Dragon Age 4: The Dread Wolf Rises

Good things come to those who wait. The last decade in gaming has constantly proven that this motto is equally important in the realm of virtual products as it is with physical products and moral ideals. There’s nothing worse than taking a pizza out of the oven too early and having it be mushy, or driving away before taking the fuel nozzle out of your car. Clearly one of those is much worse and only tangentially related, but I still think its meaningful: take the time to make sure you don’t forget anything before rolling anything out.

For Dragon Age fans, this is (hopefully) their current stance concerning Dragon Age 4: The Dread Wolf Rises. This game currently has no exact release date (estimated for April 2022 at the earliest) and is known to be in early pre-production according to BioWare members. Accordingly, there is a limited amount of information freely available at this time, but I’ll do my best to outline potential gameplay and story features based on previous installments.

Rise of the Dread Wolf

The ending of Dragon Age: Inquisition’s final DLC left a lot on the table for fans of the series. It clearly set up the next events that would unfold throughout Thedas and were revolutionary. Its debatable whether the last DLC was favorable among the fanbase, but it was intriguing in terms of story to say the least. Notions of the Dread Wolf were teased even here have left fans waiting since 2015 for the next release. So far, it is known this title will take place in Tevinter, could take some inspiration from the overall design of the last entry DA Inquisition, and has recently had its multiplayer and live services scrapped. Otherwise, we really only know that the game is still being developed around the clock and that it will directly follow the events of previous titles.

Troubling Entries

One of the main reasons that I noted fans should be happy that BioWare is taking its time with DA4 is that their last few titles have been…underwhelming, to say the least. Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem are some of the most recent releases from BioWare and are, unfortunately, notorious for being weak points for the company. I’ll say that Andromeda was a misstep if nothing else – I didn’t dislike everything about it, it simply felt like it didn’t have the heart and soul the rest of the Mass Effect trilogy did. Anthem was downright disappointing on all fronts. It lacked polish, charm, and solid gameplay, which are staples of BioWare that were incredibly hard to pull away from.

This does not bode well for future BioWare releases – despite being separate franchises, even Dragon Age seemed to begin lacking by the release of its final Trespasser DLC. There has been some internal change there, but only future updates will determine whether they are taking steps in the right direction. For now, we can only speculate as there is no gameplay to go off of and quite a bit of hostility towards the company from dedicated fans.