Dragon Age - In-House Q&A About Dragon Age: Journeys
 

Listening with Both Ears on the Bioware Blog has an in-house Q&A session about Dragon Age: Journeys. You'll create your own character and be able to recruit up to 6 companions and save your characters through all three chapters. There was no clear answer on just how difficult the game would be:
More information.

If you hit the link above, about DA: Journeys you will learn that while it is free to play chapter 1, you will be charged for playing thetwo other chapters. In order for you to be able to save the game, you will have to get an EA Master account where you saved characters will be stored.

This fits well into EA's (and Bioware's) strategy for mocing the rpg genre forward:

EA's head honcho, as well as Ray and Greg from Bioware clearly see the future of gaming as digital in full. And yes, this implies that it will be necessary to be online all the time; they seem to forget that many people, especially in rurals area won't have an online-all-the time account available to them.

Am I missing something? I have an EA account and have used the master account to get access to my keycodes that are stored there. Plus, I've searched the internet for any info on this game or future chapters and found nothing about paying anything for it. Actually, I found nothing on what the next two chapters will be about.

This is the quote about saving the game and carrying your characters over to new chapters:

The only thing you need is to be logged into you EA account, which is free, unless there is some other EA account that I don't know about. That could very well be the case. Seems like EA has different account for everything. If there is, please provide a link, I would very much like to see this.

Maybe, in the future you will have to buy chapters 2 and 3 from their store, but that is purely speculation.

I doubt they've forgotten, they've just done the calculation that there's better profits to be made by abandoning them entirely for the sake of a more efficient and less easily pirated delivery to their core market.

Same as they pitch games at system requirements that most people will be fine with, people can't expect to fall too far behind the curve on anything without getting left out.

Cynical, but probably even true.

This is just like … MMORPGs combined with Single-Player RPGs. Both need to be played continously online, then.

So where's the difference ?

Cynical usually = true, at least when you're talking about a business.

IMO the difference is that with a MMO you continually hand over cash and have to talk to people, whereas with single player rpgs v2.0 you just have to continually hand over cash but are spared the awfulness of social contact.

Which I'm fine with :)

I'm pretty sure that it was mentioned, in the other article, that while the first chapter is free to play, the others would rely on microtransactions. However they did not mention what kind of mt, or that the rest would be paid for.

I neglected to mention something in the post that you might find interesting:

I was more interested in the difficulty and what the limits of the party would be, but it's a neat little addition for just playing the game.

That quote just strengthens the view that one needs to be online in order to play it (the game) properly. (I mean Dragon Age.)

I think they've learned from Mass Effect insofar that they are not forcing any kind of DRM to the players, but instead they are trying to seduce players to use their new DRM - which consists of being constantly online connected.

In German there's the proverb "jemandem Honig ums Maul schmieren".
dict.leo.org translates this as "to butter someone up".

Given a choice between the carrot and the stick I will always take the carrot.
The stick just pisses me off and makes me not want to play their game.

I am surprised it took them this long to realise this but hopefully we are through the period of DRM abuse and they are trying something new.

Well said :)

I'm much happier with this whole model too. Much better that they increase revenues by offering more (albeit relatively high margin) content to people clamouring for more content & willing to pay for it.

Having to have an permanent online connection isn't my cup of tea.

Plus this will just put the non-broadband-connected-people off.

You don't love the internets and want it all the time (including while sleeping ideally)?

What the heck's wrong with you?

I already have my spirit being on-line with the universe all of the day, I don't need a cable connection to companies as well.