It’s no secret that BioWare has a lot riding on Dragon Age 4. After the disappointments of Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, the next Dragon Age game will need to win fans over with a truly next-generational role-playing experience.
Dragon Age 4 made an appearance at Gamescom last week that took some fans by surprise. The developers revealed that the upcoming RPG would take a very different path to Inquisition and could establish a pattern that reveals the true arc of the series.
Dragon Age 4’s Gamescom video revealed that the game’s protagonist was designed with a main objective in mind, exploring what happens “when you don’t have power.” This is a stark contrast to the player character in Dragon Age: Inquisition, who after the end of the game’s first few hours is already being called The Herald of Andraste and is instated as the leader of the Inquisition.
This reveals a pattern that was hereto invisible in the Dragon Age franchise. In Dragon Age: Origins, the character is part of a group, the Grey Wardens. Most of the Wardens are killed, but the party the player ends up travelling with remains more essentially tied together than the player’s companions in Dragon Age 2, and more clearly has the Warden as their leader. In the second game, the companions are all involved in Hawke’s life, but Hawke is not their official leader and they aren’t a single unit as in Dragon Age: Origins, even though many of the characters interact.
The Dragon Age 4 Gamescom video appears to reveal that Dragon Age 4 will be more similar to Dragon Age 2 in this regard than it is to Origins or Inquisition. If BioWare is truly interested in fully exploring what it’s like when the player character doesn’t have power, then the player character is far more likely to resemble Hawke, a refugee with no organizational ties, than the Warden or the Inquisitor, both of whom are also “chosen” in some sense and have unique magical abilities and relationships with their main villain.
Although Dragon Age 2 was not as well received as the other games in the franchise, there are ways that this approach could be good for Dragon Age 4, especially when it comes to the player’s relationships with their companions. In Inquisition in particular, the companions’ lives essentially and necessarily revolve around the Inquisitor and their orders.
In Dragon Age 4, fans could see companions who treat the player character as far less unique. This could go a long way to making Dragon Age 4‘s main character feeling less like a video game protagonist and more like a genuinely organic part of the world as they player explores it.
Although Dragon Age: Origins ultimately made the Warden the leader who was able to make all of the key decisions at the end of the game, the player character is not singled out as unique in any particular way at the start of the game. Alistair’s presence even strips the uniqueness of being a Grey Warden away from the Warden alone, which helps make the player character feel like one of many characters in the world rather than a focal point for the story to revolve around like the Inquisitor can feel like in Inquisition.
Dragon Age 4 may be able to make the player character feel just as much a part of the world as their companions but not having them be part of any organization. It could also do this by having those companions live their own lives just as they did around the city of Kirkwall in Dragon Age 2 while also having as strong as main story as Origins. If the game can pull that off, there’s a chance BioWare will be able to reinvigorate the franchise and its own reputation as one of the top Western RPG studios.
Dragon Age 4 is currently in development.
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