The upcoming console generation is perfect for a remake/remaster

They didn't lose any money. The game might not have earned as much as they hoped but it did make money. That $110m figure is from the first quarter of the game being on sale. In March when it was released it was the third best selling game of the month. It was in top 10 of the best selling games of the year for months until the Holiday 2017 games knocked it out. It's a complete myth that the game lost money. And don't forget that there are microtransactions in the game. And despite how people say they hate them enough people with deep wallets use them. 

Sure for CoD they might have lost some but that's because there are just so many shooters out there. Apex, Valorant and others. There is a lot of competition in the field but they are not losing money. Same goes for Fallout 76. See the bosses of corporations and their financial people see games/products that underperform as if they are losing money. It's a stupid way to look at things but if a game/studio does not make X amount of times more money than is being spent on it then it's a loser. Same in the film industry, movies that don't make double/triple the money that is invested in them are seen as failures especially when they are big budget movies. It also gets worse when you start realising that the games and movies made by the large corporations that have more than one studio end up paying some of that development money back to themselves because they "hire" services done by a different internal studio. 

Why I think Dragon Age will be a hit? Because it doesn't seem like there are any other traditional fantasy rpg's that would be coming out at the same time. We know Baldurs Gate 3 is closer to us and it's a cRPG, TES7 is who knows when, could be next year could be ten years from now. CDPR is making Cyberpunk and is unlikely to churn out a game faster than Bioware is going to make DA4. It will look pretty, it will most likely be some kind of similar gameplay to DAI and it's going to be one of the few western RPG's out. It's not going to be this year since I doubt Bioware wants to fight with Ubisoft for the action/rpg slot on the PS5 launch title lineup but it could be next year. 

It did. It's been made plainly obvious to me, that Andromeda missed something very vital financially, as a goal, on launch even, that made EA pull back from the title almost immediately, on release. From the Schreier article and the financial reports it can, almost, be verified. While Andromeda's revenue wasn't ... bad, it also wasn't good enough, in the timeframe it mattered. From a point on, retailers stop ordering in new copies of games, old copies are left in bargain bins and sold for ridiculously low prices and the only available revenue is either online retailers or digital. In both cases, the games end up severely discounted, further slowing down the RoI. Also, MTX was worse than Anthem's reported $3 million.


And EA is no different than that. In fact, Apex is an EA game.


Agreed.


Yes, because the fastest the RoI is, the better and no movie makes that much money after it has left the cinema. Not to my knowledge, at least and I would love to know if its otherwise. And I don't mean an exception to the rule. Like "Little Women" sold gangbusters in Blu-Ray and VoD, unlike its cinema release. That's not what I am looking for.


Well, technically true.


I don't think there's much of a thirst for traditional fantasy RPGs. I mean, we even had the GoT craze in full swing, back in 2014, but Inquisition didn't sell nearly close to rival the GoT crowd in population. There is exactly 1 fantasy RPG that sold really well last gen and it was The Witcher 3. And apparently, thanks to the TV show, now it's made double what it had a few years back. I really don't see DA4 matching that, after 6 years of absence, so far, but closer to 9, before it to make a comeback. Especially as a finale to a quadrilogy that will have gone on for 14 years and whose first two entries came out 2 years apart, one of which was great, one damaged the brand considerably, one was underwhelming, in terms of sales and mindshare and the next one will have to carry through the problems of Bioware's last two mishaps. If it will be a financial success, I am going to be really, really impressed.


It'll sell well to Larian fans. I've no interest in it and I've seen enough of it to not care.


It's going to be several years after Starfield. At least Pete Hines said so.


Pre-production on The Witcher 4 is already happening. Geralt will not be the protagonist this time around, or so I am told. I don't know how well the new Witcher will compare, but I have low expectations.


I will be surprised if DA4 comes out sooner than 2023.

AFAIK Dragon Age has historically sold better than Mass Effect.

Which is strange given the latter is way more embedded in the zeitgeist but hey ho.

