DA: The Awakening - Exclusive Interview @ Grey Wardens Fansite

During a promotional event held in Germany last week, fansite for Dragon Age: Origins, Grey Wardens, talked to Fernando Melo, Biowares online producer. The interview moves in different directions, but here's a snip where Fernando speaks about the fiasco that was Return to Ostagar:

The delayed release of Return to Ostagar caused a fair amount of drama within the community. While these things happen in the world of software development it never paints a good picture of the company, at least not in the eyes of the average End User. Is there anything BioWare has changed in their digital distribution methods to better combat such a delay in the future?

This was a big blow for the team as well. We really wanted to make this a special content piece for fans to enjoy over their holiday season, and the team worked extremely hard to try to make that come true.

Instead Return to Ostagar (RtO) was to become something along the lines of a ‘perfect storm' for us where a lot of small faults and circumstances, not only internally but also externally to us, all came together at the same time and in a really awkward time of the year. This managed to divide everyone's efforts and attention in such a way that issues got through the previous processes that normally would have spotted it - certainly well before it ever made it to the public.

Since then, RtO has turned into an important case study for us, and we've changed quite a lot of our own process actually - not only with how we develop and test our content and patches, but also in how we will communicate these going forward.