BioWare has a lot riding on Dragon Age 4, as the fantasy franchise has an opportunity to restore faith in the studio and provide fans with a unique and fresh-feeling roleplaying experience.
Dragon Age: Inquisition marked the series’ first experimentation with open-world RPG design. However, there are a few reasons Dragon Age 4 should more closely imitate earlier installments of the series, and should not be an open-world RPG.
Many fans found that Dragon Age: Inquisition’s open world was spread thin. Areas like the Hinterlands were enormous compared to previous locales seen in the franchise, but did not feel sufficiently lived-in to justify the games’ transition to the open-world format. The quests were few and far between, and those that were available were repetitive and rarely particularly story-driven. Furthermore, the plot of Dragon Age: Inquisition gave the protagonist a clear central motivation from the get-go: close the rifts and defeat Corypheus. In other open-world RPGs like Skyrim, the main quest didn’t present itself until later in the game.
While Skyrim’s opening involved the main villain, the player does not find out that they themself are the Dragonborn until they kill the dragon outside of Whiterun. This allows the player an immersive opportunity to explore the world beforehand without rejecting the call to adventure. For many players, the Inquisitor has too clear a goal to make focusing on exploring the world feel like anything other than a rejection of the pressing main quest that the character has already committed to.
The reduction of the next Dragon Age game’s scale would not be unprecedented. Dragon Age 2 limited its scope in comparison to Dragon Age: Origins, taking place almost entirely in the city of Kirkwall and in the areas immediately surrounding it. As a result, however, many fans felt that Dragon Age 2 lacked the sense of epic adventure felt in the first game. Dragon Age 4 should not limited the scope of the world explored in the story, but should rather avoid realizing it using a sprawling open-world like Inquisition‘s.
Instead, like Dragon Age: Origins, the game should take place across the breadth of its setting – likely the Tevinter Imperium. Players should be able to visit the various cities and towns of the region, as well as explore areas of the wilderness. However, BioWare should not try to connect all of these locations with an open world and should instead make the individual areas smaller in size but more rich in interesting and developed NPCs, compelling quests, and opportunities for companions to have meaningful interactions with the player and the world around them.
Dragon Age 4’s Gamescom video said that the game aims to explore “what happens when you don’t have power.” This doesn’t mean that BioWare will be creating a story that is smaller in scope – it is likely that Solas the Dread Wolf is the villain of the game and that the main threat will be existential. However, if done correctly, the game will be a more intimate and personal story, focusing on depth over breadth.
While moving away from Dragon Age: Inquisition’s open world is far from the only way to achieve this and is not sufficient on its own, it could be a step in the right direction. Dragon Age: Origins demonstrated that a journey can still feel epic with a more limited in-game scale, as long as the scale of the story still feels huge. Whatever choice the studio ultimately makes, BioWare will have to make some big decisions if the developer wants Dragon Age 4 to revive faith in the company in both its fans and its investors for the coming next-generation consoles.
Dragon Age 4 is currently in development.
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