In response to a viewer question for a 200k subscriber Q&A on his YouTube channel, former BioWare producer Mark Darrah got into the fine details of what it might actually have looked like for BioWare to release Joplin, its initial pitch for a fourth Dragon Age, and whether he thinks it would have been better received than last year's The Veilguard.
"I do think that Joplin's gonna live as this mythological game in a lot of people's memories," Darrah said. "The ways that a Joplin happens are basically in a world where it ships in 2019, February 2019.
"It takes Anthem's spot. In that world, that is a game developed on a pretty tight timeline. Not from the ship [date] of Inquisition—I suppose it's more than four years, almost five. But still, pretty tight timeline."
Most public knowledge of Joplin comes from an April 2019 Kotaku report from Jason Schreier. Joplin entered preproduction in 2015 after the release of Inquisition's Trespasser expansion.
It was reportedly intended to be a smaller scale, but deeply reactive game centering on spies and heists in the setting's then yet to be explored Tevinter Imperium.
Joplin was paused in 2016 so its staff could assist in the development of Mass Effect: Andromeda, then canceled outright in 2017 so they could help with Anthem.
Development on Dragon Age 4 was rebooted into a live service project codenamed Morrison, which would eventually be retooled back into the singleplayer Veilguard.
It's unclear whether Darrah is saying that Joplin "takes Anthem's spot" in the sense that Anthem is canceled entirely in favor of a new Dragon Age game, or if he's picturing a scenario where resources are split between the teams, allowing a delay on Anthem while the smaller scale Joplin is able to release in that early 2019 window.
The latter seems more realistic, given the head of steam BioWare had on Anthem, but of course it's all academic at this point: Anthem took priority as EA was devaluing singleplayer games and BioWare in particular in the late 2010s.
"It's gonna be a compromised game for sure," said Darrah, but he still thinks it would have been better-received than Veilguard, with a caveat: "We'll never know, and it's very easy to pretend like it definitely would be yes."
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