Mass Effect 2 sold better than DA2 and about as well as DA:O, ME3 is the best selling Bioware game, still. Inquisition didn't do nearly as well as people think it did. And to also make a point, ME1 released only on 360 on launch, followed on PC a year later, ME2 saw a limited release on 360 and PC, but still no PS3, until a small time before ME3. All DA games have seen universal platform releases. ME3 is the only Bioware game to have been ported on the Wii U, but that was just silly and it sold terribly, if I recall. Inquisition is the only game to have launched on 5 platforms; PC, PS3, PS4, XBOX 360 and XBONE.

I don't see DA selling better than ME in any capacity.

I am not seeing it, auspicious journalist man, that in no way, shape or form resembles the man of steel.

Yes!!!!

How viable is this fanbase? How invested are they to ME? What's stopping them from dropping ME for the next thing? What if they decide that they no longer want to buy to play a MTX game and instead go for a F2P one? Or go for any of the other MP clones out there? Where were they when Andromeda released? Why was that game shelved, when ME3 MP was supported with content for years to come? Evidence points to this segment not being ME's bailout customer base.

I’d say not very, since other IP’s offer a more robust multiplayer experience and there’s a lot more out there now. Destiny 2 might be more someone’s speed for a purely multiplayer experience, considering it’s free to play and includes PvP for anyone interested. Even Warframe has vastly improved. Tacked-on multiplayer is only really good to get some extra revenue out of people at least a bit invested in the entire game. Most just in it for that extra bit of content probably won’t stick around now. 

And how much time was wasted with the generated planet thing Bioware was trying? They completed MEA in about 18-24 months, did they not? So they wasted about 3 years? How different would the game be if they managed the time they had better?

Andromeda is the American Pie: Naked Mile of the series.

I think it was 18 months. They just chased dreams for too many years trying to make a thing that didn't work and wouldn't work. I remember posting that if MEA was like DAI but Mass Effect I would be satisfied. Instead they made it worse. Even things like character creator which surely they could have copied from the DAI they made a new thing. It was hinted at that the Montreal team was butting heads with the main Bioware office all throughout production. They should have recongised the scope of the game and worked on that rather than trying to make that procedural generation thing. I remember watching one of those first trailers and thinking that it would be great if they can make these things but I wasn't sold on their ability to do so. Parts of the game are left unfinished. I think Montreal wanted too much to make Mass Effect their own thing, too much into trying to make it "fresh". But it also seems that the main Bioware team was also guilty of the same thing with Anthem. They spent too much time trying out new things and then based the final design on a vertical slice shown to Soderlund who thought it was cool. A lot of us thought it would be a clone of Destiny/Warframe with a twist. The twist ended up that it was an incredibly bad clone. 

The reason why I think a remaster is going to happen is that Bioware has traditionally put new ME games out at the time that the article says it will happen and that EA's catalog of games coming out next year is not exactly full. They have a couple of strategy games, Need for Speed, their yearly sports titles and a probable Star Wars game. New Battlefield us unlikely to happen until the end of 2021 at the earliest and so they need a financial pick me up in the first quarter. Considering their current and upcoming lineup developing a totally new game that would give the boost required is unlikely. So is a major revamp of Anthem, it just won't make it in time. So a remaster of OT, released as part of their strategy to rebuild favour for Bioware is a business decision I see them making. And then Dragon Age 4 is supposed to arrive somewhere between 2021 and 2023( I think it's either going to be holiday 2021 or holiday 2022) and then Mass Effect game a couple of years after DA4. Getting back into the Tick-Tock style game release schedule they had with DA and ME before MEA. 4 years in between each game in franchise but 2 years between the games of the different franchises. Obviously that is just an assumption made on what they have done previously and seeing what EA likes to do with their game release schedules. 

Then eventually they could even do an Andromeda 2 if DA4 and ME4 do well enough. 

They could do a Hackett ending. It's not a bad way to avoid the whole "but it's not MY ending" thing that would spark if they went for one of the coloured ones but it would still be basically a revised Red ending. Because it just makes the most sense. I can see them making ME4 being about fighting remnants of the reapers along with some new threat that isn't so galaxy ending.