Perhaps you remember the Dragon Age series of RPGs. You know, story-heavy single-player, extremely popular experiences? The upcoming Dragon Age sequel wasn’t going to be anything like that. Only, according to reports, now it is. We hope.
The report, coming via Bloomberg, states that this welcome change is because publisher Electronic Arts is backing away from making developer Bioware stick multiplayer into another game. Citing people familiar with the matter, EA’s reportedly permitting “…the developers to remove all planned multiplayer components from the game.”
Saving Dragon Age
And how this change in the RPG series’ fortunes came about is an interesting tale. It’s explained a little differently on the business website but boils down to: executives were shown the performance of both Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, a focused single-player game that managed 10 million players in four months and the ill-fated Anthem, the heavily-online RPG that failed to gain any traction at all since launch. Only one of those games made any kind of money.
It was determined that Bioware, the studio behind Anthem and also noted single-player specialists (you can see how these two don’t really fit together), should probably stick to what they know best and make a Dragon Age that doesn’t include the ability to microtransaction your way to the finish line ahead of all the other randos running around Thedas.
It’s possible that a multiplayer game in this universe might have been awesome but since some of the folks working on the game have described those sections as “Anthem with dragons”, we’re going with probably not awesome. What the final game winds up looking like and when it arrives aren’t known, but it’ll likely be a solitary adventure. With enchantment.
Source: Bloomberg