After a couple of weeks break away from YouTube and social media to focus on my mental health, I’m happy to say that I’ve been feeling a lot better recently and I’m back exclusively creating exciting videos on the next Dragon Age. I just want to throw out a huge thank you to everyone who’s sent me their love and care this past month, from the bottom of my heart - I’ve tremendously appreciated it.
Anyhow, with that said, I’m back - revitalised and pumped up for creating new content, and I’ve got a lot of new videos to throw at you. Today, I’m catching up on all the major Dragon Age 4 news updates throughout the recent months because put me in a dress and call me a Templar - we've got a lot to talk about ranging from new concept art, EA Play Live 2021, motion capture work, development updates during the pandemic, recent job listings and more. So, swinging back into this, as we say in the North of England, let’s crack on, shall we?
EA Play Live 2021 & Summer Game Fest:
If you’re like me, Dragon Age: Dark Fortress has just wrapped up, which offered three months of incredibly tasty lore to digest (so tasty that I’m still working on new videos regarding the latest issues). However, with the ending to that amazing comic-run, you’re probably extremely upset while wondering what’s next for Dragon Age?
Well, most excitingly, it’s June and that means E3 is around the corner - the perfect opportunity for many world premieres and reveals on upcoming games. Hopefully, BioWare has something in store for all of us Dragon Age fanatics. Currently, we have two confirmed events that EA are attending which means BioWare could make an appearance at either event.
Firstly, EA are participating in Summer Game Fest Kickoff, Geoff Keighley’s own presentation that will reveal 12+ world premieres along with updates to upcoming games, very much like Gamescom and The Game Awards. Geoff has confirmed: “There will be big games (shown).”
The show will be around two hours on Thursday, June 10th. It will start at 11:00 am PST, 02:00 pm EST, 07:00 pm BST and 08:00 pm CET. So, mark that date in your calendar. It’s only a week away. We don’t know what EA will reveal, however, they will have some presence at this show. They’re probably going to reveal Battlefield 6 in anticipation to show more at EA Play 2021, but even so, we should all stand ready and tune in to this event just in case BioWare appears.
Furthermore, EA have announced EA Play Live 2021 happening on July 22nd with more info to follow soon. Usually, EA Play Live is in June, the Thursday before E3, however, this year, we’ve got a July date. Throughout the year’s gaming events, EA Play Live is the best place to expect any new Dragon Age trailers and information.
At this moment, EA/BioWare haven’t made any Dragon Age related announcements regarding any new trailer at EA Play Live. However, we did receive twelve seconds of in-engine footage of the next Dragon Age last year, so perhaps we’ll see more this EA Play?
Regardless, if any prior announcements are made, you can bet I’ll cover that in a news video, and if we get any new info, you can bet I’ll break that all down. I will be streaming Summer Games Fest next week and EA Play Live in July. If you'd like to watch these shows with me, tap that notification bell so you don’t miss the second I go live. Even so, mark June 10th and July 22nd down as days to clown for another look at the next Dragon Age.
Grey Warden Concept Art:
In other news, on April 30th, Executive Producer Christian Dailey revealed another brand-new piece of concept art focussed on a relevant faction going forward for the next Dragon Age. He tweeted: “Is this the right amount of pointy and gray?” Followed up with a new, stunning Grey Warden concept piece.
This imposing warrior Grey Warden is showing off their new stripes whilst in some kind of mountain-desert terrain. I’m not going to spend too much time breaking down this concept art, like I have the others, because I feel like this piece is a lot more straightforward and self explanatory. However, there are a few key things I’ve noticed.
This Warden is wearing a new type of Grey Warden heavy armour, I’ve noticed a few similarities with the Warden Commander armor set in Dragon Age: Origins, but even so, there are many significant changes with this concept Warden. This new armour set is very bulky and pointy.
While blue and gray are still the primary colours of this Warden, the gold accents in the armour and weapons add a regal aesthetic to this Warden. Could they be someone of significance? Or is this the Grey Warden’s style in the Northern regions of Thedas?
