That a new Dragon Age is in the works at BioWare isn't quite as sure a thing as it was prior to EA's recent decision to put the Mass Effect series on hold following the tepid response to ME: Andromeda. But even though it hasn't been officially confirmed yet, writer Alexis Kennedy—whose previous credits include the narrative-heavy Tales of Fallen London and Sunless Sea—recently confirmed to Eurogamer that the project is happening.
Kennedy has also worked on DLC for Stellaris and released a game of his own called Cultist Simulator, but "there are huge differences between all of that and what I'm working on at BioWare," he said. "Which I can now legitimately say is in the Dragon Age franchise, although it has been known for awhile. Notionally it was a secret but, because of who I was working with, everyone who cared knew. And then the day I started, Mark Darrah tweeted saying 'welcome to the Dragon Age franchise', so I thought, well, I guess that's official now then."
Great now I have to figure out how to work "Worldbuilding" into all my conversations with Alexis.Welcome to Dragon Age! https://t.co/yTVS4g7TgJFebruary 2, 2017
He didn't reveal anything about the game, or get into specifics about his role, but said he's "been given considerable autonomy to work on a storyline bit of lore which is well-segregated from other parts of the game, which makes a lot of sense with me being remote," a reference to the fact that he's based in the UK, while the team he's working with is in Edmonton, multiple time zones distant. "And yes, if you've seen a lot of my work before you will probably not be surprised by the choice of subject matter. It's familiar stuff."
Something with a steampunk edge, then—or perhaps just nautical? I'm thinking the former is more likely, but whatever it turns out to be, Kennedy described it as a piece of the puzzle, rather than the picture on the box. "I don't want to exaggerate the degree of the chunk [I'm writing]," he said. "It's more analogous to Patrick Weekes writing [Mass Effect character] Mordin than me being told to go off and write a whole different country... It's nothing that grandiose, but it is distinct. It's a bit of lore which has not been addressed much to date in Dragon Age."
EA, unsurprisingly, isn't prepared to say anything more about it: The company told Polygon that "it’s a pleasure having Alexis involved with BioWare, [but] we have no new information to share regarding Dragon Age at this time.”
