#filing this under the tag

[queenoftheboard]

I am once more thinking about Eirene and the significance of her name and how I've always found it a little bit strange that the first thing that will pop up in any searches is the association to the Greek goddess of Peace, Eirene - mostly because PtN Eirene doesn't come across as a pacifist. There is also a nice thread on the PtN reddit from some time ago where some guesses for the names of several characters were ventured and although some appear more obvious (NOX, Langley, Kelvin), the only mention there for Eirene is a former empress of the Byzantine empire.

And while I am 100% in favor of queenly aesthetics for Eirene (given the chessboard motifs, Quinn, etc), I never really liked this rather obscure association (I doubt 'empress Eirene' is the first empress or female monarch that comes to anyone's mind these days). As a result, I went back to the Greek mythology and thought it interesting that one of the few surviving statues of Eirene is a Roman copy, which depicts Eirene holding an infant Plutus - the Greek good for wealth. Now - this is more interesting; Eirene is the dominating figure of the Greed libram, and it's what drives her.

That statue is considered to be an allegory for 'Plenty' - in other words, 'Plutus' prospering under 'Peace'; frankly, this makes a lot more sense: while it's true that during wartime there is a financial gain for some enterprises, usually this leads to significant strife for the economy of a country and increased debt to finance war efforts. From a purely business, broader economic perspective - peace is actually more profitable.

And while Eirene (as a character) seems to not be afraid to 'get her hands dirty' (her own beginning battle quote) to achieve what she must for Quinn, she didn't resort to war to get to where she is; in fact, Eirene's wealth accumulates from sensible business choices, trade channels, political connections... Eirene's empire is built on peace (or the illusion of it) rather than all-out war. And then, one last element for consideration made me realize this is actually a pretty damn good name.

Eirene's equivalent in Roman mythology is Pax - and the Roman Empire reached its golden age during the so-called Pax Romana, going as far as inspiring other similar periods in human history where one had domination over the world in terms of geographical reach, cultural matters, trade and so on. The Roman Empire prospered as it had never done so because peace (or what was deemed 'peace' at the time) allowed them to be the strongest they ever were.

In a way - this seems to be what Eirene is doing; she is not seeking to go to war against any government agencies (at least not on the outside). Eirene is effectively establishing her own empire, going from DisCity to Outlands, controlling trade routes, having fingers in all sort of pies in DisCity in several different business segments and benefitting from 'civility' and 'order'.

Honestly - I have no idea if Eirene's name is supposed to be that deep and if Aisno went for all these connections when naming her; but now my mind has done these links, I feel much more at ease with her being named after the Greek goddess of peace.

[petshopbutch]

submissive in the way a livestock guardian dog is submissive to the sheep it kills wolves for

[thebibliosphere]

Still not over the head of cardiology, who said she wouldn't formally diagnose me with dysautonomia because she didn't want me to think of myself as disabled.

As if good vibes and a can-do attitude can stabalize autonomic dysfunction.

[charbies]

"i'm literally the priest's favorite sacrificial lamb because i am so docile and sweet and i hold very still when they put the rope around my neck and i trot along so happily while they lead me to the altar and they do not even have to tie me down because i lie so very still and only bleat once or twice in my lovely lamb voice and when the knife comes down it cuts through me like butter and i offer no resistance and i bleed so prettily all over my new white wool and my guts all unspool like the most beautiful shining yarn and my eyes are animal and dumb and hold no accusation and every time i die i come right back as another little lamb because the priest loves me so so much and he always chooses me for the sacrifice every time and he always places one hand on my small and twitching nose to calm me while he lifts the knife and he doesn't do it for the other lambs only me because i'm his favorite"

[felassan]

EuroGamer: 'BioWare knew the deepest secrets of Dragon Age lore 20 years ago, and locked it away in an uber-plot doc'

Original creator David Gaider on how "some of the big mysteries are being solved".

Rest of post under a cut due to length and possible spoilers.

