Dragon Age 4 is now a pure single player game after all. As Bloomberg reports, EA and BioWare have canceled plans for multiplayer and live service elements of the role-playing game. Instead, the developer returns to its well-known strengths.
Why Dragon Age 4 now relies on single player
This decision was made, among other things, because of the failure of Anthem and the success of Jedi: Fallen Order: While the Star Wars game about Jedi Knight Cal Kestis sold over ten million copies as a pure single-player game, the success of remained recent live service projects.
The prime example of the latter is Anthem: Only recently the general overhaul of the BioWare game “2.0” or “Next” was sawed off. Anthem crash landed after its original launch in February 2019 and should be fundamentally revised as a result.
A few days ago, however, it was announced that the Anthem Next project would not continue and that all resources would be used on Dragon Age 4 and Mass Effect 5 instead.
Dragon Age 4, Anthem with dragons
After a “development reboot” Dragon Age 4 has a similar concept to Anthem track – i.e. offer any multiplayer and live service elements. The work on it was turned over in 2017 after EA promised long-term profits from this model. How exactly Dragon Age 4 looked in this direction is not really known.
However, this decision was not without criticism: The role-playing game was decried among other things by its own developers as “Anthem with dragons”, while the then creative director Mike Laidlaw even left the project in the course of this.
What we know about Dragon Age 4 so far
There is currently not too much concrete information about Dragon Age 4. For example, we currently don’t even know the release date of the role-playing game. According to EA, the title will not appear before the second quarter of 2022. A release in 2023 would also be conceivable.
It is already known that Dragon Age 4 continues the story of Inquisition: That’s how we’ll have to deal with our old friend and the so-called “Dread Wolf” Solas. Dragon Age 4 will play in Tevinter: A mysterious empire, which in previous parts of the series was more of a threat.
In addition to Dragon Age 4, a new Mass Effect is currently in development, while the SciFi role-playing games around Commander Shepard will be remastered in May 2021 with the Legendary Edition.
Incidentally, Fabiano is expecting a lot from Dragon Age 4 and Mass Effect 5: Even before returning to the single-player focus, our role-playing expert had high hopes for the two upcoming RPGs.