Wednesday, May 10th 2023
Dragon Age: Dreadwolf Not Arriving Anytime Soon
Electronic Arts has not included Dragon Age: Dreadwolf in its projected release schedule for the ongoing financial year (2023 to 2024) - industry insiders have previously suggested that the fourth entry in the series was marked down for a later-in-2023 launch. EA's day old financial report details a number of already announced games within a rundown that ends in April 2024. The schedule includes the recently released Star Wars Jedi: Survivor game, as well as Immortal of Aveum, a Lord of the Rings mobile title, F1 23, Madden '24, Sports FC (a FIFA successor) and extra content for Apex Legend and Sims 4. A mystery pair of games are due sometime after April 2024 - a mainline EA Sports title and an unnamed racing sim.
An in-progress Skate sequel joins Dragon Age: Dreadwolf in the far off fields of mid-2024 or beyond. Bioware started to hint about a potential fourth game in late 2018 - with vague promotional material popping up during the autumn Game Awards event. The Edmonton, Canada-based development team has been quietly working on Dragon Age: Dreadwolf since then, with very little preview material issued in the interim - a non-gameplay teaser trailer was shown off way back in 2020. Gary McKay, general manager at BioWare, revealed last autumn that the game was fully playable from beginning to end, and recent information suggests that the Dreadwolf team has expanded in size to include Mass Effect series staffers. A former franchise and Bioware veteran, Mark Darrah, was added on as an external (expert) consultant on the project.
Sources:
PC Gamer, EA Financial Documents
An in-progress Skate sequel joins Dragon Age: Dreadwolf in the far off fields of mid-2024 or beyond. Bioware started to hint about a potential fourth game in late 2018 - with vague promotional material popping up during the autumn Game Awards event. The Edmonton, Canada-based development team has been quietly working on Dragon Age: Dreadwolf since then, with very little preview material issued in the interim - a non-gameplay teaser trailer was shown off way back in 2020. Gary McKay, general manager at BioWare, revealed last autumn that the game was fully playable from beginning to end, and recent information suggests that the Dreadwolf team has expanded in size to include Mass Effect series staffers. A former franchise and Bioware veteran, Mark Darrah, was added on as an external (expert) consultant on the project.
14 Comments on Dragon Age: Dreadwolf Not Arriving Anytime Soon
I for one am looking forward to it, but am in no rush. Hope its a great AAA, which rare these days.
Whole industry is a joke now.
I'd actually argue that Bioware hasn't made anything worth playing since... probably Mass Effect 3(I still haven't gotten around to it), so add at least another year, up to 11.
I'm of the mind that none of the Dragon Age's were very good.
Origin's origin stories were good, the rest of the game the "invading army" waited around while you did whatever you wanted, and the combat in Origins was simply get as many mages as possible, because that's all you really need.
I never played 2 because I didn't enjoy 1 beyond the Origin Stories.
I got Dragon Age: Inquisition for free at some point. I tried it, it wasn't good. It played like a single player MMORPG. Filled with copious amounts of fluff/fetch quests and awful hotkey-based early 00's MMO combat. I honestly knew I wasn't going to enjoy it the second it put me into combat in the tutorial.
But who knows, maybe they'll surprise us with this long delayed wolfthing.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioWare
Fallout 4Mass Effect 3, and yet sometimes I still end up disappointed with any of their recent games.Bioware stopped being a studio long ago, they're just a Business Unit within EA like every other one.
Like many other studios this one was run into the ground by corporate BS. Many many years ago, way prior to Andromeda. EA is happy to rip good teams apart and reorganize left & right, and that results in a motivation & talent exodus. Today many big publishers cant get their connected studios to make good games to save their lives. Why? The best talents leave these horror shows first, and they have done so a long time ago. The same applies to Ubisoft, and to Activision, and to Blizzard, although I think the latter has such strong franchise ties there is some good left - quite simply because it represents Blizzard's livelihood. But then you also see releases like Immortal that directly damage their franchises, and you can see the internal struggle.
The dynamic you get when corporate management invades creative processes and talented professionals is a pretty poisonous one. It cán work, but its a fine line indeed, and more often than not, with a lot of collateral damage along the way to a good product. Its a completely different world from project management in, say, a studio like Larian that was mentioned up here too. Its as simple as something that needs to be enforced (corporate) versus something that truly energizes people and becomes a part of them, their brain child. If a studio/team hasn't got the spirit of the latter, you can safely bet on a weak product, and we see this now daily. Fallout = Bethesda and certainly not EA related.
For me it was ME2, best of trilogy. Andromeda... yeesh. It has the same concept and therefore problems as DA Inquisition. Everything feels interchangeable in that game, you just know what you'll do on each world after you've seen the first, just with a different skin/biome... And the narrative is ridiculous. Game just about ends when you feel like you've played the prologue