More confirmation Dragon Age 4 will be 'single-player focused'

Concept art of a Dragon Age 4 mage lurking in an alley — (Image credit: EA)

December 4 is Dragon Age Day (D4, get it?) just as November 7 is Mass Effect Day, a time when the BioWare RPG's fan community comes together to celebrate, raise money for charity, and pray for more scraps of info about the next game in the series. This year, BioWare's annual Dragon Age post included two short stories (one about Grey Wardens, the other necromancers), and a quick note about Dragon Age 4:

"Speaking of building new worlds and stories for you to explore, we want to let you all know that we're still hard at work on building the next single-player focused experience for Dragon Age. We're excited for next year when we can talk more about what we're working on."

The phrase "single-player focused experience" may not seem like much, but it backs up a report from earlier this year that Dragon Age 4 was being retooled to ditch its planned live service features. Back in 2019, EA began "doubling down on live services" as chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen put it, and there was concern that Dragon Age 4 would be multiplayer-focused, as Anthem was. The failure of Anthem, and the success of singleplayer action game Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, reportedly encouraged EA to cancel whatever multiplayer components Dragon Age 4 would have had.

Last month, Dragon Age 4's senior creative director left BioWare. Matt Goldman had been part of the studio since 1998, beginning as an artist on Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights. He took over as creative lead on Dragon Age 4 in 2017 when Mike Laidlaw left.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.