BioWare’s Dragon Age 4 was teased at The Game Awards last year, preceding the troubled release of its looter shooter Anthem. We’ve seen reports of the title being in pre-production but it’s still long ways off from release. In an earnings call following the company’s Q2 fiscal year 2020 results, EA CFO Blake Jorgensen said that the next Dragon Age “probably comes” after fiscal year 2022.
“You should assume that Dragon Age—it’s out there, we’ve talked about it publicly that it’s in the works—it probably comes after fiscal 22.” That means it won’t be releasing anytime before April 1st 2022. However, Jorgensen followed up by noting that, “We typically don’t give multi-year guidance this early in the year, or multi-year guidance period. So I don’t want to start giving [fiscal] 23 guidance now that I’ve started to hint on 22, but you should assume it’s out there and plans are underway for that product.”
Electronic Arts could be providing as much time as possible to BioWare to develop the game. Then again, it’s possible that the sheer magnitude of the project (which is reportedly being developed on Anthem’s codebase) could warrant such a long process. The Dread Wolf’s rise, such as it were, is a fairly slow one.
Could this mean Dragon Age 4 skips the current generation of consoles and goes straight to the Xbox Scarlett and PS5? Does that mean Anthem will be further de-emphasized in the coming year or two as more resources are diverted away? Time will tell but BioWare definitely has its work cut out.