Outdated: "Dragon Age 4 could release sooner than you think, based on GeForce Now leak" - Outdated a

The articles and dislikes I saw with Andromeda and Anthem were more about the product at release and not the comparisons to what was released in videos demonstrating the game prior to its release.  There were a few people hollering about the one demonstration with "fake VoIP" where a NPC gave you a quest that wasn't in the final game, but overall that video came across pretty close to what the game is.  Even with Andromeda a lot of the complaints that I saw were about the bugs in the game at released or how bad the facial animations were.

Now being 100% honest over the years since Inquisition I have pruned a lot of websites and places I still go to I will avoid some writers because what they promote feels like nothing more then clickbait for the people that are complaining on YouTube about anything.  You will never be able to fully stop the complaining and dislike on social media, but you can try and minimize the ammo you give them or even minimize it to the point where it comes across as nitpicking which means it might not get the exposure that they desire.

If they don't have stuff that is concrete enough to talk about at this point, they're in far bigger trouble than we thought.

Nothing is in concrete until the game goes to certification.  Stuff happens in development and things might be done and ready for the game, but something happens and it gets cut or altered.

Things can change for one reason or another.  Just like Mass Effect 3 with Javik, he got cut during development and the game was changed for he was no longer going to be finished for the final development.  So they might have had a great idea for the plot, but it was altered and changed and a character was removed because they wouldn't be able to get it done in time.  So I don't think anything is safe in the game until certification for something that might be finalized might need a change because something else changed or during testing it was found out to be broken or problematic.

Another character that was changed during development was Anders in Dragon Age 2.  They had to cut at least one character and Anders was the least finished of the characters that were remaining so they altered his character to fit the role they needed a party member to be.

It's a view, but seems based on nothing but air.

The game is in development, it may be a masterpiece or a disaster. There is nothing in the public domain that would allow a rational guess to be made at this point about which applies.

We know they'll say more this year, so bring it on.

and they did. Not as much as we'd like but the game was mentioned.

Considering how short a period they had for game development, I'm pretty sure Anders was selected for his role fairly early on. I'm not sure where you got your information from but from what I understand they wanted a character to be possessed by Justice and it was a toss up between Anders and Velanna but in the end they opted for Anders, which to be honest made more sense as Justice had already started working on him in DAA (although I suppose this could be because of the overlap between DAA and DA2 development). Who was the character they cut? Anders was a pretty developed character from DAA and certainly did not undergo as much of a character change as would have been the case with Velanna.

Anyway, by the time they started marketing DA2, the choice of Anders had already been made. I don't recall any characters being promised for DA2 that did not materialise in the final product, even though you were required to buy the DLC to get Sebastian. He was definitely the least developed character in the game and of course it was perfectly possible to play DA2 without his contribution (which I did initially).

I agree with you Hanako that they could start drip feeding potential companions without risk of things changing at this stage because they would have been established during pre-production. In fact, it would seem they have already done so if that Behind the Scenes video is anything to go by, although of course the characters shown there may not be companions but just notable NPCs we encounter. The trailer from a year ago also allegedly showed factions we could be involved with and gave us some brief information about our "new hero". I do not envisage any of that changing between now and launch.

What they would need to avoid is showcasing a section of game play that never makes it into the final game, as happened with DAI. What happened in Crestwood ultimately differed greatly from what we were promised, which was also true of the customisation of the Keeps that we captured. Also, the initial trailer with Morrigan's voice over did seem to be showcasing something we did not ultimately get. I assume they learned from that mistake in the past and that is why the early trailer revealed so little.

I don't think the stage it was described at being that its that unusual that a game either is restarted, cancelled, or significant changes made to it when they first restarted Dragon Age after they moved the team to Anthem.  My opinion is that it was at the same time as Anthem so it became bigger news then it really was.  The stage it was sent back to the creative process is where they are testing things to see if they are going to make a good game and again in my opinion if enough of the content there isn't fun they just send the whole thing back for this would be the first time they can play the "game" in its most basic form.

I am pretty sure its Jade Empire that nearly bankrupted BioWare for its sales were that bad (and why I believe there won't be a sequel or another Jade Empire game).  Which did cause problems for Origins and Mass Effect, but I don't think it had the same level of negative impact on BioWare as Jade Empire.