"As I write about the secrets hidden in Dragon Age's mysterious Fade, and as I uncover some of them playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard, one question keeps rising up in my mind. How much did BioWare know about future events when first developing the series more than 20 years ago? That's a long time, and back then BioWare didn't know there would be a second game, which is why Dragon Age: Origins has an elaborate and far-reaching epilogue. Why lay so much lore-track ahead of yourself if you don't think you'll ever get there? But look more closely at Origins and there are big clues suggesting BioWare did know about future Dragon Age events. There are obvious signs in the original game, such as establishing recurring themes like Old Gods and the Blight and Archdemons. But there's also Flemeth, Morrigan's witchy mother, who's intimately linked to events in the series now - more specifically: intimately linked to Solas. Does her existence mean Solas was known about back then too? There's only one person I can think of to answer this and it's David Gaider, the original creator of Dragon Age's world and lore. We've talked before, once in a podcast and once for a piece on the magic of fantasy maps, where we discussed the creation of Dragon Age's world. And much to my surprise, when I ask him what he and the BioWare team knew back then, he says they knew it all. "By the time we released Dragon Age: Origins, we were basically sure that it was one and done, but there was, back when we made the world, an overarching plan," he says. "The way I created the world was to seed plots in various parts of the world that could be part of a game, a single game, and then there was the overall uber-plot, which I didn't know for certain that we would ever get to but I had an understanding of how it all worked together. "A lot of that was in my head until we were starting Inquisition and the writers got a little bit impatient with my memory or lack thereof, so they pinned me down and dragged the uber-plot out of me. I'd talked about it, I'd hinted at it, but never really spelled out how it all connected, so they dragged it out of me, we put it into a master lore doc, the secret lore, which we had to hide from most of the team.""

"This uber-plot document was only viewable on a need-to-know basis, he says, and only around 20 people on the team had access to it - other senior writers mostly. And even though Gaider left the Dragon Age team after Inquisition, and then eight years ago BioWare altogether, meaning he didn't work on The Veilguard at all, he believes - by looking at the events in the new game - his uber-plot lore "has more or less held up". That's impressive. What's even more impressive, or exciting, is that back then he also envisaged a potential end state for the entire Dragon Age series - a point at which it would make no sense for the series to carry on. "I always had this dream of where it would all end, the very last plot," he says, "which I won't say because who knows, we could still end up there. But the idea that this uber-plot was this sort of biggest, finite... That the final thing you could do in this world that would break it was there as a 'maybe we would get to do that one day'... There was just the idea of certain big, world-shaking things that were seeded in that arc, some of which have already come to pass, like the return of Fen'Harel." You've read that correctly: the idea to have Fen'Harel, also known as the Dread Wolf, reappear, was seeded all the way back then, way before Inquisition - the game in which he does actually reappear. But the concept for Solas, as a character who was Fen'Harel in disguise, was a newer idea. "That spawned from a conversation I had with Patrick [Weekes] and a number of other writers," Gaider says, "as an idea of 'what if you had a villain that spent an entire game where he's actually in the party and you get to know him?' Now, the god version and his larger role in the plot, yes that was known, but not that he would be presented as a character named Solas." Fen'Harel being known about means the other elven gods were known about, which means all of that stuff Solas reveals about his godly siblings - that they're not gods at all but evil elven mages he locked away behind the Veil - was known about back then too. "Oh yeah," Gaider says. "Everything that Solas tells you [at the end of Inquisition DLC, Trespasser]: it's all part of that original uber-lore - that was all in our mind." But why have so much lore if you're not certain you'll get to ever realise it? Well, to create a believable illusion. By creating an "excess" of lore, as Gaider describes it, Origins made Thedas feel like an old and believable place. A place with history, rather than a Western set that was all facade and no substance."

