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According to this tweet (which has since been deleted), via Rock, Paper, Shotgun. (Note also how the RPS article is quoting some EA stuffed suit about this, and not someone who is actually from Bioware itself.)
Did they learn absolutely nothing from Dragon Age 2 at all? No morals about not rushing out half-assed crap in order to try to cash in and such? Nothing like that? Well, too bad. Here we go again. (I guess all we can hope is that they didn't really plan for this news to get out so soon, and were planning to unveil it in, like, 2015 or something, after having several years to work on it and get it right... ha ha, who am I kidding? This is EA we're talking about here. Of course DA3 will be released in 2012 or maybe even end of year 2011 or something. [EDIT April 2013] Well, looks like they might actually be taking their time with this one, which is a good thing. Maybe it won't entirely suck like DA2 did, after all. I'm still probably not going to get it, at least not anything near launch, anyway. [/EDIT])
I never made it out of Act 1 of DA2, and even then I'd already seen that one cave system being reused for the needlessly tedious (but prettier) combat at least two or three times (but then, the tweet mentions that they're looking for environment artists so maybe they did learn at least that much). And maybe I just didn't give it long enough, but the story wasn't grabbing me either. But then, at that point the main story consisted of simply "We gotta get ready to go to the Deep Roads." and that was pretty much it.* Sure, a few of the bigger side quests had some vaguely interesting stuff happening, but the main quest at the time was just to earn 50 gold to pay the dwarf guy to be able to join the Deep Roads expedition, and this was after many hours of play. All of the pointless fetch quests were very trivial and stupid as well, as fetch quests typically are.** And I'm not even going into the romance stuff again, because that's all been covered ad nauseam by just about everyone else (and, again, it wasn't a problem for me, personally). Compared to the original game, overall, what little I've played of DA2 was quite crappy by comparison. I dunno, I might give it another shot someday (maybe in prep for DA3, if it turns out that DA3 actually doesn't suck), but I currently have way too many other, much more interesting games to play. In any case, if I do end up getting DA3 at some point, I'm most likely not going to be pre-ordering it like I did DA2 and will be waiting for reviews and, more importantly, word-of-mouth from actual players. Too bad I'll miss out on whatever pre-order bonuses that will be arbitrarily cut out of the original game by doing that, but oh well. *eye roll*
* - The Deep Roads stuff is widely regarded as one of the most uninteresting sections of the original Dragon Age (and I most definitely agree with that assessment), so of course they center the main quest in the first chapter of the second game around going back there for some reason. Go figure.
** - Seriously, one of the fetch quests was as follows: Hawke randomly stumbled upon the corpse of a nun in a bad part of the city, presumably killed while trying to minister to the downtrodden and scum who lived there. He made some kind of trite comment like "So and so at the chapel would be interested in this." or some such. He then picked up the corpse and carried it around with him in an inventory slot and (eventually) brought it back to the chapel, at which point, the guy there said some banal phrase like "Ah, I've been looking all over for this item. Thanks." You get a bit of money and XP, and that's it. Quest over. It has absolutely zero importance on the rest of the game. There were several of those quests in Act 1 alone, and every single one of them was the same. Either someone tells you to find some unimportant bauble, you randomly find it later and then bring it back to them, or you find the random trinket first and then wander around looking for someone with a quest marker over their head and give it to them. In either case, they say some generic "Thank you for completing this quest" lines of dialog, and that's it. I mean, really, EarthBound was making fun of these kinds of quests almost two decades ago (with the appropriately named "Insignificant Item" that you find in the third town and give to some guy in the second town).
Did they learn absolutely nothing from Dragon Age 2 at all? No morals about not rushing out half-assed crap in order to try to cash in and such? Nothing like that? Well, too bad. Here we go again. (I guess all we can hope is that they didn't really plan for this news to get out so soon, and were planning to unveil it in, like, 2015 or something, after having several years to work on it and get it right... ha ha, who am I kidding? This is EA we're talking about here. Of course DA3 will be released in 2012 or maybe even end of year 2011 or something. [EDIT April 2013] Well, looks like they might actually be taking their time with this one, which is a good thing. Maybe it won't entirely suck like DA2 did, after all. I'm still probably not going to get it, at least not anything near launch, anyway. [/EDIT])
I never made it out of Act 1 of DA2, and even then I'd already seen that one cave system being reused for the needlessly tedious (but prettier) combat at least two or three times (but then, the tweet mentions that they're looking for environment artists so maybe they did learn at least that much). And maybe I just didn't give it long enough, but the story wasn't grabbing me either. But then, at that point the main story consisted of simply "We gotta get ready to go to the Deep Roads." and that was pretty much it.* Sure, a few of the bigger side quests had some vaguely interesting stuff happening, but the main quest at the time was just to earn 50 gold to pay the dwarf guy to be able to join the Deep Roads expedition, and this was after many hours of play. All of the pointless fetch quests were very trivial and stupid as well, as fetch quests typically are.** And I'm not even going into the romance stuff again, because that's all been covered ad nauseam by just about everyone else (and, again, it wasn't a problem for me, personally). Compared to the original game, overall, what little I've played of DA2 was quite crappy by comparison. I dunno, I might give it another shot someday (maybe in prep for DA3, if it turns out that DA3 actually doesn't suck), but I currently have way too many other, much more interesting games to play. In any case, if I do end up getting DA3 at some point, I'm most likely not going to be pre-ordering it like I did DA2 and will be waiting for reviews and, more importantly, word-of-mouth from actual players. Too bad I'll miss out on whatever pre-order bonuses that will be arbitrarily cut out of the original game by doing that, but oh well. *eye roll*
* - The Deep Roads stuff is widely regarded as one of the most uninteresting sections of the original Dragon Age (and I most definitely agree with that assessment), so of course they center the main quest in the first chapter of the second game around going back there for some reason. Go figure.
** - Seriously, one of the fetch quests was as follows: Hawke randomly stumbled upon the corpse of a nun in a bad part of the city, presumably killed while trying to minister to the downtrodden and scum who lived there. He made some kind of trite comment like "So and so at the chapel would be interested in this." or some such. He then picked up the corpse and carried it around with him in an inventory slot and (eventually) brought it back to the chapel, at which point, the guy there said some banal phrase like "Ah, I've been looking all over for this item. Thanks." You get a bit of money and XP, and that's it. Quest over. It has absolutely zero importance on the rest of the game. There were several of those quests in Act 1 alone, and every single one of them was the same. Either someone tells you to find some unimportant bauble, you randomly find it later and then bring it back to them, or you find the random trinket first and then wander around looking for someone with a quest marker over their head and give it to them. In either case, they say some generic "Thank you for completing this quest" lines of dialog, and that's it. I mean, really, EarthBound was making fun of these kinds of quests almost two decades ago (with the appropriately named "Insignificant Item" that you find in the third town and give to some guy in the second town).
