Dragon Age The Veilguard Criticism Thread (formerly Skepticism Thread) [Spoilers]

This will be the last Dragon Age game. This can be interpreted in a few ways.

That is one possibility, though not the only interpretation. Like, if it does really bad, it'll probably be the last Dragon Age.
But also, there's the decreasing importance of Dragons in the gameplay. Not that you don't fight Dragons, but they're not as important to the central plot and, therefore, as implemented in Inquisition, more of a side thing, than an important narrative piece. Not to the extent of the corrupted dragon of Origins. Solas is a wold and doesn't have pet dragons for us to fight, for example.
It could also mean that the next game will be set hundreds of years in the future and thus the Dragon Age will have ended, so it will be named after the new age.
Perhaps they want to give greater emphasis to THEDAS as a setting, more than Dragon Age itself.
I don't know yet, but it doesn't necessarily mean negative, although it is a possibility that the franchise ends with Dread Wolf.

Personally, I think the interpretation of "they just want to get away from dragons" to be the most plausible. I think they don't like the mechanic very much and since they are not really plot relevant, they don't want to have a game called "Dragon Age" without dragons. Wasn't there an article how Inquisition almost didn't have dragons, at all? I think they just don't want to have dragons, at all and don't to advertise the games as such. That's how I see it.

Yep, from what I recall they didn't have a name for the game, everyone put in a suggestion and Dragon Age was the best they could come up with. Then suddenly someone realised that you can't call a game Dragon Age and then have no dragons, which is when the Old God went from being a creature that looked like a demon with multiple limbs (hence being known as an Arch-demon) to a corrupted dragon. Which is why there is so much iconography in DAO that people have speculated about as being the Old Gods but found in elven settlements, thus clearly connecting the two, but was pretty much redundant graphics really. Whether they will ever get back to reconciling the Old Gods to the original concept remains to be seen.

I still wonder if Solas is going to be allowed to succeed in some way, so the setting is fundamentally altered and thus will begin a new age both in universe and when it comes to future games. Either that or what we need to do to stop him also finally destroys all the dragons.

By next game you mean DA4 or the one after it? Because if someone looking to see Dragons in DA4 went in and found none, that would have been a big whoopsie. Like, I can understand them not changing the title for this game, since Solas is there so some link would have to be in the title. But I supposed, after that, it's free game. We'll see how and if that really changes, or if it proves too big a change.

Actually, this one is DICE LA, well, formely DICE LA, now what was it. Ripple Effect. It was renamed to Ripple Effect and they were the lead developers of this Battlefield, under Zampella's supervision. I bet that didn't do him any favours, though.

No, they haven't. Well, it might be, depends, but they haven't. What is being referred is more complicated than "shelving the franchise". It basically boils down to implementation of Dragons in the games, in terms of lore/gameplay/story. You can't go out and kill 150 dragons one game and do that for every game, for example.

I understand, but a Dragon Age game without Dragons, might as well be a rock paper scissors game called Mass Effect.

Yet oddly enough that is precisely why the Arch-demon ended up being a dragon instead of an actual demon, because someone at Bioware realised they were calling it Dragon Age and yet there were no dragons. I assume that Flemeth turning into a dragon and the dragon at Haven only came about as a result of the name as well, plus needing to write a codex explaining exactly why the Divine decided to call it that in the first place, although that was a prediction of it being a time of violence and upheaval which she assumed because of the "sign" of a dragon appearing in southern Thedas, not a prediction of a wholesale return of dragons. So essentially they came up with the name of the game first and then added in the dragons to justify the name.

Obviously Dragon Age is a recognisable name of the franchise now unless the events of DA4 change the setting so drastically that they could justify doing a re-brand for the sequel. However, if DA4 is a major success they are unlikely to want to do that. In any case, we are only less than half way through the Dragon age, so unless they were intending doing a major jump in time between games, there is still plenty of scope for them to continue with stories set within the current age, which fits the brand.

No, Fade Age is what it will be called if Solas succeeds in dropping the Veil. Also, currently, it would have to be the Black City because the last time it was golden was at least 1200 years ago, or possibly even longer if Corypheus is to be believed.