All About Interwebz: BioWare confirms commitment to making Dragon Age 4 ‘single-player focused’

Dragon Age 4 developer, BioWare, has confirmed that the game will be a “single-player focused experience.”

The confirmation comes by way of a recent blog post celebrating Dragon Age Day, which takes place on December 4 each year. In the post, the Dragon Age team thanked the community for their passion and said that they’re “still hard at work” on what will be a “single-player focused experience for Dragon Age.”

In the post, BioWare also stated that we shouldn’t expect any more updates on the game until 2022, stating that they’re “excited for next year when we can talk more about what we're working on”. That means we won’t be seeing Dragon Age 4 at this year’s Game Awards, as many might have reasonably hoped given the game's appearances in 2020 and 2018, so this is probably a good time to have stepped in with some expectation management.

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To tide fans over until next year—which, at this point, really isn’t all that far away—the development team closed out the post by linking to two new short stories set in the Dragon Age universe that have been written by the team at BioWare in celebration of Dragon Age Day.

Analysis: A comforting confirmation

This clear assertion from BioWare that Dragon Age 4 is going to be a “single-player focused experience” comes after a Bloomberg report from earlier this year claimed that the game had essentially been overhauled to make it a single-player experience, rather than one with a heavy emphasis on live service multiplayer elements as originally planned. This overhaul was, according to the report, the result of “a recent multiplayer flop”—widely understood to be Anthem—and the success of single-player game Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

This report was likely welcomed by Dragon Age fans who had enjoyed the single-player campaigns of the previous three entries in the series. This solid confirmation from BioWare itself is only further good news for them. Having a single-player focus doesn’t necessarily discount the inclusion of any multiplayer elements but it looks increasingly likely that if they’re going to be included, they’ll be more along the lines of Dragon Age: Inquisition’s entirely optional multiplayer mode.

If the report of this relatively recent development change is accurate then the revelation from BioWare that we won’t be seeing any updates until some time in 2022 perhaps isn't all that surprising. Further to that, the game doesn’t have a confirmed release date just yet but a report from GamesBeat’s Jeff Grubb published earlier this year suggested 2023 is the team's targeted release year. With that in mind, a more concerted marketing campaign in 2022 would make a lot of sense.