"BioWare also did something canny with the lore it did relay then, too: it shared it through the voices of characters living in the world, making it inherently fallible. In doing this, Dragon Age veiled its truths behind biases. The church-like organisation of the Chantry proclaims one truth, while the elves and dwarves proclaim another. Sidenote: you can experience this yourself through different racial origin stories in Dragon Age: Origins. This way, there's no one, objective, irrefutable, truth. "To get the truth, you kind of have to pick between the lines," Gaider says. So even though elven legends are coming true through the existence of Solas and The Veilguard's antagonist gods, it doesn't mean that's the one and only truth. There's truth in what the Chantry teaches and what the dwarves say, he tells me, which ignites my curiosity intensely. BioWare has also been tricksy in how it's rubbed out the lore the further back in time you go. "In general, the further the history goes back, we always would purposefully obfuscate it more and more," Gaider says - "make it more biased and more untrue no matter who was talking, just so that the absolute truth was rarely knowable. I like that idea from a world standpoint, that the player always has to wonder and bring their own beliefs to it." It leads into a founding principle of Dragon Age, which is doubt - because without it, you can't have faith, a particularly important concept in the series. It's where the whole idea of the Chantry's Maker comes from and with it, the legend about the fabled Golden City - now the Black City - at the heart of the Fade. This is the very centre of the lore web, and, I imagine, it's close to the series endpoint Gaider imagined long ago. All secrets end there. Did Gaider know what was in the Black City when he laid down Origins' lore? That's the question - and it startles me how casually he answers this. "Oh, yeah," he says. "What was in the Black City: that's the uber-plot. I knew exactly. "Was it as detailed in the first draft of the world?" he goes on. "No. I had an idea of the early history because that's where I started making the world. So the things that were true early-early: I knew exactly what the Black City was and the idea of what the elves believed, and what humans believed vis-a-vis the Chantry - that was all settled on really early. Then I expanded the world and the uber-plot bubbled out of that.""

"Gaider shows me the original cosmology design document for Dragon Age: Origins as if to prove this - or rather for the game that would become DAO. The world was known as Peldea back then. I can't share this with you because I see it via a shared screen on a video call, and because Gaider doesn't want me to, mostly because the ideas are so old they're almost unrecognisable from what's in the series now. But I can tell you it's a document that's just over a page in length, and that there's a circular diagram at the top showing the world in the middle and the spirit realm ringed around it. And on that document is reference to the Chantry's beliefs about a God located in a citadel that can be found there. Gaider says BioWare knew about Fen'Harel (the Dread Wolf) 20 years ago when it was developing Dragon Age: Origins, and that he'd one day reappear. The Fade wasn't known as the Fade back then, either, but as the Dreaming, because it's the place people go when they dream - an idea that lives on still. And if that sounds familiar to any fans of The Sandman among you, it should. "I'd say The Sandman series was probably fairly prominently in my head," says Gaider. "I liked that amorphous geography that was born from the psyche of collective humanity. I'd say yes, if I was to point at something specifically, that's probably where the very first inspiration of it took root." It's a lot to take in, but it reinforces the admiration I have for Dragon Age. Just as I have when hearing about the creation of my other favourite fantasy worlds, such as A Song of Ice and Fire, I begin to understand the magnitude - and the deliberateness - of the plotting that went on. I wonder if one day the Dragon Age series will end in the way Gaider first imagined, albeit slightly altered by the many other pairs of hands shepherding it along now. What a curious feeling it must be to know, so many years in advance, where things might go. Where that end is, I don't know, but I do know we'll take a significant step towards it in The Veilguard. After all, we're coming into contact with gods who were there at the recorded beginning of it all. "Yeah - we have access to people who can tell us the truth from first-hand experience," Gaider says, "although again, it depends on what the writers did with it. But if they continued the tradition of Dragon Age, you never know for sure if Solas is telling you everything, or what you're learning is the entire truth. "But yes, some of the big mysteries are being solved. I mean, will they one day definitively tell you about the Maker? Will we crack the big mysteries of the world and just make them answered finally? And does that ruin one of the central precepts that Dragon Age is founded upon? Maybe," he says. "Ultimately, that lore, when you make it big and you hint at it and hint at it and hint at it, it becomes a Chekhov's Gun of sorts. Eventually you got to pony up.""

