Once upon a time, BioWare was counted as one of the creative developers in RPG genre, with their great ideas in creating deep gameplay mechanics along with engaging stories, but the team’s glorious days have come to an end since they released Mass Effect: Andromeda with tons of major issues that never was able to revive the memories players have had with Captain Shepard’s trilogy. The situation became worse for the studio with the release of Anthem, which received more negative reviews than Andromeda and pushed BioWare on the ropes. Now, Dragon Age 4 could be either the studio’s savior, or its last straw.
Dragon Age 4 was officially revealed with a short teaser at The Game Awards 2018, with no determined title, though its codename is Morrison. According to the information provided by Kotaku, development process for Dragon Age 4 has been started from the time that BioWare finished work on the last DLC of Dragon Age Inquisition, but the question is why we haven’t seen any anything about it so far? Well, the answer is directly related to Andromeda, Anthem and EA.
First of all, when BioWare was done with Dragon Age Inquisition, the team divided into two groups, with one of them working on Mass Effect: Andromeda and the other group to develop Dragon Age 4 with the codename of Joplin. In 2016, while Dragon Age developers, leading by Mark Darrah and Mike Laidlaw, were doing some great stuff with the game, they got pushed to leave their own project for a short period and work with the other group on Mass Effect: Andromeda. After doing so, Dragon Age 4 development process has been continued but in late 2017 it got interrupted again.
With Casey Hudson returning to the studio, BioWare and EA came to an agreement in stopping the work on Joplin and moving the whole team toward Anthem, and they did it, but not exactly in this way. While a large amount of the developers started to cultivate Anthem, a small group has been divided to work on Dragon Age 4 with the new codename of Morrison. Changing the codename means that the game won’t be similar to what Joplin was, although it may use some the previous game’s ideas, but as the source claims, Morrison contains more online features than Joplin.
With all the information above, Morrison is the game that we are awaiting for and its like a last chance for BioWare to rise once again and reach the standards that the studio is known for. Dragon Age 4 has no release date nor target platforms and it is possibly going to be a next-gen title.
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