With recent news of DA4 going single-player only, how has your opinion of the games potential change

BioWare has said that most of their games qualify as live service games, so his saying that its going to be one doesn't indicate anything different will be happening then before. Having MP as a mode could just as easily be the same thing as what Inquisition offered, the way it works when you are using a single word to determine what it means could be lost between the people that told Schreier what they heard internally and what he wrote. Sort of like you using Inquisition having a single player having story mode that stood on its own.

The problem with saying Anthem's MP was the reason for the elimination of MP from DA4. The GaaS and MTX worked pretty close to what was already in DA:I MP. Both games there is a store where you buy items that you can either grind currency out playing the game or you can pay for internal currency and buy the items that way. The difference between the two is that the items in DA:I were completely random from a box and were the armor and weapons you used. Anthem it was purely cosmetic and you pick what you wanted.

Voted Optimistic. I've felt pretty optimistic about DA4 all along (even though the long wait for it has been disappointing). This news about single-player only is a good thing to me since I never played DAI's mp and have no interest in co-op games like Anthem.

On the surface, this is a plus. Clearly the multiplayer aspect was going to infest single player to some degree, or they wouldn't have rebooted the project in the first place. But now that its apparently being re-rebooted, I can't help but believe this isn't going any place all that great. We've been down this road before. But for now, this news is definitely a positive for me. 

Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't ME3 and DAI never really connected to the single player game? where Andromeda you could connect straight from the single player game via the ???? (think it was the strike teams).

Hmmm? I remember that but I always got the breath scene (if I remember correctly) When I did destroy before the director cut   

Bolded Part #1 and #2.  Jason Schreier's opinion on if it was a live service of GaaS.  Since its such a broad term with nobody going to any effort to give a straight definition its his opinion and doesn't mean its a fact for everyone else.

Bolded Part #3 sounds pretty much like Mass Effect 3, Mass Effect: Andromeda, and Dragon Age: Inquisition.  Keep people playing the multiplayer aspects of the game and buy the single player DLC and gear MTX packs after they might have normally left the game already.

The base game didn’t give you enough points to achieve the breath scene before the extended cut. 

I'm not sure what you mean. GaaS is broad, yes, and we don't exactly know what that would have looked in Dragon Age 4. But Shrier has offered quite a lot of details regarding BioWare's previous plan of defining that in their Dragon Age Universe. One has to wonder why they couldn't tack on a multiplayer mode onto Joplin instead of outright cancelling it, if what they were planning for Morrison was a simple side mode like Inquisition or ME3? Shrier is not giving his opinion so much as he's illustrating the situation given to him by his sources, and his sources are literally saying that the multiplayer was going to be part of the main campaign.

From the same paragraph distinguishing "live service" and Inquisition's multiplayer:

"For example, some ideas I’ve heard floated for Morrison’s multiplayer include companions that can be controlled by multiple players via drop-in/drop-out co-op, similar to old-school BioWare RPGs like Baldur’s Gate, and quests that could change based not just on one player’s decisions, but on the choices of players across the globe."




Except it wasn't going to be, see above.

So is your statement.

I mean, of course we don’t know what was going on. But there’s quite a lot of information from Shrier that points one way and not the other. IMO, Joplin being cancelled and then rebooted into Morrison tells me that whatever change needed to happen wasn’t going to be subtle; and being that adding in live-service multiplayer was the reason behind the change, I would take that the multiplayer overhaul wasn’t some side mode they could create separately from the main campaign, but rather made from the ground up with everything else, influencing the main design of the game (btw, I think the “Anthem with dragons” is bullshit and not an indicator.)

I would be shocked and rather sad if DA4 was rebooted for just another multiplayer mode like Andromeda or Inquisition, but I seriously don’t see that as being the case.

Do patches not count as live updates? Because DAO, DA2 and all the ME games definitely got patches that I had no real choice to opt out of.

Depends if the patches changes the game state content wise, or adds content to the world. If patches fix bugs, then no it is not a live service game. If continuous patches are churned out adding new content, then sure it's a live service game. Live service games have a different delivery system of content than traditional games.

Very quickly, what is the difference between live service models and traditional DLC models? A few things, live service models focus on continuous changes to the game. When something is a live service game one of the things consumers expect is the game to be continuously and constantly updated with content. Later on down the track live service games could start to emulate worlds in providing a world state to consumers that is ever changing and evolving, but of course technology isn't their yet. Sometimes live service games have a bad name, why? Because it is not a traditional game model there are different payment structures and people are wary of how predatorial these could be. Free to play live service games are famously pay to win. Sometimes there are season passes with not enough content added to the game to justify the season pass. Subscription models are a famous one. Cosmetic microtransactions seem to be the most accepted these days though.

People keep changing the definition of live service to fit their agenda. Let's be perfectly clear, genres are useful for consumers because it segregates media into different categories to help narrow things down to what they like. That is all. It is a service for consumers often made by consumers. Sometimes creators try and redefine genres to target a certain crowd, like how Bungie advertised Destiny as an MMO on Steam, all this does is make people laugh. But it's a nice tactic, could trick some people. Scholars traditionally separate literature, in Ancient Greece I guess Plato separated literature which might have been great for him but it's not like all those dead content creators got a say in things.

At the end of the day though single player DLC packages are not live service games. Patches fixing bugs are not live service games. If they spent a single patch adding a single gun, then it has microscopic live service elements. And content creators don't get to define these categories. If what they say doesn't match with the commonly acceptable definition, and I don't see this being the case, then firstly the english language doesn't work like that and secondly genres aren't for them. They can use genres sure, they don't get to define them though.

It was a social media post years ago it will be too much time to find.  Here is the gist of the situation, it was made back when people started the outrage about EA mandating live service elements in their games.  BioWare dev on Twitter made the statement that starting with Dragon Age: Origins would qualify because of the Flash Game, Dragon Age 2 because of the Facebook game, Mass Effect 2 & 3 due to the cellphone games.  The reasoning given was that because there was content added to the game from outside sources via logging into the EA servers.  Now expanding upon that I bet that the Cellphone game for Inquisition, or the Apex App for Andromeda would fall into that thinking and potentially along with The Keep and The Archives.

Since nobody has given an industry wide definition of what a live service is I think it can just as easily be different across the board as well unless you have something that all developers and publishers have agreed upon.