She looks down, into the abyss. But instead of empty nothingness or the unending Void, she finds her own reflection looking up at her from a still pool of black water. Her own amber eyes wide with fear and bright as ever. Her own dark hair loose and messy. Her own face mapped with lines made by lies and grins, and carved by grit and grief. “Oh hello,” Ash says flirtatiously to her own reflection. “Fancy meeting someone like you in a place like this.” She follows her words with a wink, and her reflection winks back at her. Ash laughs, and her reflection laughs along too. But as she laughs, she splutters and gulps for air then coughs. Ash squeezes her eyes tight and tries to clear her throat, but there’s something stuck. A bolt of terror, you’re afraid of being alone, of that deep devouring well of loneliness. Her feelings are caught there, right there in her throat and she can’t breathe, they’re knotted up inside of her, and she tries and tries to scream them out, to throw them up, but it’s no use. Keep smiling. Everyone you love leaves you, one way or another, but that feeling never will. Ash keeps coughing, she bends over, and on her hands and knees she retches and cries and spits and hacks, until - finally - she can feel the lump coming up. Until with one final push a wet little bird drops from her mouth, all bone and tawny feathers covered in bile. The creature looks dead at first. Then it twitches, once. Again – again - in a stuttering, fragile heartbeat-rhythm. It shakes its head and fluffs up its soaked feathers then it climbs to its legs. Before Ash can act, the bird stumbles and falls over the edge. Panicked, Ash rushes forward with her arms outstretched, almost falling head-first into the pool as she reaches for the bird, her bird. But before it hits the surface of the water, it opens its wings and singing all the while flies away into the distance. No, no, no, no, she cries as she collapses back. Ash hugs her knees to her chest and wails, rocking back and forth and crying out soundless, shapeless words, but no words can express the feeling of this loss. Something so beautiful – created out of the void in her - has flown away never to be seen again. That tiny, perfect, feathered part of her will never return. The never-ending night when you close your eyes. Such profound loss, it never leaves us. It never leaves us. There will always be a hole in her chest where her little bird once was, and Ash will never ever be the same. “Hello, sister.”  

• "I'm pretty sure that the [in-world] Dragon Age will be an age that lasts a suspiciously long time, as long as there are Dragon Ages being made. I don't think they will drop 'Dragon Age' because it's such an identifiable part of the franchise". [source]
• "I totally cannot spoil what the original Black City was supposed to be. I'm pretty sure that the approach to lore in DA has always been to leave it ambiguous to allow the future to go where it needs to go. Though that being said, DA:O was definitely built with the assumption that it was not getting a sequel." [source]
• "The Calling is presented as taking decades to kill you on its own. So Alistair would still be alive in DA:I and DA:D if he went that way. I think, if I remember the lore correctly." [source]
• "DA:O introduces a lot of hanging plot threads that aren't necessarily resolved. Orzammar potentially sets up a civil war, there's potentially werewolves running around. There's a lot of stuff we've been able to kind've ignore, but there's a lot of stuff that's still out there. The line of succession for Ferelden is open isn't it." [source]
• [on the Warden's quest for a cure for the Calling] "I don't think it's established that the cure is actually found is it. Or just that they're looking." [source]
• "Likely any cure for the Calling would be to extract the Taint from the person, so you would basically cease being a Grey Warden at that point." [source]
• "I think they're treating the Trespasser epilogue slides as canon." [source]
• [during DA:O epilogue slides] "You can see, this leaves a lot of threads in a lot of potential different directions that Dragon Age has been dealing with since then, since 2009." [source]
• "The resistance that there was for toolset for Frostbite was a feeling like, 'this engine is proprietary, it does a bunch of stuff that we don't want other people to be able to steal'. That's basically not even true anymore. There's actually a feeling now within EA that user-generated content, UGC, is incredibly good, that it's basically free marketing. Like you say, Skyrim has been going forever. So that's why, EA has a really complicated relationship with UGC. What they want is basically, everyone to make TikTok videos and things about how great the game is. They don't necessarily want you to make DLC or Twitch stream the thing but they also recognize that this is not a, you don't get to have one without the other really. Yeah, the 'cost of free ads from fans is fan DLC'. That's pretty much, sums it up perfectly." [source]
• "CD Projekt uses slightly different language than BioWare did for DLCs, expansion packs etc. I would not classify the free DLCs from The Witcher as expansion packs, they're DLC. They called them expansion packs but from my perspective, an expansion pack is larger than that but it's a spectrum for sure. The thing I would say about CD Projekt in general is they're amazingly good at picking the right language. So what they did on Witcher 3 is they said, they added a tiny bit of content to each of their patches and said 'this is DLC, we're going to give it away for free, aren't we amazing?' And then they made their DLC a little bit bigger and then said 'these are expansion packs, we're gonna charge for that', brilliant. Honestly brilliant. Because it makes them, it's a great PR move, it also meant that they got a, every time they released a patch they essentially got an article on the gaming sites. It's something that BioWare and frankly DA in particular is pretty bad at, like, naming things, and using language that makes things sound better." [source]
• [on The Sims] "'Buy a thing and then later they release more stuff to add to your thing', it's an amazing business model. It's also a business model that EA does not understand, they, like BioWare, suffer from being a thing that exists within the sports-focused EA ecosystem that, constantly trying to explain that 'our players are not the same as your players, you need to let us do what we know how to do'." [source]