Their sword and shield are magnificently designed - the attention to detail is beautiful. Not to mention, their cloak is fantastic. Like the witch hat in the Minrathous concept piece, I'm in love with this cloak design. I think cloaks and capes like this are a much-needed attire in the next Dragon Age. Though I can imagine a lot of clipping issues with weapons.
The Griffon silhouette design only proves further that this character is, indeed, representing the Grey Wardens. I get the impression that this Warden is heroic, intimidating and strong, those are the main moods I feel from this piece. Overall, this Warden looks like a hero, standing tall and proud, ready to face as many darkspawn as they can.
Considering this character is, indeed, a Grey Warden, it confirms my suspicions about the figures shown in the Game Awards trailer.
Bear with me for this, but we’ve had three faction-based concept art character pieces this year already - adding to this - the Game Awards 2020 trailer revealed four enigmatic figures representing the factions our new hero will witness in the next game. Also, the four Dragon Age Day short stories had plots revolving around four different factions which seem to be the same as the figures in the Game Awards trailer and these concept art pieces. It’s all tied together.
These factions are: The Grey Wardens, The Executors, an unknown Tevinter anti-slavery movement and The Antivan Crows. It seems that each faction is going to have a lot of significance in the next Dragon Age’s narrative.
So far, based on concept art, The Executor seemed to show off a ranged-rogue hybrid class, the Tevinter anti-slavery movement member is a mage class, and this Grey Warden is a sword and shield warrior class.
Given these connections and ties, the next, faction-based concept art piece is most likely going to be an Antivan Crow, dual-wielding rogue. Place your bets. Even so, this is just fun speculation from myself, I do feel like I am connecting a few dots though between the trailers, the short stories and the recent concept pieces. What do you think about these faction ties? Are they each representing the same factions? What factions do you think they are in your opinion?
Dragon Age 4 Mocap/Scylla Costa Con:
Moving on to a huge update, Chief Producer Scylla (See-La) Costa discussed the challenges of the next Dragon Age’s production during the pandemic at Brazil’s Independent Games Festival.
The talk was fortunately uploaded at a later date with an English dubbed speaker, if you’d like to watch it for yourself, I’ll have a link down below, however, you don’t have to because I’ve swept through it all and wrote down the main takeaways from Scylla’s talk. So, without further ado.
Scylla Costa introduced himself as one of the heads of the next Dragon Age project. Scylla and another producer are directly under Executive Producer Christian Dailey. He opened up the talk revealing the crash course timeline of BioWare’s development cycle with regards to the next Dragon Age’s production.
Pre-Production:
The first stage of game development is pre-production. Within BioWare, the pre-production stages of any project can have a size between 5, 30 and 60 people. In this early stage, core concepts, prototypes and system developments are heavily iterated on. Considering BioWare creates story-driven games, plenty of time is spent on creating many tools for the game’s narrative. Other focuses during this stage are on the game’s key features, as well as market research.
Production:
The next Dragon Age is currently in its production stages - this is the stage after pre-production where the team goes through the whole development of content and features. At this point, the team has the majority of the game’s systems in place, some new systems may be created with the implementation of newer features. The team also starts growing tremendously bigger as the development progresses.
Alpha:
After the production stages, Dragon Age 4 will go on to its Alpha stages. Within this stage, the game’s systems should all be running and working and the game’s features should be fully implemented. Technical tests are then assessed and lots of QA players test and play the game.
Beta:
The stage after Alpha is the Beta stage. At this point, the game should have its entire content added. The team will then focus on balancing the game. Many more tests are run in order to further test the balance. Final tweaks are also made.
Launch:
After Beta, it’s the launch stage where the team creates something known as the War Room. Everyone in every department comes together once a day to the meeting room where every single existing issue is brought up, then those issues are prioritised on what needs to be done depending on importance leading up to launch day.
Patch:
After the game has shipped, the focus is on patching the game. Day zero patches with more tweaks and fixes to follow.
DLC:
The final stage of BioWare’s development cycle is the new content stage with the creation of downloadable content post-launch.
