One of the Dragon Age series' most well-known features is now safe, thanks to the efforts of a modder. After EA shut down BioWare a few weeks ago, many fans realized the studio’s closure probably meant it would soon become impossible to easily port save data between all the games.
When Dragon Age: Origins released in 2009, BioWare emphasized that player decisions would permanently impact the land of Thedas. Dragon Age 2 lets players carry over their choices from the previous game by reading data stored on your system's hard drive, but things got tricky with Dragon Age: Inquisition, which was released on the next generation of consoles. Because BioWare couldn’t rely on players using the same system they had previously for Inquisition, they had to take a different approach.
The studio created a website called the Dragon Age Keep, which lets players tailor the decisions made in Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 so they can be ported into Dragon Age: Inquisition via an EA account. The Keep was the only way to transfer a player’s previous world state into Inquisition, allowing for around 300 choices. While the Keep is still working, it seems fair to expect that EA will shut it down now that BioWare is no longer there to maintain the site.
Thankfully, fans have found a way around this. As spotted by IGN, modder anshela created an offline version of the Dragon Age Keep that lets players edit their choices in the same format as the online version. They uploaded this tool to Nexus Mods just a day after BioWare closed, building on their less-user-friendly Custom World States mod. It should be noted that the mod's code was written with the assistance of AI.
This mod is specifically for Dragon Age: Inquisition, as Dragon Age: Veilguard, which is set in a different part of Thedas than previous entries, didn’t make use of the Keep at all. Instead, players were asked three questions at the start of the game, which would affect the world.
Is there any hope for BioWare to come back?
With fans still reeling over BioWare's closure, some are hopeful that the legendary Canadian studio and the new Mass Effect game it was working on can be saved. There’s currently an online petition to #SaveMassEffect with over 300,000 signatures. Perhaps more pertinently, a politician alluded to a plan for the Canadian government to help the Edmonton-based studio buy itself back from EA. It's a longshot, but at least it's something.
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Image: BioWare/EA
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