BioWare's Christian Dailey has apologized to Dragon Age fans for the lack of news coming at the upcoming EA Play event while also promising that the team is making lots of progress on the highly anticipated fourth entry in the series. Dailey is the current head of development for the unnamed Dragon Age sequel, slotting into his Executive Producer role following his time running the ultimately fruitless efforts to revamp Anthem. This shift was due to Casey Hudson leaving that same role and departing BioWare for the second time in his career. The creative force behind the original Mass Effect has just recently announced the formation of his own independent studio named Humanoid Studios.
Circling back to Electronic Arts and its subsidiaries, both Dragon Age and the in-development revival of Mass Effect will not see updates at this year's event. The publisher has already told fans that they will focus on the upcoming Battlefield 2042 and the EA Sports lineup as well as some unannounced projects. One of those is almost certainly the heavily rumored remake of Dead Space that's said to be cooking at Star Wars Squadrons developer EA Motive, and the other could be anything from another franchise revival to a sequel to the well-received Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.
In a tweet posted to manage fan's expectations following reports about EA Play's contents, Christian Dailey assured the public that the new Dragon Age is making "great progress," and that the team is excited to "share more when the time is right." The post also contained a new bit of art from the in-development sequel, and fans speculated about its contents in the reply to the post. Others are simply happy that the game is getting the time it needs, especially after the experience of recent releases like Cyberpunk 2077.
Despite the reassurances of Dragon Age's new head honcho, fans have good reason to be concerned about the game's progress. There has been little to no official word about the development other than cinematic trailers that premiered at The Game Awards in 2018 and 2020. Despite work starting on the game several years ago, there have been multiple reports that the new Dragon Age suffered multiple reboots. All signs point to the project originally having a heavy focus on multiplayer, but the short life and poor reception of Anthem forced BioWare to change direction to something that more resembled the other games in the series.
It's clear that the next entry in the Dragon Age series still has quite a bit to go before it's ready for launch, and the early reveal several years ago has done the game no favors. BioWare needed the win then and now, but fans left with nothing to go on but some CGI scenes are bound to grow impatient when the game fails to show up at big events like EA Play. Until more members of the gaming public better understand the game development process (and how long games can take to finalize in the modern era), these situations will continue to crop up whenever game announcement season makes its annual return.
Source: Christian Dailey/Twitter