Former Bioware Dev Reveals Incredibly Ambitious Pitch for Dragon Age 4

As fans reel from EA’s recent closure of BioWare, a former studio veteran revealed part of the internal pitch for a Dragon Age game that never came to be. Game developer Mark Darrah, who worked at BioWare from 1997 to 2021, shared part of a pitch book meant to “remain relevant” with the publisher.

“There’s always a fear, and I think a legitimate fear, within a big publishing organization that you will get canceled or, in the case of EA, you will simply be allowed to remain on a starvation diet to the point where you cannot continue,” Darrah said in a video on his YouTube channel. Reading between the lines, Darrah may be referencing what arguably happened to BioWare when EA whittled away at the studio’s staff over the years.

“So we’re trying to establish ourselves in the corporate culture and in the public’s eye as loudly as we can, simply to remain relevant,” Darrah continued. “And this is where ultimately this book comes into being. This was made in mid-2016 to be something that I could give to the team, but also something I could give senior people within the EA organization to say, ‘Look, we’re doing a Dragon Age. Don’t forget that Dragon Age: Inquisition was a super great game that sold super well, so you want another one, right?’”

Darrah lays out the vision for what was internally referred to as Joplin, the original plan for Dragon Age 4 that EA scrapped in favor of a live service project — which was also eventually shelved — with leftover parts of both projects becoming 2024’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Darrah notes that while certain elements from the original design doc made it through to Veilguard, many others didn’t.

“The Dragon Age team will create a more immersive, interactive world with people in it that act and react like real people,” a line from the book’s introduction reads. Darrah describes the vision for Joplin as being centered on interactivity, with the player’s decisions having rippling effects on the world that could be impacted by player actions like carrying out a heist. Beyond more complex social interactions, the game would also emphasize destructible environments and a world shaped by weather and other natural phenomena, like mud that players could sink into.

BioWare's original Dragon Age 4 pitch was mostly propaganda

While the pitch sounds quite impressive, Darrah admits that the pitch document was essentially a piece of “propaganda” aimed at EA producers and that “the game that’s described in the vision book would never have come to be because there’s a bunch of things that I can say with very high confidence, people within the structure of the team would have worked against, would have killed because for their own disciplined reasons wouldn’t want to exist.”

While Darrah acknowledges these kinds of design documents are never one-to-one with the final game, he also says that if Joplin wasn’t canceled for a live service game, the final version of Dragon Age 4 would have been “more like this than Dragon Age: The Veilguard ultimately ended up being.” EA shutting down BioWare has led to a lot of “what ifs,” and Darrah’s comments add quite a few more to the pile.