Hitting you with a major Dragon Age 4 news update regarding the current development of the game according to Casey Hudson, the general manager of BioWare. Jumping straight into this like Fenris killing a bunch of evil magisters!
In a recent blog post on BioWare's website, Casey Hudson posted a summer update sharing some of the things the studio has been up to. Mentioning Anthem, and it's latest Cataclysm event, and Star Wars: The Old Republic, with a DLC set to launch this Fall.
However, the piece of cake here is the "other stuff going on" at BioWare, Casey says as followed:
"We have several other big projects in the works. I wish I could tell you more about them, but they’re mostly super-secret right now. I can say however that one of our projects has a large and growing team in Edmonton working through pre-production, and based on the progress I’m seeing, I can confirm that indeed the Dread Wolf rises."
Before we delve straight into the Dragon Age 4 hot takes, lets talk about those "several other big projects in the works", surely one of them has to be Mass Effect 4 right? Based on the news in April, we know the series is "warming back up" and Casey Hudson is super excited to share more on possible Mass Effect games.
So Mass Effect must be among other games at BioWare that are currently in the works, same as Dragon Age 4, other than those two franchises, potentially BioWare could be working on something Star Wars related considering their history with creating truly amazing games with the Old Republic franchise.
As we understand at the moment, BioWare are currently working on several projects, and the largest of these right now is Dragon Age 4 as it's accordingly working through it's pre-production stages, seemingly looking good as Casey indicates.
Although this is great news, and I've seen plenty of mainstream outlets coming out of the woodwork and actually declaring that Dragon Age 4 seems like it's going to be alright then. The hitch for the fans is, I guess we all thought the game was coming sooner, I mean, I've extensively reported on plenty of news pieces that indicated the game was in deep development stages, and pre-production seemed complete.
We had Fernando Melo depart the company just last month, his role within the studio was quintessential to the pre-production stages, he spoke on leaving at the perfect time that would best for him and the development of Dragon Age 4. Maybe, they're nearing the end of pre-production?
I'm curious how much of the game has actually been developed. You see, pre-production is the planning phase of the project where developers focus on concept development along with the writing of initial design documents. Game design documents have to be precise and descriptive, outlining the work ahead.
Key processes during the pre-production stages include:
Concept Art
Storyboarding
Level Design
Mechanic Design
Internal Marketing
Interestingly, BioWare are hiring many new job hires that relate to pre-production stages like concept artist, animation manager, game designer and many other design focused jobs. So it certainly seems like these core stages are currently crafting away at BioWare, with project prototyping and working on the basic mechanics.
We found out back in April that Dragon Age 4 will use Anthem's codebase, which will ease elements of the development process because the foundation have already been created. At the point, we assumed the game had been in deep development, however, what if prototyping, coding and many of the essential pre-production stages were just beginning at that point.
Project Joplin was scrapped in 2017, with a lot of the production reworked into Project Morrison, have the studio been in pre-production for two years?
As we know, the Frostbite engine has been a nightmare for BioWare in the past, so if have spent two years on just crafting the essentials of Dragon Age 4, mastering the Frostbite engine and laying the groundwork, then I have no bother waiting until this game is perfect.
As we know, both Anthem and Andromeda needed way more time in it's vital early stages. So, here's hoping Dragon Age 4 will have that. The only thing we need is for EA to not press BioWare into a ridiculous deadline, so the developers can create this game at their own pace.
Of course, if Dragon Age 4 is still in the pre-production stages, then that means the release window is going to be further than we thought. Judging by previous Casey Hudson statements, it was assumed Dragon Age 4 would have a 2021 - 2022 release window.
Based on the current development now, I'd say 2023 - 2024, on top of that, BioWare generally start to market their games two years before release, so we could be seeing Dragon Age 4 at bear minimum in 2021/2022?
Even though it's a longer wait, I do see this as a good thing, more time spent on Dragon Age 4, the better the game will be, period.
Wrapping up, with the potential release window in mind - do you think they revealed the game teaser too early? A 2018 teaser trailer for a game coming out in hypothetically 2024, that's six year wait from the first trailer, not to mention ten years since the previous Dragon Age game.