The wait for Dragon Age: Dreadwolf has been extremely long for fans, but it sounds like the end of the line is finally in sight, and it might have been worth it.
Just two months ago, Jeff Grubb said the developers were confident the game would be launched in 2024. Today, in a brief new episode of his Game Mess video series, Grubb reiterated that idea while also adding that everyone (presumably at BioWare) is really happy with how it turned out now that it’s almost done.
Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, this is one that I’ve mentioned before, is coming out this year. Will it be at the Summer Game Fest or around that time? Yeah, they’ve said that themselves over at EA. It still sounds like that game is coming out later this year, so where would they announce it other than Summer Game Fest? They could hold their own thing, but my expectation is they’ll have - well, if they hold their own thing, I think it will be part of the Summer Game Fest orbit, so we should see that game at Summer Game Fest or around that time. And they should have all of the details for that thing because everyone seems really happy with that game; they’re pretty pleased with how it turned out. The plan is to launch that this calendar year, so not EA’s fiscal year, not before March 2025 or anything like that, this year. And I don’t think you’re going to have to wait too long after this thing gets announced to play it.
The next iteration in the Dragon Age fantasy RPG franchise has had a complicated gestating phase, to say the least. Originally, creative director Mike Laidlaw spearheaded a project codenamed Joplin that was supposed to deliver a smaller, more narrative focused Dragon Age set in the region of Tevinter. However, the project was canceled as it lacked the live service elements that EA wanted; this was before the release of Anthem. Laidlaw left BioWare as a result.
Another Dragon Age project got off the ground under Matthew Goldman with those live service elements, but in early 2021, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reported that EA had been convinced by the success of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order of the commercial viability of single player games. As such, those live service elements were scrapped, and Dragon Age went back to being single player only.
In June 2022, BioWare finally confirmed Dragon Age: Dreadwolf as the game’s final title, which made perfect sense from a narrative standpoint to anyone who played the previous game and its post-launch DLCs. In October 2022, the studio announced it had reached the Alpha milestone, with the game playable from beginning to end. BioWare previously only had a few months from Alpha to launch to polish its games, whereas, with a likely Fall release window (which might drop near the 10-year anniversary from the launch of Inquisition), it will have been two years dedicated to making it shine.
We don’t know much about the game except for a rumor that suggests direct control of party members (as usual for the franchise) might have been swapped for orders issued via a wheel, similar to Mass Effect. Regarding the available locales, BioWare revealed that Dragon Age: Dreadwolf will allow players to explore much more of Thedas than in any previous entry, including Anderfels, Antiva, Rivain, and more.
Dragon Age: Dreadwolf will once again be powered by the Frostbite engine. It will be released for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X.
Has any developer ever announced that not everyone at the studio was happy with how the game turned out? “Mostly everyone here likes it, except for Merl, Anna, and Bunson over in Finance, they hate the new control scheme, but they’re all trash players, so they don’t count.”