This cycle offers a very thorough perspective on the next Dragon Age’s production stages and how far into development it actually is.
Scylla moved on and explored the next game’s production at the height of the pandemic. On the 12th March, 2020, BioWare held a team meeting reviewing the story for the new Dragon Age. Scylla said that everyone was very excited, however, on the evening of that day, an EA CEO emailed each developer stating that due to the pandemic, everyone was to start working remotely.
Given this overnight mandate, less than 50% of the devs were not ready to work from home straight away due to many issues like not having a VPN. Scylla and his team started working on short-term changes that were needed - their top priority was to take care of the developers, reviewing each situation on a case-by-case basis, and supporting the needs of each person.
A lot of working hours were made flexible, as well as deadlines. This support is still strong today for each developer. There was a lot of work looking at the individual team’s need for certain gear and equipment, ensuring that each developer had the required kit for working remotely.
Every three months, there was a sum of money that was given so the team’s could buy specific developers kit like new mice, keyboards, microphones, webcams, etc.
Regarding mid and long term changes. Scylla said they had to look at them from 2 perspectives, the change in personal and professional environments.
As an example of a change in personal environments, Scylla showed his FitBit stats that drastically dipped once the team had started working from home, the number of steps he’d previously taken when working in the office were halved because of working remotely. This had an effect on his productivity as he then got a kidney stone.
Each of the developers were going through similar situations and felt like they needed to adapt to a new routine in order to feel more productive. Scylla, in particular, started getting dressed at the same time, planned meetings not through lunch, got a standing desk and a treadmill, etc. All with the motive to get more active. Each developer built their own routine, ensuring they were going for a walk, or getting a new hobby to remain active, as a result, the developers became more productive when working.
On the professional side, the team had to improve the remote delivery of builds. When working from home, developers need a VPN so they can download builds. make their changes to the game and then upload the updated build to the server. To help each developer access the build, Scylla and his team worked with new infrastructure and found a way for each developer to remotely access the console build-kit in the BioWare offices via streaming methods.
The team also worked on adapting new channels of communication. Scylla revealed a shot of a few developers storyboarding the narrative before motion capture implementation to reflect the draft that quickly illustrates the intent of the scene.
Before the pandemic, the team could sit in the meeting room and discuss things with ease, however, during the pandemic, BioWare had to adapt to new channels of communication like Zoom meetings and re-analysing their Slack server.
Another issue that the team had to face was the amount of meetings they needed to have while working remotely. Essentially, any conversation within the team became a meeting because of the uncertainty of the pandemic. At one point, there were so many meetings throughout the days that not much time was dedicated to production.
To overcome this, the team questioned which meetings should take priority, which conversations should be taken to Slack instead. They wrote meeting notes for anyone who didn’t need to be in said meeting, but wanted to know what was discussed. With these guidelines in place, the number of meetings decreased and the production improved significantly.
From a content point of view, the most difficult thing about the pandemic was adapting performance and motion capture. Previously, BioWare hired actors to fill out scenes for the next Dragon Age for animation and scene frameworks. The pandemic brought great limitations to what BioWare could and couldn’t do. As a fix, the mocap actors wore masks and socially distanced themselves for their own safety, no other crew members were on scene, and the directors were guiding the actors through a Zoom call.
Scylla shared that these adaptations made the work harder, however, the team managed to do it. When it was once said to be impossible to do things like mocap remotely, the team have strived through challenges like this and they’ve made them possible - which is honestly inspiring.
Going forward for the future development of the next Dragon Age, depending on each developer's roles, some of them may continue working from home, while some slowly return to work at the offices. During the pandemic, BioWare began hiring other developers outside of the Edmonton and Austin studios, because of this, the team gained more talent that they wouldn’t have been able to before without those developers relocating. They’re going to continue doing this.
In summary, Scylla ended the talk with answering a few questions. As a big fan of Dragon Age, he’s really excited for the next game, Scylla believes they have the opportunity to launch the best story with Dragon Age 4. The characters are amazing and Scylla is dying to say more, but he can’t.
