With just five days left to go, Chorus: An Adventure Musical has managed to surpass its fundraising target.

In case you missed it, Chorus is a character-driven musical game by new Australian dev team, Summerfall Studios. It's spearheaded by ex Obsidian and BioWare developers, Liam Esler and David Gaider, and will feature the voice talents of Laura Bailey and Troy baker, as well as music by Austin Wintory.

At the time of writing, 4619 backers have pledged over $600k (about 465k) on the fig.co site, and any more pledges will go towards stretch goals to make the game even bigger.

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While this fan-made Dragon Age: Origins patch purports to fix an impressive 790 bugs in the PC version of the RPG, that's not even the best bit; incredibly, it also restores a heap of hitherto hidden content that had been cut from BioWare's original release.

Qwinn's Ultimate DAO Fixpack (thanks, PC Gamer), currently available on Nexus Mods, has taken on the unenviable task of addressing Origins' myriad of issues. While first released in June 2017 it continues to be updated regularly, and the community modder has also poked around the inner gubbins and enabled players to run original material that, for reasons unknown - but thought to be related to "time or budget constraints" - was cut before release.

If you've yet to play and might be sensitive to Dragon Age spoilers, look away now...

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I adore the tarot cards in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Whoever came up with the idea, I could kiss you. I could happily look at the cards all day - and I have, sorry colleagues. I have bought them to frame and hang on my wall, and I've never done anything like that before. It's odd - Dragon Age isn't known for its art. Origins was ugly and Dragon Age 2 was all over the place, caught between old and new. They had art, but it wasn't important. But with Inquisition it changed.

Inquisition had tarot cards. They lived in the menus, representing all facets of the game. They were the characters you met, changing along with your relationships, and they were the class you chose, monsters you killed, achievements you earned. And they were there the moment you started your game, in your face, dazzling in their deliciousness.

OK, so technically they're not all tarot cards. Some are simply gorgeous pictures shaped like cards. But there are enough actual tarot to fill a 78-card deck, which EA printed for the 140/$160 Collector's Edition of the game. I wish I'd bought it - you can't find it for less than hundreds of pounds on eBay these days, the deck. Sure, you can buy them as playing cards (and I have) but it defeats the point.

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Mike Laidlaw, former boss of BioWare's Dragon Age series, has joined Ubisoft Quebec to work as creative director on a new project.

You'll know Ubisoft Quebec as the studio which lead development on this year's brilliant Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and the enjoyable London-based Assassin's Creed Syndicate before that.

It's a fascinating move. Quebec's Odyssey is an enormous Assassin's Creed role-playing game clearly influenced by BioWare. It has a main character shaped by your choices, missions with various branching story paths and the ability to romance other characters found in the game.

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According to a new report, which Eurogamer understands to be true, BioWare is set to offer a first taste of its long-awaited next Dragon Age at this week's Game Awards. That's despite it still being "at least three years away" from release.

News of an imminent unveiling for a new Dragon Age comes via Venturebeat, and follows BioWare own hints last week that fans could look forward to more Dragon Age news "in the coming month". As Venturebeat puts it though, the real question is what, precisely, BioWare and publisher EA have in store for The Game Awards.

According to "sources familiar with the studio", a new Dragon Age game is "at least three years away" from release, based on current expectations. Development is so early, in fact, that the project hasn't even been given an official name - although Venturebeat suggests this might change in time for Thursday's Game Awards.

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Another of BioWare's old-guard has left the building. This time it's James Ohlen, lead designer of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Neverwinter Nights and Dragon Age: Origins, and director of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Ohlen leaves BioWare after a staggering 22 years.

"After 22 years I have retired from BioWare," Ohlen announced on Twitter. "I've loved my time with Anthem, Star Wars, Dragon Age and Dungeons and Dragons. But I need to take a break from the industry and work on something a little smaller and more personal.

"The most fun I've ever had at BioWare was as the lead designer on Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 and Neverwinter Nights. I've been a D&D fanatic since I was 10 years old and I want to be a part of it again."