• "We had a free-to-play version for DA multiplayer, that was Hendrix. It's not on the, EA didn't want it to exist so it was only on the servers for a little while, a couple of months, but it was actually there. I'm sure it's not up anymore." [source]
• "I don't know if Frostbite is gonna die. I think there's a very good chance that what's going to happen is, it may become the next sports engine. FIFA is a monolith and has taken over the driver's seat for that engine. I don't think they're gonna be very interested in switching again. Even if active Frostbite development in general goes away, FIFA will keep going and then a bunch of other games live in the rain shadow of FIFA, like NHL." [source]
• "If it was up to me, I'd probably have forced Mass Effect onto Frostbite. And I would be strongly inclined to keep Dragon Age on Frostbite for at least one more game because you've built the foundation. The best engine to use is the one you just used. But I don't know what's gonna happen after DA:D to be honest. BioWare seems to be addicted to throwing away work they've done in the past. And it was never up to me." [source]
• "Frostbite isn't a recruitment negative but certainly it's a lot easier to find people that already know how to use Unreal. What you actually see in programming is some people, it's not a universal, but some programmers, they don't wanna work in Unreal because they feel like someone else gets to do all the cool programming bits." [source]
• "The question for Awakening is should it have even been an expansion pack, or is a different solution to have made it, say, 40% bigger and made it a full-sized game. This is, I think, the reason why expansion packs are so rare these days is because, it's easy to imagine a path from an expansion pack to a $60 or $70 game and then you're getting somewhere between 80-120% attach as opposed to 30% attach. I suspect this is the primary reason why expansion packs have kind've faded away, because 'I'm gonna ship every year' is fairly accepted within games these days. So honestly the pitch for Joplin's live service was 'we're not gonna do a live service, we're gonna do a game, and then we're gonna do another game in 18 months and another 18 months after that. And maybe we'll do one piece of DLC in there, but we'll just be like dunk-dunk-dunk' and the economics for that are great. So that's why expansion packs are gone I think." [source]

• "That's the fundamental problem of DA:O not knowing it's gonna have sequels, it leaves the world in a very quantum state. There's still stuff that's hinted at in those [epilogue slides] that are happening sometime in the future that I think are gonna probably at this point be ignored. Probably the biggest issue of DA:O is that it leaves the world in a state that probably wasn't intending that there would be a sequel." [source]
• "When we were discussing doing a remaster for the trilogy, my pitch was to essentially retcon it [DA:O, DAII and DA:I] into a trilogy, to make it the 'Champion's Trilogy' or something to that effect, where you group the three games together, imply that they were always intended to be a trilogy kind of, and then that does a couple of things. It packages them into something that stands on its own a bit better, but also lets you potentially change what you're doing with the player character going forward. If you've decided that, okay, we've changed player character every single game up until now, but maybe we're not going to do that going forward, by packaging them together in a remaster you kind've give yourself permission to do that. Certainly DA:D is gonna have a new player character, given that the one from DA:I is missing a limb." [source]
• We probably oversold the Wardens in the marketing for DA:O. Because essentially, what we did was establish them as the coolest thing in the world and then yeah, so the series has definitely been dealing with the aftermath oh 'but not Wardens? Therefore not cool' forever since then." [source]
• "But a new player character means you have a harder job every single game, because you have to get people interested, you don't get the shortcut of 'Shepard is Shepard, you know Shepard'." [source]
• "Anders is the one that made us rethink how we introduce romances, because a lot of people ended up in romance with him that didn't mean to. We'll see if they come back to that in DA:D, but I think that because of Anders in DAII, DA:I was definitely trying to not 'accidentally do anything to you'. But it does mean that it is very player-controlled and very player-initiated. But maybe they'll be willing to go back to that a little bit." [source]
• "Tevinter Nights does a really good job of staying away from violating canon. The thing with, the further you go away from what's in the games the more you are, the less well it's gonna do, so that's not necessarily a problem but it is something to keep in mind that you don't, you're trying to make money with your novels. Setting it in a time period that people don't know is great for the core fans but isn't necessarily gonna do super amazing. The advantage that Tevinter Nights is, because it's an anthology, you're able to just, everything kinda just stands on its own and therefore you're able to just stay away from the major characters to a large degree." [source]
• "Varric's definitely not quantum, he's in good shape. Dorian, I feel like Dorian is guaranteed to be around [as in quantum], but maybe not, maybe I'm wrong about that. But the games have gotten better or at least more conscious of what they do with companions as it's gone on, in terms of trying to, being at least aware of the fact that you might want these people to come back, so maybe at least understand the quantum you're putting them in. There's a bunch of followers in DA:I that you might just not recruit. Like Blackwall's pretty easy to miss. Dorian can show up but he doesn't die if you don't recruit him, he's alive. The biggest thing for quantum is 'are they alive', in which, in DA:O there's a lot that don't make it. Then you have to deal with, well they might be [killed/not recruited?] or something but the biggest thing is, if they're alive you can probably make it work." [source]
• "I have a feeling that Desire Demons are going to be just, ignored, or, honestly I mean one way to, I think, Desire is seen in a very narrow light in DA:O. I think if you go, if you move into Desire being a much broader concept, you have a lot of options there. I think if you approach Desire in a broader sense I think you have some opportunities. But then you kind've end up with the DA:I problem with the Fear." [source]