Bloomberg: Dragon Age 4 Will Now Be A SP (Non-LS) Game

That has more to do with general creative freedom and MO within Bioware being wrestled and less to do with GaaS specifically. Bioware is being more tightly controlled by EA compared to before. Perhaps this has more to do with "rogue incidents" like the DA4 teaser in the 2018 VGAs or the LE, which were rogue and unauthorized by EA projects. Or even not so much the MP aspect of Live Service, but the MTX aspect of it. As I've said, control was wrestled out. But what that means, I don't have specifics.


Exactly. Companies, like EA, are not big at leaving money on the table. They want the maximum amount of money, per title and more money with each new title. Good point.

Perhaps they needed some replication of their own. SONY have their own platform. It makes sense for them. And as an embedded store on their platform, they get revenue out of all purchases through that. They can afford it. Perhaps EA needed a Live Service model that can work (Apex Legends), a Live Service Model that proved a failure (Battlefront 2, Battlefield V, Anthem) and data as to what didn't work about them and a SP game (Fallen Order) that proved very profitable. Which is a lot of time spent trying to create data to prove they were chasing ghosts all along.

Yeah so long as SP and MP ae rkept as seperate modes I don't mind i teither a sI don't reall ytouch MP. It was a mistak eto do that wit hME3 I think. I' mnot saying MP can' tb efun as I have tried a few bronze matches on ME3 and MEA and yeah I've had on eor 2 fun moments thoug hI' mno tvery good at it. Usuall yspeaking though I us ethe N7HQ site to raise my galactic readinesss when playin gthe trilogy. In fact been usin g i tto raise it up again now as I'm doing a trilogy runb as I'm about half wa ythrough ME1. They did a tleast ge ttha tright in DAI and MEA. TBH I get moer of a kick out of watching other people play MP and get instakilled by the Ascendants and Fiends than playing it myself. Kind of glad tha tfor the most part in the SP you mostly really only hav eto deal with instakill  enemies one at a time a sthey can be problematic to quote our dear friend Mordin. There aer occasions wher yes you do have to taske on moe rfor certain quests but when jus tgeneral running around you rarely have to deal with more than one.

I must say though I'm still curious to see how the Galactic readiness will work in the LE even if I do have an idea as to how they'll do it.

Multiplayer can work with a game like Dragon Age, it has in the past under different circumstances such as neverwinter knights and baldurs gate. The issue is how to make it compeling...

The real coup would be a dev kit suite for mods again, so players can craft their own servers, challenges, builds, and the like. But that's never going to happen.

Meh. It's no closer to existing, either way.

Well this was certainly a surprise, but a good one, now BW can really focus on their strengths & flesh out characters & roleplaying experiences, I'm looking forward to see where this is going, as DA news seems to be getting better & better


(just need confirmation of blood mage now)

Also, where in any of these articles does it say that the game won't have a live service? A game can be single-player and still have live services like events and such.

AC Valhalla is single-player, it still has events and daily quests and regular releases of cosmetic item packs, etc etc.

Am I not a Bioware fan? Let's see.

I have played over 3,000 hours of Dragon Age Inquisition Multiplayer. Former #1 on PC Leadeboards.

Also played over 2,000 hours of Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer and 1,000 hours of Andromeda Multiplayer.

And yeah, also played the single player modes (from the aforementioned games and others), at least a hundred hours each.

I believe I do classify as a Bioware fan. Probably the wrong type of Bioware fan, the one in a minority that heavily invested into their multiplayer games, but a Bioware fan nonetheless. Am I right?

That is what I have been wondering as well, but I think people just throw whatever they don't like as a "live service" functionality.  As far as I can tell there is no unified definition of what a live service is, but it just seems people throw everything into that basket.  I have even seen one developer say if the game requires you to login and it interacts with a server that to them is a live service because information is constantly travelling from the player to the company.

Ah well, I think a lot of people are going to be disappointed when something "live service-y" is done.

Also, not for nothing, but Jedi: Fallen Order succeeding and Anthem flopping don't necessarily have anything at all to do with one being multiplayer and the other not. The success of Jedi: Fallen Order proves that single-player games can still make money, sure, but there are a lot of factors that contributed to its success (not least being part of one of the most popular multimedia franchises in history, which Dragon Age is definitely not).

And it's not as if multiplayer games aren't making money. The most profitable and popular games in the world right now are all multiplayer.

In my opinion this is very good news. And I say this as a player that is at around 2000 hours ME3MP. It's good news, because BioWare should focus on strong single player campaigns in both the next Dragon age as well as the next Mass Effect game. They also have to find a way to not only deliver quality single player content, but also in shorter time periods than in the last few years. So if cutting multiplayer allows to ship great single player content in let's say a four instead of a six or more years development cycle per game, than sign me up! Staying with established franchises you can't have those 7 year gaps between games, but rather have to build on any momentum you might gain with the next releases.

For example: MELE releases May 21, which for me means that the next ME has to have a target date two to three years from May 21 and not five or more years later. Cutting Anthem and multiplayer for the next entries might help to realize such a timeframe. 

Right, as I suspected, you didn't pass on them, so you passing on DA4 because "No Multiplayer" is total nonsense.