Dragon Age 4 - All the Rumours
 

PC Gamer talk about all the rumours around Dragon Age 4.

Thanks Couchpotato!

More information.

Are there any rumors about it not sucking? Well then…

Isn't it a bit early to speculate, I mean it is at least three years away. I will probably purchase it no matter what the reviews, because of the memories and feels. Probably be targeted at a different audience by then, but I hope with successful marketing. At least, lets hope they decide that "Bioware magic" means hard work and hitting their targets on schedule with reflection. I am playing Greedfall at the moment and well, I have low expectations because Spiders, but Spiders seem to have tried quite hard and some of its systems are deep enough and I can see what they are doing and they seems to be sufficiently hitting the right areas of my dopaminergic reward pathway. Or maybe I just like the colonial setting with muskets against magic. I might give Anthem a try again. They had a character voiced by Kristen Schaal, who plays Louise Belcher in "Bobs Burgers". I wonder if we can get Kristen Schaal to voice a character in Dragon Age 4, because she was a highlight in Anthem.

Yeah, agreed.

It's way too early to tell anything - and I don't really enjoy speculating with such little information available.

As for Greedfall, I couldn't quite get into it. I'm probably more of a mechanics and systems guy - and I found what was available to be rather underwhelming.

Anthem is an entirely different beast, though. It's a straight-up looter shooter with, at best, a passable story.

It does have a surprisingly large amount of dialogue for such a game, though - most of it being optional.

This is all just my opinion, obviously.

If the Anthem development exposé is any indication, the DA4 devs at BioWare probably don't know anything about what DA4 will be like yet, either.

The setting and plot was leaked before it was cancelled in 2017. These extra three to four years are because it was scrapped and rebooted into something different.

Link - https://www.denofgeek.com/us/games/d…heists-details
Have to agree but I hope it's at least a decent RPG.:fingerscrossed:

So its not that old, grumpy nerd you pretend to be. Here it is, you are quite optimist, after all. :-D

Couch used to always be optimistic when it came to anything BioWare, until they shit out the Anthem turd and destroyed his spirit :lol:

Couch tends to go up and down in that way. At first he was supremely negative - then he became a ray of sunshine.

Seems he's found more of a balance in recent years ;)

As for Anthem, it's very good indeed. It just lacks content in a big way. Doesn't really carry more than 50-100 hours of looting and shooting, which isn't good for such a high-profile live service game that's been out for more than half a year.

Certainly, I think it's better than Destiny 2. Division 2 is also great - but Anthem is king when it comes to moment-to-moment gameplay.

Depends I just enjoy certain BioWare games.:biggrin:

I will gladly admit I enjoyed both DA: Inquisition & MA: Andromeda.
Correct I didn't enjoy Anthem but I wonder if the patches and DLC improved it by now?
Yep I always defended Dragon Age 2. Still remember my furious posts.:blush:

They were both great games.

Depends on what you didn't enjoy about it?

The basic gameplay is identical - more or less.

There was a decent content dump with the Cataclysm - but that's more about excuses to keep looting than story content.

They did fix quite a few bugs - and they've greatly improved the drop rate as well.

I love the gameplay, but I can't keep redoing content like that.

Supposedly, there's significant content being developed behind the scenes - but that could easily be PR bullshit.

I think I've defended it once or twice on here too, wasn't as bad as some people portray. I enjoyed every single BioWare RPG from BG1 through DA:I. Including Jade Empire and, for the month or so that I bothered playing it, SWTOR. Obviously, the later ones weren't great RPGs anymore, too dumbed down, but still fun games in my opinion.

But ME:A was just a slog really, the standard BioWare story layer was still there (which is what made it worth playing), but the gameplay was so ridiculously tedious. Also felt like I spent 50% of my time either walking, driving, flying, or watching loading screens. The low review scores were well-deserved. If there was an ME:A 2 (I know there won't be but this is hypothetical) I'd probably play it still, but I sure wouldn't look forward to it.