[source]

[hrokkall]

DIVINE AUTOPSY

Text from a post by @bedrock-to-buildheight about angel anatomy and the physical manifestations of regret that can only be purged in a bloody vivisection.

[kaiminluu]

"when you slam the door i think you know, that you won't be away too long, you know that i'm not that strong"

hi @campbyler you destroyed me

[its-wabby-stuff]

Mikey Goes To Oz

<Time spent: 49 hours 17 minutes>

When Mikey takes some time away from a loud family squabble he accidentally ends up getting “flushed” down the sewers. This winds up sending him to the colorful land of Oz where he meets a good witch, a wicked witch, a brainless scarecrow, a heartless Tinman, a cowardess lion, and a powerful wizard, all disguised behind very familiar faces.

A canon adjacent spin off set before the season one finale but after they discover Splinter is Lou Jitsu

I wanted to fit each of the boys into their “you’ve had this all along” category. Leo isn’t brainless, in fact he’s pretty clever with a street smart, people reading ability on par with Donnie’s intelligence. Donnie isn’t heartless, he just has a tough time expressing his feelings. They are complex and unalgorithic but he can get just as excited or sad or angry as anyone, as much as he may deny it. Raph isn’t a coward, but being brave sometimes means admitting you’re scared and that you maybe don’t have all the answers. You dont have to be strong all the time and you don’t have to do it by yourself.

In the movie Dorothy’s journey home is also a representation of her running away. The important thing was to remember there were people who cared about her. Mikey is experiencing a similar phenomenon, wanting the escape the bad vibes in the lair. His “you’ve had it all along” is interesting because it is an object, since the Ruby kneepads could’ve taken him home the whole time. And sometimes getting home means going on a journey only to realize you never left.

I put April as Glinda because Glinda appears as a defender of the weak, and I see April in a similar light. Always willing to help and beat someone up if it is so required. Splinter as The Wizard of Oz represents Splinters own willingness to hide behind different personas, his running from the past and the pulling back of the curtain for Mikey in timeline. The Wizard grows through the movie, albeit quickly, and ends up leaving Oz to go home leaving his legacy with the scarecrow, the Tinman, and the lion. In this case the passing of the baton to his sons.

Meanwhile Draxum as the wicked witch felt much more how Mikey sees Draxum at this time in the show, mostly just an antagonistic force who wants something from them. Fun fact: I imagine throughout this dream, Draxum is uninterested in being the wicked witch but is pressed into it via plot. Hence his disinterest in being “melted.”

Additional characters not pictured: Big Mama as the Wicked Witch of the East (those were her Ruby kneepads!!) and Todd as the Mayor of Munchkin Land. If you can think of more, feel free to leave them in the comments or tags.

[ind1c0lite]

SO HEED THE STARS, THEIR LIGHT WILL LEAVE US IN THE DARK

[mazken]

brush test slash rendering practice with ayem

[sainz100]

just a few Max moments ❤️ | 📸 x x

[isan0rt]

The Dedue scarf (or more of a wrap really) I've been screaming all the way through knitting is done!!!

Final dimensions are about 8 ft long by 22 inches wide, and about 14.6 oz dry. I used 7.25 balls of Knit Picks Palette fingering yarn (50g, 100% Peruvian highland wool) in Marine Heather, one ball in Almond, and about half a ball of the same yarn in Garnet Heather. The smaller motifs are your standard 3 yarn Fair Isle knitting and the larger is 3 color ladderback jacquard at the suggestion of @themikecollective .

(Credits: shout-out to @eaglehorn for floating me their chart for the pattern as a starting point (I did my own chart for the smaller scale motifs but used their chart as the starting point and for the larger scale motif) and also shout-out to @themikecollective and @ehyde for suggestions on how to manage the floats on the larger motif. The medal (for display purposes) was purchased from @gizmoforge .)

