For a while there, it seemed like BioWare could do no wrong. The golden boy of the RPG genre, their games were massive hits – beloved by fans and critics alike. While they were often criticized for dumbing down their gameplay and RPG elements in favor of a more action-oriented and streamlined experience, the care with which they crafted their narratives, settings, and characters more than made up for those shortcomings.
When it comes to producing AAA role-playing games, BioWare’s most significant competitor was always Bethesda. However, they are far too busy re-releasing Skyrim on every possible platform known to man. And while Bethesda never really deviated that much from their RPG-making formula since Morrowind, BioWare is different. They experimented with their game design in almost every game they made – to varying degrees of success.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the Dragon Age series. Mass Effect was effectively the same game across the entire trilogy (the less said about Mass Effect: Andromeda, the better), with only minor changes and additions. Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age II, and Dragon Age: Inquisition are all wildly different products.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzSDwQJaWpU
Since the long-awaited Dragon Age 4 is finally in development, this is the perfect time to look back at the franchise as a whole and speculate what DA4 will be like.
Dragon Age – From (Humble) Origins
As mentioned earlier, up until now every entry in the Dragon Age saga was a complete departure from what came before it. The differences are too pronounced to be anything but a specific – and an unfortunate – combination of executive meddling, the ambiguity of what the series should be, and critical people leaving the company.
When Dragon Age was first conceived, it was initially envisioned as a spiritual sequel to the Baldur’s Gate series. Instead of using the traditional (and by that point – a little outdated and clichĂ©) Dungeons and Dragons ruleset, BioWare wanted to flex their creative muscles and come up with their own setting. It was a darker, more mature one, where life was cheap and essential characters could die because of a single wrong decision.
Drawing much of its inspiration from George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (and predating the megahit TV adaptation by several years), Dragon Age: Origins was an excellent start to the series. It quickly garnered millions of fans who were clamoring to see a continuation of the Graywarden and Darkspawn conflict in the form of a sequel.
Dragon Age, Too
Fans didn’t have to wait long for Dragon Age II. A mere year after Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening, the expansion pack for the first game, was released, DAII came out.
Without a doubt the most polarizing entry in the series, DAII was a rushed and strange game. Instead of continuing the epic fantasy tone of its predecessor, it instead opted to tell a more personal, low-key story about a family of refugees trying to survive and thrive in the city of Kirkwall.
The narrative was something that is rarely seen in games – it tried to subvert traditional CRPG conventions where you go from a nobody to a walking god in the matter of (in-game) weeks by having the game take place over the course of a decade. All the while having the characters (and Kirkwall itself) changing in power and social and material status.
All of this is topped off by having one of your companions – Varric, the crossbow-wielding dwarf – deliver exposition as a wonderfully amusing, and wholly unreliable narrator.
But even though DAII made significant strides with expanded character relationships (they could now be your friends or rivals), a voiced protagonist whose personality would evolve during the game based on the answers you gave during conversations, and other improvements, the core gameplay felt like a significant step back in many regards.
Reused graphical assets which soon became jarring, bugs, inconsistent lore, action-oriented (and unbalanced) combat, fewer character customization options, obvious plot holes, an overall lack of polish – for many players, the cons far outweighed the pros.
Today, the game is fondly remembered by some, while others consider it a bitter disappointment that made them give up on the series.
Dragon Age – 3 Inquisition
The third installment, Dragon Age: Inquisition, spiced up the formula yet again. Just like every MMO developer wants to make a game that will be the next World of Warcraft (affectionately called a “WoW killer”, the internet is riddled with the digital corpses of MMOs that failed to seize WoW’s crown), so does every RPG maker dream to be the one that will produce a game that surpasses the number of copies Skyrim sold.
After the unsatisfactory reception of DAII – not to mention the controversy over the ending of Mass Effect 3 – BioWare knew they couldn’t afford another flop. That is why they set about to combine the best parts of DA:O and DAII and make the entire game bigger and better than ever before.
The results are a mixed bag. Even though it can’t be denied that a lot of attention has been invested in not repeating the mistakes of the past, it just means that a whole new set of problems had sprung up. The game is polished and undeniably pretty to look at, but the open-world design of the game doesn’t mesh well with BioWare’s focus on story and characters.
In Skyrim (and most other Bethesda games), you could choose to follow the main quest, or you could choose to prance around the countryside, ignoring the main story altogether. That is a big part of the appeal of Skyrim’s design – the game merely offers a suggestion on where you should go, it never punishes you for making your own choices.
