EA Ditching Multiplayer for Dragon Age 4 Following Anthem's Failure

With Anthem having effectively died, the Legendary Edition of the Mass Effect trilogy underwhelming fans (who have taken to calling it the bloom edition, due to the lightning), and with Andromeda continuing to be a mark of shame on the once-hyped developer, Bioware — and their fans — are putting what remains of their stock into Dragon Age 4, the long-awaited sequel to the beloved Dragon Age franchise.

Well, there’s not a whole lot we know about Dragon Age 4, but according to a new report from Bloomberg, there is one thing we do know: thanks to Anthem’s failure, and the success of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, EA has decided to strip away the multiplayer components of the game and focus on making it exclusively a single-player experience.

It’s a little unclear exactly how much that changes Dragon Age 4’s original vision. EA has been on the live-service bandwagon for a while now, inspired in no small part by the successes of games like Fortnite and GTA Online, but their success has been more limited in the field: they have Apex Legends, and a handful of sports games, but nothing that has managed to break the bank the way Epic and Take-Two have. In that respect, the thinking is probably that it’s better to have Bioware do what they know and make a safe bet, than risk what could be a profitable game on another live-service experiment.

That said — that’s assuming that Star Wars succeeded because it was a single-player game, whereas Anthem failed because it was an online one. But we already know that’s not actually the biggest difference between those two titles: Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was made by Respawn, a studio famous for taking care of its developers and refusing to crunch. Anthem, on the other hand, is famous for the opposite — being the product of heavy crunch and mismanagement.

So while this is arguably good news, it’s by no means a guarantee that Dragon Age 4 will turn out better then Anthem. That depends on management. And last I checked — EA is still pretty awful.

But we’ll see.