Dragon Age - Forum Highlights @ Sorcerer's Place

Sorcerer's Place once again keeps us up to date on the Dragon Age official forums, with four new collections of highlights.  Along with the usual David Gaider (and Stanley Woo and Georg Zoeller) writers Mary Kirby and Sheryl Chee seem to be taking a more prominent role.  Here's the summary Sorcerer's sent over:

It's a heckload of data. In a rough count, a couple dozen pages of print. There's a lot of design discussion, talk about the plot concerns, endings, party banter, magic system, class restrictions, character choices, romance, dialogue, NPCs and more.

...and although there are plenty of quotes to choose from, here's a bit on the development time from Gaider for the non-believers:

Yeah, DA's a funny project if you're going to talk development time, because it hasn't been developed on a normal schedule. It all depends on what you consider to be "in development", really. Do we count the period where DA was just being planned and there were talks about it? Do we count the time where there was a handful of us passing around design docs and working on the background material? Do we count the period where there was a small team putting together the tech demo for E3 in 2003? Personally, I can't even pinpoint for you when the "full" team came together, as it's been done in bits and globs over the last few years.

I'm not sure how other companies do it, but I suspect you all wouldn't normally be privy to those periods of a project. All that stuff would be going on behind the scenes, with you all blissfully unaware that anything was even going on. Not that this hasn't been a long process, sure, but I suspect it seems longer than you're used to because of the extra early announcement. Whether you consider that to be a good thing or not is debateable, but there it is.