Summary
It’s an open secret that the development of a fourthDragon Agegamehas been tumultuous. The fact that it’s taken ten years to get a sequel toDragon Age: Inquisitionalone is a clear enough sign that something went wrong behind the scenes. And now,BioWarehas shed some light on what that is.
Speaking toIGN, Dragon Age developers confirm old reports that the fourth game in the series was going to be a multiplayer game. This has since been cancelled, with Dragon Age: The Veilguard being a solely single-player game that can be played offline, but BioWare says that a lot of work went into the multiplayer game that never was.
BioWare Reveals What The Cancelled Dragon Age Live Service Would Have Been Like
Based on interviews with staff, IGN says that the cancelled Dragon Age 4 would have had “repeatable quests, a tech base, and the outline of a story”. On top of having to scale back the story, BioWare was also struggling toaccount for different world states, as it wasn’t clear how a multiplayer game would work if everyone was making different choices.
“Even when we were still more multiplayer-focused, we did still want to tell a story about Solas,” says creative director John Epler. “It just became a lot more challenging because, again, multiplayer games and single-player games have different pressures, have different needs as a project, as a story. And once you add other people’s perspectives into it, it becomes even more challenging.”
Much of this was already known, thanks to a 2019 report fromKotaku, but this is the first time that current BioWare employees have spoken about this cancelled project so openly.
It wasn’t until the pandemic hit that BioWare was allowed to return to Dragon Age’s single-player roots. This meant redoing the combat systems because they’d been overhauled to accommodate other players, not NPCs.
Interstingly, both general manager Gary McKay and game director Corinne Busche add that The Veilguard isn’t a “complete reboot” of the multiplayer game. As Busche explains, the “underlying foundations” are much the same, and the time spent on the scrapped live service helped the developers get used to the Frostbite engine, so it wasn’t a total waste of time. The Veilguard even reuses some of the narrative elements and characters from the multiplayer game, as BioWare had already started casting.
However, BioWare now assures fans that everything is back on track. “[The Veilguard is] not a multiplayer game, it’s not microtransactions, it’s an offline game,” says McKay. “These are all the things that we really wanted to return to what we feel would be a successful game.”
Dragon Age: The Veilguard
WHERE TO PLAY
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the long-awaited fourth game in the fantasy RPG series from BioWare formerly known as Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. A direct sequel to Inquisition, it focuses on red lyrium and Solas, the aforementioned Dread Wolf.
