Last week, an extensive report from Kotaku about Anthem's messy development and the problems inflicting BioWare dominated the chatter of many gaming circles. The report was full of insight into the problems Anthem face in the lead up to its very rocky launch, the problems BioWare has been facing the last few years, and the faltering relationship between top brass at EA and the studio. However, one of the most interesting tidbits in the report was an off-topic and buried reveal that Dragon Age 4 was rebooted in order for BioWare to save and fix Anthem.

According to the report, development began on Dragon Age 4 began back in 2017, under Mark Darrah and series' creative director Mike Laidlaw, who has since left BioWare. That said, the game's development was apparently put on the backburner when studio general manager Aaron Flynn left BioWare and Anthem was increasingly in a desperate and messy state, and as a result, Darrah was moved over to the development of Anthem. Laidlaw left for Ubisoft not long after.

Because the Dragon Age team had to to help bail out the Anthem team, the game was rebooted, and actually put into Anthem's codebase, which is to say, it's reportedly being built upon the code of Anthem in order to avoid resources spent adapting EA's Frostbite engine.

As for when we can expect the next installment in the beloved fantasy RPG series, who knows. EA and BioWare haven't teased anything, and given that development on it was rebooted might mean we won't be seeing it for awhile, though, hopefully it being built on Anthem's code saves it some development time.

For those that don't know: Dragon Age 4 was announced at The Game Awards this past December, but unfortunately, it was announced with nothing but a vague teaser trailer. In other words, we have no clue what the game will look like. Hopefully that will change soon though.



Posted: Apr 09, 2019 5:38 pm
Related Forum: Gaming Discussion

Source: https://comicbook.com/gaming/2019/04/07/dragon-age-4-development-rebooted-anthem/