The wait for Dragon Age: Dreadwolf has been long one, but slowly yet surely, BioWare is continuing to make steady progress on the RPG’s development. Earlier this year, the developer confirmed that the game was in the middle of its production stage, and now, with another new blog update on EA’s website, BioWare’s general manager Gary McKay has announced that it’s hit another major development milestone.
Dragon Age: Dreadwolf has hit alpha, which, in simple terms, means that the game is not internally playable in its entirety, from start to finish. “Up to this point, we’ve been working hard on the various parts of the game, but it’s not until the Alpha milestone that a game all comes together,” McKay writes. “Now, for the first time, we can experience the entire game, from the opening scenes of the first mission to the very end. We can see, hear, feel, and play everything as a cohesive experience.”
BioWare will now turn its attention to “bringing the visual fidelity to its final form and iterating on gameplay features”, which will primarily be driven by feedback from various sources- and, of course, constant playtesting and iterating.
Meanwhile, all aspects of the game’s story will also receive much more attention from this point forward. “We can now evaluate the game’s pacing, how relationships evolve over time, and the player’s progression, as well as narrative cohesion—essentially how the story comes together,” McKay says. “We can take the story we’ve written and see if we’re expressing it well through the characters, dialogue, cinematics, and ultimately, the player’s journey. Now that we have the ability to do a complete playthrough, we can iterate and polish on the things that matter most to our fans.”
Meanwhile, McKay also confirms that the city of Minrathous, the capital city of the Tevinter Empire (which was confirmed as Dragon Age: Dreadwolf’s setting last year) will be featured heavily in the game. He writes: “It’s also exciting to finally be able to bring our fans to parts of the world that we’ve previously hinted at, but never been able to fully explore—like the city of Minrathous, the capital of the Tevinter Empire. We’ve talked about Minrathous in previous games, and now you’ll finally be able to visit! It’s a city built on and fuelled by magic, and the ways in which that has come through in its visual identity, and what that looks like in comparison to previous cities we’ve visited in Dragon Age, are pretty spectacular.”
So what exactly does that mean for when we’ll get a proper look for the game, or when it will launch? That remains unknown, but reports have suggested that Dragon Age: Dreadwolf is targeting late 2023 launch, and that it won’t be cross-gen title.