And on that exciting notion, these are the main takeaways from Scylla Costa’s talk which was exceedingly insightful on Dragon Age’s current production. I’m so thankful Scylla did this talk and that it was dubbed for English speakers. Huge heaps of thanks from myself!
Recent Staff Departures:
Following that, we’ve got a bit of sad news to divulge, a few key staff members have recently departed from the Dragon Age team.
At the end of March, 14-year Narrative Quality Designer Arone Le Bray left BioWare, seeking a change. Arone is now a Principal Narrative Designer at The Chinese Room - I wish him all the best on his future endeavours. I really enjoyed Arone’s short story in Tevinter Nights, he wrote “An Old Crow’s Old Tricks” - and with that as an example of his work, BioWare are surely at a loss without him.
I wonder if the main story and narrative beats have been fairly completed to a point where Arone felt like he could leave without disturbing the process. It's widely known that within BioWare, the writing team finishes first, while the main production teams crack on with the main development of the game. For example, David Gaider has shared in the past that the writing teams will be creating codex entries and banter scenes after the main narrative has been drafted, while the other production teams begin to pick up the pace.
Even so, it’s always sad when a veteran leaves BioWare, however, I’m wishing Arone well for his future.
In addition, at the start of May, Audio Artist Presley Hynes left BioWare. She said that it’s been bittersweet, to say the least. Presley is now a Sound Designer at Sony, which is awesome!
I am a little bit more saddened with Presley’s departure because we’re mutuals on Twitter and she’s always been incredibly kind to me, even so, I am absolutely wishing her well at Sony and hope she’s having a great time working there.
BioWare Job Listings:
On the flipside of the recent departures... BioWare Edmonton are currently hiring a lot of production-related job positions, coinciding with Scylla’s take on the current development stages of the next Dragon Age.
There’s a job position for a Senior Gameplay Designer for the next Dragon Age. This listing, in particular, hints at a few gameplay indicators that are being iterated on.
As a TLDR: The ideal candidate for this Designer role would be responsible for developing, and tuning the overall game feel of the Character, Camera, and Controls. They would take ownership of the Camera system and control set for a Next-Gen Action RPG.
As well as work with the animators, engineers, and designers to ensure responsive character movement, intuitive controls, and immersive gameplay that is dynamic and fun.
They’d take ownership of the design and implementation of core player character mechanics, controls, and camera. This Designer would set up and tune the final game cameras and controls. They’d meet with the game design team to discuss progress, tackle setbacks, find solutions, share experience, provide and implement feedback, etc.
Very interesting stuff that offers a few indicators for the next Dragon Age’s gameplay and feel. If anyone is up for this job position, or any others at BioWare, I’ll post the link to BioWare’s hiring page in the description:
2023 Release Window:
And the final story I have for you is more of an update than anything. As we already know, the next Dragon Age has been planned with a release window anytime after April 2022. We’ve known this since EA’s 2019 October earnings call, when EA CFO Blake Jorgensen said that the next Dragon Age will come after fiscal 2022.
In the middle of May 2021, EA had another earnings call focusing on the immediate future of 2022 with titles like Battlefield, Apex Legends and EA Sports outlined. There was no word on the next Dragon Age, other than BioWare have a new title coming out in the future.
So, considering the next Dragon Age hasn’t been outlined in this earnings call focussing on 2022 game releases - this clarifies that the next game will not be releasing next year, and will most likely be a 2023+ release. While there was hope for potentially releasing after April, 2022, that’s certainly not the case anymore.
Like I said, the majority of us knew this, but for the outliers watching this, don’t expect the next Dragon Age to release next year. We’re just going to have to be patient and allow the developers time to craft the best experiences possible without crunching. I think I speak for us all when I say, we don’t want a Dragon Age title created from crunch and awful working conditions, we’d like the next game to have a happy working environment and release when it's ready - in BioWare’s time and no one else's.
In any event, I’m here for the long haul, so you’re already in the right place as we communally wait and prepare for the next Dragon Age. Hopefully, we’ll see another trailer soon, and we can have many more reasons to be excited about the future of our favourite game franchise.
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