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Mike Laidlaw can still remember his first day at BioWare, even though it was over 15 years ago. He even remembers the date he answered the phone and found out he had got the job: 23rd December 2002. Laidlaw was used to answering the phone; at the time he was working at Bell, Canada's largest telecommunications company, in the province of Ontario. When Laidlaw first joined Bell's call centre, he worked the phones. Later, he got promoted to lead a team on the phones, "which was somehow way worse than being on the phones," Laidlaw told me last March, the day after his star turn at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. "I went in and said, I'm sorry, I'm quitting. I'm not coming in tomorrow. They said, 'you can't quit two days before Christmas! If you quit you'll never work here again!' I said, 'that is pretty much the plan, yes.' So I walked out, and a bunch of people high-fived me because - yay! - I got out."

We're upstairs at Zero Zero, a pizza and pasta place just a 10-minute walk from the begging mothers and the babies they cradle who sit on the sidewalks that connect the buildings that host GDC, the world's largest gathering of video game developers, a place thousands come to share, to learn, to network, and, occasionally - although I sense through gritted teeth - talk to press people such as me.

Laidlaw is instantly affable, entertaining and interesting. He is willing to talk about things, which might sound like an odd thing to mention, but in this business, it is a rare joy indeed to speak to people who are willing to talk about things. I get why they do not, why developers are hesitant to say too much, because when they do, the fans sometimes come calling - as they have at Mike Laidlaw at points during his career.

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BioWare has rubber stamped development of Dragon Age III.

The role-playing specialists are looking for staff to work on the game.

"I'm looking for exceptional environment artists to join me at #BioWare Edmonton, Canada to work on #DragonAge3 #gamejobs #jobs #3D #artists" reads a tweet by Alistair McNally, senior director of creative development at BioWare (spotted by IGN).

Confirmation of the game comes as no surprise – the Dragon Age series is hugely successful.

Dragon Age II topped the UK all-formats chart upon its March 2011 release.

Eurogamer's Dragon Age II review rolled an 8/10. "An enduring classic? Not quite," wrote Dan Whitehead. "A satisfying epic? Absolutely."

But the game proved devisive. In a Dragon Age II interview with Eurogamer, lead designer Mike Laidlaw said the developer has "ideas" for a sequel and protagonist Hawke.

What about multiplayer?

"Long-term that's something we have to consider," he said, "because obviously multiplayer is something that's a huge undertaking, it presents technical difficulty. And frankly it's something that if done, has to be done really well, otherwise it feels very tacked on. So we'll have to make any decision about that within that context."

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Angry gamers have filled BioWare's forum with complaints after the PC version of fantasy role-playing game Dragon Age: Origins became unplayable over the weekend.

According to a report on Ars Technica, the problem was the result of Bioware's DRM authorization servers.

"Sometime on Friday morning, Dragon Age:Origins players who booted up the game for a session of single-player dungeon crawling were greeted with a nasty surprise: all of the downloadable content (DLC) that they had purchased for the game had been flagged as 'unauthorised', so their saved games wouldn't load," Ars Technica reports. "Again, these were vanilla, single-player saved games, representing untold hours of gameplay and investment, that users were suddenly unable to load."

Yesterday BioWare announced it had fixed the problem, but not before angry fans had their say in a spiralling thread packed with posts.

Dragon Age online producer Fernando Melo jumped in to explain what had happened.

"The short answer is that we were caught off-guard by this as a new issue for DAO players, believing initially that this was an existing issue that had a solution already available here on the tech forums," Melo said.

"Some of you may be familiar with it, but for those that were not, DAO has an existing (but low in numbers of affected players) issue with unauthorized DLC which can occur in certain cases - usually stemming from something related with the DA updater service that is either not correctly installed or not started with the game.

"Normally, we are pretty responsive to activity on the forums, but you may also be aware that our forums are staffed voluntarily - and while we do ensure that additional presence exists when launching patches or server updates, this weekend was not the case.

"The DA2 patch was not expected to clear QA until at least Monday, and most of the volunteer staff/moderators were focused on the DA2 threads currently. The higher than normal traffic in the DAO support thread was not caught.

"The delay and vagueness in information provided to you came from the fact that the issue ended up residing in servers outside our direct control elsewhere at EA -  and across time zones it took us a while (most of Mon and into early Tues) to go back and forth trying out different approaches to identify exactly what was causing the issue. 

"Once again my sincere apologies on the delay and the frustration factor for everyone wanting to play the game and DLCs over this weekend."

Dragon Age: Origins launched in 2009 to an 8/10 review score from Eurogamer. Its sequel, Dragon Age II, launched earlier this year.

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