Dragon Age II demo for public or not?
BioWare won't say either way.
Update: I made some errors while reporting this story. Thank you to the people who pointed them out. I'm sorry. The gist of the story still stands.
Original story: Will there or won't there be a Dragon Age II demo offered to the public? It's a question that's been hotly debated overnight.
A leaked internal memo from US game-shop-goliath GameStop sparked the debate after promising employees "early demo access" to Dragon Age II.
"Any form of distribution, recording, posting of any elements of the Dragon Age 2 demo and any of its files is strictly prohibited until February 23, 2011 when the demo is made available to all consumers," the memo stated, seeming to confirm a public demo release.
BioWare staff, in the official forum, were reluctant to say either yes or no to that date. Cue bad tempers from a frustrated community and a 152-page forum thread (at the time of writing).
"Without getting into the meat of this thread," said BioWare's cinematic designer John Epler, "as a publicly-traded company, we're very limited in what we can discuss. Not to mention there are very specific people whose job it is to discuss very specific issues - and this includes even something as seemingly-innocuous as 'I can't say anything about this'."
Added Stanley Woo, BioWare QA: "We have nothing to say, so we didn't say anything. We didn't address certain issues, because we had nothing to say on those issues. You ask us questions about stuff. We don't answer, it means we have nothing to say on stuff."
In a later post, he added: "Really, we're totally cool with saying what we can when we can. But when everyone's got their pitchforks and Lightsabers out, it's difficult to wade in and be a voice of reason. I often have to set myself up as the target and let people shoot me a few times before they start to really listen to what I'm saying and think about what they're posting."
He said he sent an email asking for clarification but doesn't expect anything back until "tomorrow". His post was made four hours ago. "No promises," he added, "at all."
Eurogamer is seeking out clarification from EA UK.