Your opinion of Dragon Age 4 releasing in late 2022 (possibly early 2023)

Mixed - obviously I'm dissapointed I don't get to play it sooner, but if thats how long it takes - then thats how long it takes. It should be great, I'll keep looking forward to it, afterall I loved the first three and have no reason to think I won't love the fourth.

I'll just keep doing what I"ve been doing - playing the previous games, reading meta and side content, and running my dragon age TTrpg until it gets here. Even if the pessimists on the forum are right and da4 ends up being terrible and not something I think is worth buying, I still just keep playing the other games and ttrpg. At this point bioware/ea don't have the power to ruin Dragon age for me, they can only affect whether or not they continue to get money from me.

I'd say I'm cautiously optimistic, really, DA4 stands the best chance of avoiding some form of development hell out of any game they've released since DAO, between having a team with experience with the franchise, a codebase to work off of, an idea of where they're going, and enough time to work on it, hopefully without crunch. It's always possible that it'll get squandered, but at the very least the creative leads are competent and they have some sense of direction. Hopefully they can avoid the severe internal mismanagement problems and the special hell that was MEA and Anthem's dev cycles is fresh enough on their memory they avoid the same mistakes.

BioWare makes great games when rushed...think of what will happen when they have the proper amount of time.

(At least that's the theory )

As much sensationalism is given when a high profile employee leaves BioWare, they have a lot of the original staff.  Back when they were working on Inquisition I think it was stated that 75% to 80% of the staff that worked on Jade Empire was on the team working on Inquisition.  Considering the level of turnover in the industry that number still sounds impressive.

While true right now, Spiders and Obsidian are close to that. Obsidian, especially, now with Microsoft's backing, is in a very competitive spot to do so, going forward. And Greedfall's relative success, both commercially and critically, shows the studio is steadily improving. It may not be today and it may not be tomorrow for Spiders, but eventually and possibly sooner than ME5, they will encroach on Bioware's territory, the way things are headed.


Still in pre-production and a whole 9 months after the release of Anthem, so that is a little concerning. But ... they've got a long way ahead of them till release. Expect things to ramp up after March 2020. I won't be surprised of DA4 will have a minor, if at all, presence in EA PLAY 2020. Depending on the performance of the Anthem relaunch, Bioware may have even less of a time slot than 2019's, otherwise it will mostly be Anthem. But that is way too far ahead to talk about now and production may go much faster and better, by then, so who knows?

Well there are some reasonable signs to be positive on that front at least. From Schreier’s article, we know that Mark Darrah was a huge help in forcing the Anthem leads to be decisive and push development forward when he was transferred to the project in the last year of release. It was too late to save Anthem completely without a big delay, but in any case it seems Darrah learned from the mess of Inquisition’s development cycle. So with him deeply involved with DA4, I’m hopeful they won’t get bogged down with indecision like the Anthem and Andromeda teams did.

I'm very disappointed that we'll have to wait so long for DA 4. It makes me hanker for the quick turnaround of DA 2, even if that game was a bit rough and ready!
Bioware does seem prone to development delays when projects suddenly get huge changes a year or two into them. Other on this forum have mentioned that such an issue afflicted both ME:A and Anthem, as well as DA4, of course. Those of us with long memories will also recall that the DA team spent around a year developing the lost expansion 'DA: Exalted March', after DA 2. Though some of the background work was used in DA:I, there is no doubt that it delayed that game too.
Oh, how I miss the expansions! I have very fond memories of DA: Awakening.

From the most recent products from both companies...not really.

Spiders has the companion angle more or less down...but their take on RP made me so mad I rage quit the let's play I was watching.

And Outer Worlds...first person voiceless RPG with a CC and no companions that I saw so far? No thanks.

Only company that seems interested in being in shouting distance of bio right now is Ubisoft. Still lagging behind but A. They are the closest and B. Seem like they are honestly trying to improve.

As for the issue when bio has left pre pod...well they also had to wait for the move more then likely before getting everything started, at least that's the smart play. Now that that's out of the way they are either in production or soon will be.

Outer Worlds absolutely has companions, and some very good ones at that. Frankly I slightly prefer Obsidian’s output to Bioware’s, they’re better at implementing RP, their writing is generally better imo, and they’re lagging only slightly behind on the companion front, although they’ve been pretty vocal about disliking writing romances, so that’s one element which they’re not competing with BioWare on. But overall, they’re really doing very similar things to BioWare, just on a AA level with a more classic cRPG mindset. And the production values will likely go significantly up due to Microsoft funding.

Now, I’m not prophesying that they’re necessarily going to edge out Bioware, but they definitely occupy a similar niche and are competitors, despite cosmetic differences between the presentation of their games.

How would that have worked?