I'm now going to snuggle in and be toasty warm for the rest of the winter.

[capquinn]

Bug and uncle Luke vibes

Jim and Cub vibes 🤭🤭

so true bestie. uncle lukey is such a kid at heart so he indulges bug's every whim. he's also that guy who just naturally migrates towards kids at parties and family events engaged in their silly conversations and games. in another lifetime he would've been a teacher <3

and there is nothing more cub-coded than this 😭😭😭😭 you and quinn thought it’d be a peaceful trip to the shops, leave the kids with their grandparents. what could go wrong? well...

Now, let’s be clear — Cub isn’t a naughty child. He’s the sweetest little guy you could imagine, polite, kind, always eager to help, and absolutely full of curiosity. It’s just that his energy knows no limits, and his curiosity is boundless. He’s not misbehaving, not trying to cause trouble. He’s just... exploring. He needs to touch everything, try everything, see how it works.

So when he stumbled across Bug’s paint set, well, it was only a matter of time before chaos unfolded. He’d been so into it, dabbing his little fingers into the colours, blending them together, and just having the best time — so lost in the textures of the paint — that it never occurred to him that maybe he should stop.

And Jim, having only been gone for a second, thought Cub was fine, sitting a few feet away. But when he looks down and sees his grandson sitting on the living room floor, absolutely covered in blue paint, there’s a flicker of mortification across his face before he laughs.

He’s raised three boys — equally rambunctious, equally curious — and honestly, this isn’t half as bad as the antics he dealt with when they were this small. So, even though Cub looks like a tiny, paint-covered disaster, Jim can’t help but love it.

Cub, of course, is smiling up at Jim, not even noticing the paint all over his little body, grinning ear to ear, completely content with his artistic endeavours. He has no idea why his grandpa is laughing, but he’s happy to join in anyway, his little giggle filling the air.

Jim, still laughing and shaking his head in disbelief, picks Cubby up, paint smearing all over his shirt, and carries him toward the dining room to find Ellen. She’s sitting at the table, watching Bug quietly draw, completely absorbed in her own art but the moment she looks up and sees Jim, with Cub in his arms, both of them covered in paint, even she bursts into laughter.

Jim, still chuckling, shakes his head. “I looked away for two seconds,” he says through his laughter, holding Cub up as if the mess wasn’t already obvious.

Ellen just laughs again, pulling out her phone in one smooth motion and snapping a picture before sending it off to you and Quinn with the caption: Grandpa was supposed to be supervising... maybe he just likes blue?

Jim looks at the picture Ellen just snapped, shaking his head with a grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. He glances down at Cub, who’s still grinning cheekily, completely unfazed by the mess of blue paint covering him from head to toe.

“Is that right, Cubby? You like the colour blue?” Jim asks, his tone playful, his eyes twinkling with amusement.

Cub nods enthusiastically, his little smile so wide it practically lights up the room.

“Uh-huh!” he says, his hands still sticky with paint as he tries to wipe them on Jim’s already-ruined shirt.

Jim chuckles and shifts Cub in his arms.

“Maybe you’re just getting ready to suit up for the Canucks one day, like your dad.” He pauses, glancing at Ellen with a smirk. “Though Quinn is gonna say I’m just trying to turn this into a team bonding exercise.”

Ellen laughs, her phone buzzing in her hand. She looks down at the screen, and as soon as she reads Quinn’s reply, she bursts out laughing again.

“What is it?” Jim asks, still bouncing Cub slightly, trying to keep him entertained.

Ellen holds up the phone, Quinn’s reply in bold letters: Tell Jimmy he’s out of practice. Can't handle one toddler?

