There remains very little concrete information on Dragon Age 4, including its official title. Outside of concept art and other reported details, the only real news about it seems to be whenever a BioWare staff member leaves. The departure of Dragon Age series’ creative director Mike Laidlaw from the project and the company in 2017 was enough to make fans worried about Dragon Age 4’s progress and now it has lost its second creative director.
In an email sent out to staff by BioWare general manager Gary McKay, it was announced that the current senior creative director of the Dragon Age series, Matt Goldman, is leaving the company. The email provides no real reason for his departure, only saying that it was a mutual decision.
Dragon Age 4 losing not one but two creative director’s is naturally concerning, and McKay’s email admits that this will have an impact on development. However, he adds that BioWare and EA’s executive team are still confident that the final game will meet their vision and promises to not ship a sub-par product that fails to meet their standards of quality. An EA representative said more or less the same thing to Kotaku, as well as that Goldman is leaving the game in excellent hands.
Goldman originally joined BioWare in 1998 as an art director, where he worked on the likes of Jade Empire and the Baldur’s Gate games. He left in 2005 and went to work for Microsoft in 2006, specifically for Ensemble Studios, the studio behind the first Halo Wars. He stayed with the studio for three years until it was shut down in 2009. Afterwards, he returned to BioWare as an art director on the Dragon Age series, eventually being promoted to senior creative director in 2017.
Laidlaw and Goldman aren’t the only veteran staff to have left both Dragon Age 4 and BioWare. A number of staff also departed the company along with Laidlaw, supposedly in response to the cancellation and subsequent rebooting of the Dragon Age Joplin project. Then, in December 2020, executive producer Mark Darrah suddenly resigned as well, along with general manager Casey Hudson.
Reportedly, Dragon Age 4 was meant to be another live service title similar to Anthem with multiplayer functionality. But in the wake of Anthem’s own cancellation and the success of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, EA and BioWare opted to remove the multiplayer and live service elements and instead focus on releasing Dragon Age 4 as a purely single-player game.
Dragon Age 4 is in development with no release window.
Source: Kotaku