There are a number of reasons why the new Dragon Age game has been a decade in the making. Developer BioWare has been busy with other projects over the past decade, and big-budget games generally take longer to produce than they did in 2014. But according to the film's creative director, John Epler, and creative performance director, Ashley Barlow, there is a simpler reason.

In a recent interview with GamesRadar, Epler and Barlow were asked about the game's development timeframe. Epler answered first, noting that "we had other projects underway at BioWare." Then Barlow mentioned some numbers that indicated the scale of the game.

At 140,000 lines for the latter, "The Veilguard" would be the most voluminous "Dragon Age" work to date. Its predecessor, "Inquisition," had 88,000 lines. This number also means that "The Veilguard" has more dialogue than "Baldur's Gate 3," which had an estimated 114,921 lines of dialogue as of patch 5. Oddly enough, however, "The Veilguard" is still outnumbered by Bethesda's "Starfield," with a whopping 252,953 lines of dialogue. In space, your cries seem to be heard by all.

However, the numbers presented by Barlow are questionable. The "every look" Barlow refers to is a customizable player character (named Look), which probably has different lines recorded depending on the player's chosen voice. It is unclear whether the latter number includes the same lines recorded by different voices, or whether there are character-specific barks associated with selected fantasy races, classes, etc., that add to the total. In any case, the number of unique lines in "The Veilguard" may be somewhere between the two numbers cited. And still less than "Starfield" (seriously, why does "Starfield" talk so much? Nobody says anything interesting!) .

BioWare has been trying to promote Veilguard in a big way lately. Earlier this month, the studio claimed that it was the first game in the series where "the combat is actually fun" and the characters are "intentionally" central to the storytelling. As with Barlow's figures, I question the veracity of this statement. Nonetheless, I am nonetheless eager to see what BioWare has crafted in the five years since the deeply disappointing "Anthem."