To each his own.

I found the combat and gameplay in Andromeda vastly superior to anything in the previous games. Certainly Mass Effect 1 - which had pretty terrible combat.

The driving was certainly also superior to anything vehicle-related in that game.

My only real problem with Andromeda was the subpar visuals for NPCs and player characters. They were strangely terrible, and it really did hurt immersion greatly.

The rest of the game was well above the other Mass Effect games, in my opinion.

Still one of the best games I've played in recent years - and it was very big too. I think I spent something like 90 hours completing it, where the other ME games were more like 40-45 hours with all the DLC.

Yeah but that's the norm when you become to big and are owned by a publisher like EA. Dart talked about this theory a few times before. Lately I come to believe he is correct.

Don't forget the old talent left and new blood brings change.Can't deny it becomes a slog but that's because the entire game was rushed and it's core changed. A few older interviews with developers talk about that issue.

Link - https://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-…ive-1795886428

On the plus side they did improve combat and graphics over the older MA games.

Agree it's a flawed gem that's still good to play. I'm still pissed off that the the internet outrage and low review scores made EA cancel all the planned DLC expansions.

As there was still a lot of plot holes that were not filled. I remember Bio-Ware made the story about the other Arks into a book you could buy. It's just not the same.

Look at Hollywood for the go-to example.

The bigger the budget, the more you have to try and reach the biggest audience.

In theory, you can't do that by challenging them too much.

But, I think we all know that things aren't as simple as that.

We have countless examples of big-budget games that are genuinely great and while they're rarely "challenging" - they can be more than worth the time you spend with them.

Same goes for Hollywood movies. I mean, you don't get much bigger than Lord of the Rings - and they were pretty great, for the most part.

Some big-budget games are trash - and most are forgettable, in my opinion.

But EA isn't intentionally financing bad games - as they actually want to make money, and they know you can't do that with an audience that's not happy with the product.

So, it becomes a balancing act of how much control they give developers - and it's not like being a developer automatically means you're a great developer :)

All the big studios are subject to this mainstream approach - and you can look to your favorites for this as well.

Heck, look at what happened to Obsidian and Outer Worlds - now that they have Microsoft support.

I can't be the only one who noticed how much it feels like a console game in terms of combat, mechanics and balance? Even the writing seems much less sophisticated in many ways - than their past games.

That doesn't mean it's not a good game. I certainly think it is - but there's always a price to pay for appealing wide.

Yes, it's a sad story.

Unfortunately, that's becoming the norm. The streamers profit from appealing to the outrage culture - and they perpetuate nonsense and misinformation.

Quite the destructive relationship :)

Andromeda had issues, certainly - and it didn't help that they had a different company do a big chunk of the art.

But, the actual game was very good - and I happened to quite like the writing for the most part. The whole end sequence was better than anything else I've seen from Bioware in a long time.

I also found the combat and modding great - and I had tons of fun experimenting with weapons and combinations.

Something that wasn't the case in any other Mass Effect game.

But, yeah, it was drowned in overblown criticism.

I liked Dragon Age for the story and visuals and to some extent for choice and consequences design. But the gameplay was too shallow for game that takes 100+ hours to finish. I think overall ruleset was … is shallow in these games, leading to limited gameplay variations.

In past I wouldnt leave game unfinished. And leaving Bioware game unfinished? Unthinkable. Plus there is my personal completionist obsession (not so uncommon around here I think). But I didnt finish DA:I (Neither ME4). Even though it feels like itch I cannot scratch, I just couldnt go on … because I got bored by gameplay mechanics. And thats why Im quite reserved towards their future games. Im not sure the trend goes toward deeper gameplay mechanics, so not feeling so much positivity here. Would be glead to be wrong tho …

I don't care that much about mechanics, especially combat, so that's why I enjoyed DA:I and ME:A but wouldn't even look at Anthem.