[kcrabb88]

Being me, I was thinking about Quinlan again this morning, specifically his sense of humor and how he expresses it. He's definitely playful (Obi-Wan even thinks of him that way in Dark Disciple) and he's also got a sharply funny, dry, sarcastic sense of humor that you see A LOT in the comics (and actually in the TCW ep, as well). That sense of humor is actually something I think he and Obi-Wan have in common! I think they share a pretty similar taste in humor and express themselves similarly via teasing and intelligent snark. They speak differently (Obi-Wan is more formal, Quin is more casual) but they enjoy the same kinds of jokes. You can even see it in the way they talk to each other sometimes in that bantery way that is the affectionate bickering of two people who know each other so, so well. I just really love the ways in which they play off each other. Quin can be more impulsive than Obi-Wan, but Obi-Wan also has his own controlled chaos, which just makes their dynamic all the more fun.

[lenle-g]

I wrote the sentence "All Scott can think of is that skinny kid with the scraped knees arriving home from summer spacecamp, his noodle arms full of freebies and one baby tooth missing from his megawatt grin." in a fic this morning anD

Jeff has this in his wallet

[felassan]

Mark Darrah video: 'Dragon Age: The Veilguard Has Shipped. Now What?? #/masseffect'

Video description:

"Dragon Age: The Veilguard has shipped. What happens at BioWare now? BioWare structurally finds itself in uncharted territory as it only has a single Project (Mass Effect) active. Chapters: 0:00 Veilguard is out, now what? 0:22 BioWare Structure and History 1:57 Growth 4:45 Consumption 6:28 Sustain 7:27 Contraction 11:14 Leadership Discontinuity 1 12:48 Leadership Discontinuity 2 14:14 One Project At A Time 16:33 Mass Effect 18:50 Will The People Be There? 22:18 FOCUS"

[source]

Key notes from the vid and the comments underneath:

"Up front I should say that I have every confidence that Mass Effect [5] is in fact being worked on and that that project is going to receive all of the support from EA that it might need."

Slowly and painfully BioWare is figuring out that it simply can't do more than one project at a time anymore. It's now a single-project studio. Mark Darrah expects that both Edmonton and Austin will be working on ME5 together

ME5 effectively paused production for 15 months in order to help DA:TV ship

Right now other than some DA:TV clean up/final patches, everyone at BW is working on ME5

However ME5 isn't yet ready to suddenly have a team of 250-300 people working on it, so while some DA:TV devs moved onto it, some DA:TV devs were moved to/are moving to other parts of EA instead. The ME5 team started, but there is a long way between "start" and "ready to scale" up

The ME5 team is figuring out what ME5 is going to be & its structure, then will get ready to ramp up to a much bigger team size

"BW, for the first time really ever, is able to singularly focus on a single project, is able to put everything it has towards a single goal, which is making the best ME it possibly can."

But it remains to be seen whether BW will be able to get its people back when it needs them and is ready for them. There are a few reasons why this might prove difficult. Alternatively, on the flipside, this degree of focus might be exactly what BW needs to move it into the next phase of its life. "Maybe EA is going to prove to be incredibly effective at moving people around and when ME5 looks to start to grow maybe there will be no troubles".

We will probably have hints of what's going on [with ME5] within the next two years. "I have high hopes for ME. I think that once they figure out staffing, BW being focused on one game at a time is probably great for the studio" (though there may be growing pains to get there)

Does Mark Darrah foresee similar issues in the ME5 dev cycle to what DA:TV had? No, because ME5 hasn't had the same two big directional shifts, and it has had no leadership discontinuity (ME5 paused when they went to help DA:TV i.e. it didn't continue without a leader). But we should only really start counting ME5's dev cycle from today. "It really hasn't been that long with a significant team"

The ME5 teases in recent N7 Days were made by a "very small team"

There are still lots of veterans at BW

Mark Darrah doesn't expect to be involved in what BW makes next

More under cut due to length.

