Dragon Age "Return to Ostagar" delay explained

The first reasonably-sized batch of post-launch Dragon Age DLC -- "Return to Ostagar" -- was delayed this week, leaving fans and ourselves wondering what went down. As it turns out, our speculation was spot on -- BioWare had indeed run into a last minute snag.

The content had been cleared in testing by EA, but thanks to the law of "infinite monkeys", BioWare's internal testing (always ongoing) uncovered something. They could've went ahead and it would've been okay enough, but as Online Producer Fernando Melo explains, they decided to go for quality:

"...it's something that was serious enough that we felt it impacted the quality [of the DLC] and we made the choice to delay it to give our fans the best experience with it. That was the reason behind [the delay] -- we want to make sure that we don't cut any corners when we do the DLC."

"There's already a lot of content out, there's a lot more coming -- we just announced the expansion pack, and there's more coming after that. I think the worst thing we could do after that is do anything "to poison the well," to use the expression, or put fans off from feeling that they're getting the best content from us. It's a long term decision instead of a short term decision."

Good to know someone understands the importance of reputation.

As for a release date, Community Coordinator Chris Priestly says, "Since many people have (rightly [in my opinion]) called us out for promising two release dates and missing them, we are going to make sure of the date before we issue it again. As soon as we are sure, we will let you know, but I have no ETA of when this will be."