How many DA games will you live to see after "DAD'?

Well at the rate they have been moving since they released their last DAI DLC over seven years ago. If we are lucky we might see anything post DAD by the time we get in the old folks home...maybe

Strange way to gatekeep yourself. But, if these are your life goals, cool!

That said, if you are invested in the series that seems like a strange statement. Your life will continue after your child is born, and if you have a good support structure and live up to a standard where your supporters enjoy helping you... your hobbies should only change if you want them to.

...

I can't vote on this without more data or a missing choice. You did not give zero as an option, and as Beetle said, that is very much a possibility.

ETA -


Lmao... Imagining you and me as two Husk heads on some lab table, bitching at each other about the next Dragon Age like Statler and Waldorf.

Hmmm ... I did miss zero as an option ... senility must be setting in for me.

I played PC video games for a few years before kids, but abruptly stopped for 10 years. I like having a block of at least two hours for gaming, but it was not practical at the time as the kids kept us busy. I remember watching the kids play Pokemon Colosseum on GameCube and enjoying that, as it had a good story.

I resumed PC gaming 10 years later when I found a game with "pause & play" to compensate for my lousy reflexes ... Neverwinter Nights

At 54 and the pace BW is producing games I'll be lucky to see more than one at this point.

Though I have been wondering...and assuming we resolve the Solas issue in this iteration...what comes next? Isn't the Dread Wolf the apex of antagonists?

Well... if Bioware is still hanging around hopefully, I think we'll at least see one more, though it'd come out in the early 2030s.

That is, unless they magically find a way to make game development less time-consuming.

(or, you know, maybe AAA game devs\publishers could start thinking about making smaller, non-open world games again? )

Allowing for COVID and assuming the game isn't delayed much further the time to release games, at least on the BioWare end, hasn't really increased significantly. For years I've held it as a maxim that games tend to take 3-4 years to develop and Inquisition came out in 2014, Andromeda in 2017, Anthem in 2019 (hmm), and the LE (which admittedly barely counts but it is still worth the historical log) came out in 2021.  If DA 4 does manage to come out next year it'll still fit into that general target...again allowing for COVID....the only real anamoly here was Anthem which was A. BioWare had two different studios to tag team it and B. still came off as being very rushed feeling.  

Then on the extreme end you have companies like Activision or Ubisoft which devotes multiple studios to their game releases which explains how fast they have been able to release even their open world games (up until COVID) and get out their yearly cycle. They seemed to have multiple studios working on games at the same time in order to keep up a much faster release cycle.  But then companies like CDPR and Bethesda seem to be having a lot of trouble releasing their games in anything like a timely matter for reasons I'm not exactly sure about but I can see the results for myself.  

Long winded way of saying I don't think the 'open world' aspect of the game is really the deciding factor here. Games tend to take 3-4 years to develop no matter what they are, rushing them leads to problem. Its more a matter of resources and what you can do and since BioWare seems to be a more 'medium' sized studio which is focused on multiple game franchises at the same time and all things considered, so far, they have actually been releasing a lot of high quality games at a fairly regular rate (yes, Anthem was the anamoly here). 

Edit:  For further emphasis JEdi Fallen Order came out in 2019 and the new game is coming out in 2023.  Now I'm not entirely sure how meaty FO is but the game didn't strike me as especially open world from the gameplay that I've seen and yet that game itself needed four years to develop.

That is part of it I think.  For high end game dev I get the feeling its not either you do a longer game or a shorter one but where you spend the resources you have.  You can either have a really detailed short game where every single pixel gets more detailed or a lot more wider experience but ultimatley the same resources are being spent just in different areas and different ways, which is why games tend to take the same amount of time to dev whether or not they are 10 hours or 100...at least from what I've observed.  

Which I may be in the minority and am a bit weird in this regard but for these reasons I do prefer my games to be on the longer side.  Especially if we are getting these games more expesnive in the future. Hopefully they can still make a pretty good quality in addition to making it longer but given how long its been since DAI, how long it will likely be until we get DA 6 *if we're extremely lucky we'll get it by 2026 at the earliest* I would prefer at least a 100 hour experience, or something in that ballpark, like with Inquisition and Andromeda.  And while there has been bad experiences with this kind of 'open world' game here and there and they aren't perfect some of my best gaming experiences of the last two generation have been with this kind of gameplay loop.  As long as the side quests are good the price is well worth it and gives me plenty to occupy myself until the next game I wants comes out.