That is why such a large cross-section of people enjoy it.
From hardcore role-players, all the way up to casual players that simply want to scale a snow-covered mountain at their own leisurely pace, it has something for everyone to appreciate and enjoy.
It didn’t help matters that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was released several months after Inquisition. Similar in design, if not in execution, TW3 is superior to DA: I in just about every category – from the purely technical aspects to the story and quest design. TW3 overshadowed BioWare in the very things that always made them stand out, namely, in the quality of their writing.
Players looking for an outstanding open-world game that was more story-heavy and complex than Skyrim flocked to TW3, leaving DA: I a distant second choice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHTvGbC0O0E
Still, Inquisition was well received by many fans – old and new alike – and was, more importantly for publisher Electronic Arts, a much-needed solid financial success. Because Inquisition’s story ended with many unanswered questions, fans expected that a sequel would be imminent.
Which brings us to Dragon Age 4.
Dragon Age 4 – Release Date
At the time of writing, a release date for Dragon Age 4 still hasn’t been officially confirmed.
What we do know for sure is that the game had a very tumultuous development process, going through an entire pre-production concept phase before scrapping it to start anew. This early project, codenamed “Joplin,” would have taken place in the Tevinter Imperium – a place that DA players often had dealings with, but up until now didn’t have the opportunity actually to visit in person.
Taking on the rule of a team of spies, this version of the game would have focused on smaller areas with a lot of replayability and different choice and consequence outcomes.
Pre-production continued without major hurdles until EA decided to put more emphasis on the upcoming Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem games. Many Joplin developers were moved to those projects, and it became increasingly more obvious that EA was looking to make all of the games they were publishing follow the “games as a service” model.
Instead of the usual model, where games are typically bought once and played until completion, the GaaS model strives to make games a source of a constant revenue stream through things like season passes, loot boxes, and other microtransactions.
Then, in late 2018, Joplin was effectively rebooted with project Morrison. It is unclear how many of Joplin’s ideas will make their way into Morrison – though, according to one developer, at least some of them will – but for all intents and purposes, Morrison is a completely new and separate game, built from the ground up.
So while we still don’t know the exact release date, it’s a pretty safe bet to say that DA4 won’t be coming in 2020, and probably not even in 2020. Morrison has only recently begun its development cycle, and if DAII has taught us – and BioWare – anything, it is that RPGs of this scope and quality demand at least two to three years of development time and a high-quality gaming rig.
Dragon Age 4 – Teaser Trailer
As you can see, the teaser does a good job of living up to its name – teasing us with promises of what’s to come.
It does give us a probable (and very cool) name of the game – The Dread Wolf Rises, and it ends with a sound clip featuring Solas, hinting that it will be a direct continuation of the story from Inquisition.
Beyond this, all we know for sure is that, based on the image shown in the teaser, the Lyrium Idol artifact from DAII will somehow be important.
Not a lot to go by, but it’s fun to come up with theories on what it all means – who is the mysterious elven figure on the left, and what the ominous creature on the right represents.
All we can do is hope that all of these questions (or at least some) will be answered soon.
Dragon Age 4 – Gameplay Changes
Practically nothing is known about DA4’s gameplay, but if past games are anything to go by, we can probably expect it to be another DA game that’s different from its predecessors.
But what we can do is come up with our own set of changes that we would like to see included in DA4. Basically, our dream Dragon Age game is one that takes all the best elements from the entire series – the role-play options and multiple quest solutions from DA:O, the unorthodox story structure of DAII, and the open-world freedom of DA: I – and refine and take them to a whole new level of quality.
Of course, more weapons, armor, spells, abilities, new (and returning!) companions, and a story that will take us to never before seen parts of Thedas are a given. We also hope that the combat system will provide us with a suitable number of battles that are both challenging and tactical.
Final Words
While it is still far too early to know what sort of game Dragon Age 4 will be, we can be sure of one thing – after the, to put it mildly, lukewarm reception that Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem received, DA4 could very well be BioWare’s last chance to prove that they still have what it takes to deliver a great RPG.
As fan expectations and EA-mandated features collide, the pressure is high. Regardless of EA’s inevitable live service shenanigans, we hope – against all odds – that BioWare’s team will somehow still find a way to make a good and enjoyable single-player experience and that Dragon Age 4 will be the best Dragon Age yet.