Dragon Age 4 - Cancelled Version Focused on Heists

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USGamer reports that a cancelled version of Dragon Age 4 focused on heists.

"You'd play as a group of spies in Tevinter Imperium, a wizard-ruled country on the north end of Dragon Age's main continent, Thedas," a source told the site. "The goal was to focus as much as possible on choice and consequence, with smaller areas and fewer fetch quests than Dragon Age: Inquisition."

One developer said that BioWare wanted to focus on "repeat play" with "areas that changed over time and missions that branched in interesting ways based on your decisions, to the point where you could even get 'non-standard game overs' if you followed certain paths."

[...]
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More information.
 
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High-ranking BioWare staff openly wondered: Did EA’s executives really care about narrative? Did they really care about RPGs? Those questions have always lingered, and still do today.
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F**k EA and their single player games are dead rhetoric.:cool:

Get ready for Anthem with dragons.
 
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Sounds like they managed to FCK UP the only Dragon Age game that could have been fun. Heists.

Dragon Age: BDSM Country! If you lose a battle you get Sodomized!
 
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lackblogger said:
Dragon Age: Choose Your Own Adventure?
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The first thing I though off when reading the description was Dragon Age 2 with a spy/thief instead of the story of the Champion of Kirkwall.

Or what DA2 would have been with more than 18 months to work on it…so Dragon Age 2-2 as final product considering the stories behind their last 5 games.
 
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Yes, that's what I thought as well. A game with lots… and lots… and lots, and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots…


and lots…


and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots…


and lots
and lots
and lots
and lots
and lots


aaaaaaaand lots


and lots
and lots
and lots


and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots


…and lots


and lots
and lots
and lots


aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand

lots
and
lots
and
lots


of NPC dialogue conversations.
 
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mercy said:
Dragon Age: BDSM Country! If you lose a battle you get Sodomized!
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That'd make it FO2 copycat. :p

Of course, it'd sell at least 10 millions of copies, but EA is not interested in selling copies, that ain't milking through microtransactions and live services.
 
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"EA's live-service mandate"...f*ck you very much EA. Take your all of your mtx in a full-priced game, and ram it up your collective executive asses.

"Then Anthem went into trouble and Joplin was canceled so that the Dragon Age team could assist on BioWare's troubled sci-fi loot shooter. Key team members like Mike Laidlaw left, and a new Dragon Age 4 game was started under the codename Morrison.

Morrison would be more in-line with EA's live-service mandate, and while BioWare sources caution not to think of Dragon Age 4 as "Anthem with dragons," there will be live-service elements to BioWare's next fantasy RPG. "
 
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Sadly there is no "live services" Jim Sterling compilation on youtube similar to "triple A" to mail it as an attachment to Bioware.
 
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So, it's called "live service" now ?
 
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Alrik Fassbauer said:
So, it's called "live service" now ?
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Live service has been called live service for 20+ years now. Game developers jargon just wasn't printed in news until a few years ago.
 
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JDR13 said:
So what is the version they're working on now focused on?
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On live service and microtransactions.
New version was described as "Anthem with dragons". Multiplayer, missions, loot.
 
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"The goal was to focus as much as possible on choice and consequence, with smaller areas and fewer fetch quests than Dragon Age: Inquisition."

That sounds pretty good to me. That's pretty much what I'd want from the next Dragonage game. A focus on choice and consequence and small areas could be pretty interesting - more so than another Bioware epic adventure.
 
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I just read the whole article.
there will be live-service elements to BioWare's next fantasy RPG. These could be in the form of drop-in drop-out co-op, or even world changes dependent on the decisions of every Dragon Age player.
Yeah. I don't want that.
 
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Stingray said:
This news post really should've directly linked the original article, which contains tons more information than the summary from this random "USGamer" site.

https://kotaku.com/the-past-and-present-of-dragon-age-4-1833913351
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Rumor among BioWare circles for the past year has been that Morrison is “Anthem with dragons”—a snarky label conveyed to me by several people—but a couple of current BioWare employees have waved me off that description. “The idea was that Anthem would be the online game and that Dragon Age and Mass Effect, while they may experiment with online portions, that’s not what defines them as franchises,” said one. “I don’t think you’ll see us completely change those franchises.”

BioWare circles = BioWare fans? Not developers as per the developers waving off the rumor.

One person close to the game told me this week that Morrison’s critical path, or main story, would be designed for single-player and that goal of the multiplayer elements would be to keep people engaged so that they would actually stick with post-launch content.

That sound a lot like DAI and MEA to me. MEA only had multiplayer post-launch content actually.

The author claiming DAI and MEA were not "live service" games because single player and multiplayer were not mixed together is bullshit though. Assassin's Creed Odyssey is live service with zero multiplayer and a BioWare developers used Dragon Age Origin as example of a live service game back when DA4 was said to be reboot to add live service elements in 2017.
 
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EA has been a rotten tomato too long to even remember when exactly they soured. But their latest mandates to monetize everything in perpetuity and shoe-horn every genre into the same engine seem like a one-two punch that ought to be fatal.

Sadly, the gamer masses show time and again that while they are willing to bitch and moan a lot, at the end of the day hype wins out and they give their cash away to awful games riddled with one-sided business models. Just have to wait and see if gamers keep chugging the kool aid or not. Something tells me the gamer masses will keep on chuggin…
 
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