BW has existed in different ways/structures through its history. We're currently entering into an "unprecedented time" for BW

The purchase of BW by Elevation Partners, the purchase of BW by EA, when Ray Muzyka & Greg Zeschuk left BW, and the year 2017 in general are the 4 most important events (not including shipping games) that Mark Darrah feels have affected BW the most in its history

BW's strategy over time could be seen as having had 4 different phases: grow, consume, sustain, contract. In the contract phase, though BW maybe didn't realize it yet, the number of projects it was capable of running simultaneously was decreasing slowly/gradually. Why? Projects were getting more expensive, requiring more people/resources/time, and by this point BW had essentially burned off all its 'reserves' from the growth phase i.e. there was no longer any fat left to burn off

After DA:I shipped, Mark Darrah experienced that it was very difficult to find resources if your project wasn't the next project that was due out the door

DLC is a safety valve for processes and staff; a place for devs to work when other projects aren't quite ready for them yet; a place for the next gen of leaders to be grown. These things disappear as DLC does. Mark Darrah is pretty sure that the move away from DLC is coming from EA

In the contract phase, in 2013-14 Anthem was starved out by DA & ME:A. ME:A was also somewhat starved out by DA. Then when ME:A was in the driver's seat, it consumed most of the resources

In late 2016/early 2017 during the push to ship ME:A, as part of that BW began to experience leadership discontinuity. As the DA leader, Mark Darrah led a team of DA people onto ME:A to help it ship (the Dragon Age Finaling Team) for a few months. this sort of thing had happened at BW before but this was the first time when senior leadership moved off the projects they led to do this. this caused a change in philosophy in terms of the way that projects were run

When ME:A shipped and Casey Hudson came back to lead BW, there was then a much much larger leadership discontinuity with Anthem. The Montreal studio was supposed to move over onto Joplin to help kickstart it but it ended up getting taken away and given to the leadership in Montreal. but even if this had happened as it was supposed to, BW may not have been able to be in a place where it was going to be able to ship Anthem and Joplin simultaneously

Three quarters of the senior leadership on Joplin moved to Anthem or left BW. DA continued and became Morrison. The discontinuity had massive consequences for DA4

In 2021/22, this happened again in the opposite direction. The leadership team moved onto DA to help it ship, though rather than leaving some of the team in place, everyone moved. The other project (next Mass Effect) effectively ceased to exist for 15 months in order to help DA4 ship. In 2023 for the first time since 1995 BW was only working on 1 project (DA:TV) & there was nobody working on ME5 or remasters or side projects at that time. Now that DA:TV has shipped, apart from some people on cleanup and final patches, there is no plans for DA:TV DLC and "there is only Mass Effect". "Everyone at BW will be working on Mass Effect."

DA:TV being a 'direct sequel' would have been an unlikely path

With BW now focusing on a single project, Mark Darrah does worry that EA will get "itchy"

It'll be a [long] while to DA5 [hypothetically speaking, if it gets made]

MELE involved a lot of external devs

Shadow Realms was BioWare Austin and was due to: "partially places for people, partially a desire for Austin to get something new."

Mark Darrah expects that the devs are hearing everything being said about DA:TV

BW focuses more on consoles because of sales numbers

Unreal Engine 5 (which ME5 is on) is moving onto other EA projects as well, which may help

There are reasons why DA:TV is the way it is

BW has had external consultants on leadership and structure over the years

Mark Darrah expects that the next Dragon Age will once again be pretty different to the last iteration

BW Austin were brought in to help make Anthem. "What didn't happen (that should have) is that they should have had more directional control over the live service direction."

BW has had difficulty learning from previous games because at least one title was too far along TO learn. but a single game leads to staffing issues

Mark Darrah pitched a dev structure back in 2016/17 which would have had "3 fast follow games then a period of retooling"

EA doesn't really sell IPs

Chance of DA:TV DLC? "That's an EA question. And I expect EA's answer to be no". "I don't think we will see DLC. A new DA would be in the future."

"DA has been looking for larger audiences in every iteration. EA has never understood the franchise"

Remake DA:O or ME1? "While I think it would do well, I don't expect it to happen at any time soon. Also the skillsets required don't really over lap"

"The 3 previous games DAVe was are leaking through in places"

Diagram from the video which shows the flow of people throughout BW's history, made by a member of Mark Darrah's community.

[source]