because people really wanted to have more than five world states we couldn't accommodate it in the small panel we had before but in this way people were able to either drag or edit their world states in the tapestry and it gave a better sense of what I was working on I had to physically tangibly move something or do something to start working on a different world state whereas before you just had to click on a little eyeball button that was really people didn't know what that meant so I think that this was again a big thing and it also allows us in the future to add more world states or add different sections so a really great thing that we got from kind of small hints and the themes that we were hearing out of the beta program and finally the details I really love

this piece here this is one of my favorites about dog and when we went through the beta wanting to add and give things more life and more personality we found that one of the cool things that we could do was rewrite all the text in the keep the creative director Mike Laidlaw wrote all the text himself so big thank you to him and it just gave everything kind of that storybook feel whereas it used to say did you recruit dog yes or no so this was a big big thing that we added and it seems small but again these details they made a massive difference in the experience and what we are trying to achieve so I love this quote as well because it really speaks to kind of the keep evolve so these people who are with us during our beta program they got to see it move from basically this gray piece that had interesting usability problems and some confusing sections into something that

was workable for a wide variety of fans and we were so excited to have them involved as well so kind of the lessons that we learned coming out of this is to design a program around what your product needs I think it's quite simple to say but you know we had a really long time span we knew where we were with the product and maybe if we were closer to launch or we had a more firm timeline this would have been a lot harder to do so really take a look at what your product needs where you want to get to and then really get feedback in the moment this was huge for us because as we launched things as we put out new releases we could see what was really vexing for people as well encourage your whole team to get involved I hope that this was something that you know my team would want to be a part of and just to see them get on the forums to talk to people to say from a developer's perspective why a feature couldn't be implemented or why something didn't work well was really big and it was something that then the community could go talk

about and it was really genuine authentic and we tried our best to kind of do that and then finding the common themes and investigate like I said we had a massive amount of feedback tons and tons of feedback so we had to work really really hard on how to categorize this how to make this actionable how to find out what people are really looking for and then investigate and dig in when we needed more information as well communicate openly during the process I think that we spent a lot of time putting up release notes saying what we heard what we changed and what we were going to do next and we always tried to kind of toth at line between things that we could do and couldn't do and wanted to do versus you know what we were actually able to do and making sure to communicate that openly and honestly and I think that was a big thing that kind of helped get us to where we were with the keep to get where we were in terms of some of

the features the things that we couldn't get done you know sort of prepared for it launched so this was a big big point for us and then at the end what we did was we put up a credit section with all the people who decided to help us we did use a surveys that people could tell us what name they wanted in there and this was something that again I just loved being able to say like you absolutely helped us get here with your work your feedback based on something that was you know probably a year prior a list of check boxes so that was again really really special so I encourage you to if you do something like this and you're able to give credit where credit's due and finally some final thoughts so for us don't just solve the immediate problem find the opportunities we absolutely could have gone with a list of check boxes you could have used that as your world state and imported it into Dragon Age Inquisition but we wanted to

respect our fans investment their engagement their time with the franchise and build something that would be there for them in years to come as well preserve the investment your fans have me and your franchise whether it's choices progress anything those things can help carry them through to your next game your next experience and it really represents what they've put into your franchise as well find ways to include your community in the development process I can't say enough about this this was huge for us and it was an incredibly rewarding experience and something that I really hope that if you're looking at considering something that you'll just do is that it does really help take your product in a really great direction and finally if I have time for questions and thank you again all so much for coming out today I'd really really appreciate it and I don't know if I have time for

questions but you could ask them eight minutes okay shouldn't like and what kind of adoption were you targeting like do you know how many Inquisition States got in forted yes so in terms of what we were looking for and what we got the analytics team is still working on some numbers so I can't officially say we do know for origin pre-orders only it was about 50% so again we didn't have massive sort of goals in terms of adoption but really this was something that we felt we needed to do and if it helped people get ready for Inquisition that was great but what we're finding now actually is that people are using it more for their second or third playthroughs because they can get a different experience in Inquisition so that's kind of what we're digging into to try and figure out a bit more about thank you all right just a very quick

question sorry my voice is kind of dead due to the AC here but it does look like the keepers the most comprehensive sort of story book of all the dragon writer experiences right now but what was the product oriented goal or pressure from the Inquisition team to include very specific things or maybe prioritize them in the keep yeah so I think up until launch our kind of razor was help fans prepare for Inquisition like help them get their World States into Inquisition and that was really kind of the big driving goal for us so when we had to look at other interesting features or things that we had on the backburner kind of if it didn't help fans get ready for a Dragon Age Inquisition that it kind of got shuffled off to the side so that was I think our main kind of goal going forward to launch as well as we did have sort of our more product goals around creating the franchise ecosystem preserving our players data but yes when

it came to the game get players ready to play great okay awesome well if there's no further questions again thank you all so much for coming out I really really appreciate it and I hope you had fun and learned a few things today [Applause]