During the 2018 Game Awards ceremony Dragon Age 4 was publicly revealed with a cryptic teaser, and, according to EA CFO Blake Jorgensen, we won’t be getting any answers to the questions it raised anytime soon. In a recent earnings call, he confirmed that Electronic Arts and BioWare are continuing to work on the fantasy role-playing sequel, but fans shouldn’t expect to get their hands on it for more than a couple of years yet. That’ll put us well into the PlayStation 5’s lifecycle, meaning that Dragon Age 4 will most likely launch on next-generation hardware.
Specifically, Jorgensen said that the game currently looks set to launch after the Fiscal Year 2022 (FY22). March 31st, 2022 marks the end of that period, so a best-case scenario for impatient fans would seemingly be the title hitting shelves in April 2022.
PS5 hardware is due out well in advance of that, with Sony’s new console planned for release in holiday 2020. Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox, codenamed Project Scarlett, is also scheduled to arrive during that same period. With this in mind, it appears as though Dragon Age 4 will most likely be a game that targets those consoles—rather than the current PS4 and Xbox One—though no clarification on the matter was offered by Jorgensen.
Following rumors ahead of time, Dragon Age 4 made its anticipated debut (whether intended or not) almost a year ago now. Teasing “The Dread Wolf Rises” in reference to events from 2014 hit Dragon Age: Inquisition, it appears as though DA4 could be a direct sequel to that game.
In a short 2018 blog post, executive producer Mark Darrah stated that he and the team at BioWare had been “working on a new Dragon Age game for quite a while.” If the sequel had already spent significant time in the oven as of December 2018, a projected 2022 release date will fall later than many expected.
Perhaps after the controversy surrounding Anthem more time was allocated to the project in order to avoid a repeat occurrence. BioWare has sought to hire developers with multiplayer experience to work on DA4, after all, which raised concerns over the potentiality of it being a live service game in much the same vein.
