New ‘Dragon Age’ game is in development according to BioWare writer who is surely in trouble now
You gotta love when some employee of a zillion-dollar gaming company vomits up information that definitely, definitely should not be out in the open yet.
BioWare is working on a new entry in the Dragon Age franchise, a writer on the unannounced project said in a recent interview with Eurogamer.
Alexis Kennedy, co-founder of Sunless Sea developer Failbetter Games, left the studio a year ago to become a freelance video game writer, and announced in early September that BioWare had hired him as its first-ever guest writer. Kennedy said at the time that he was working on “a significant piece of content,” but couldn’t provide further details. The studio hasn’t exactly been trying to keep his work secret, though — Kennedy pointed out to Eurogamer that Mark Darrah, the series’ executive producer, said “welcome to Dragon Age” earlier this year in a tweet about Kennedy.
Before he started at BioWare in February, Kennedy was working on projects such as a game of his own called Cultist Simulator and narrative content for the turn-based strategy game Stellaris.
“There are huge differences between all of that and what I’m working on at BioWare,” Kennedy told Eurogamer, “which I can now legitimately say is in the Dragon Age franchise although it has been known for a while.”
As for the nature of the content Kennedy is writing, he said, “What I can say is I have been given considerable autonomy to work on a storyline bit of lore which is well-segregated from other parts of the game.” He added, “It’s nothing that grandiose, but it is distinct. It’s a bit of lore which has not been addressed much to date in Dragon Age.”
The separated setup makes sense, since Kennedy works remotely — he is based in Greenwich, U.K., while the Dragon Age team is at BioWare Edmonton, seven hours behind.
There have been three Dragon Age games to date: 2009’s Dragon Age: Origins, 2011’s Dragon Age 2 and 2014’s Dragon Age: Inquisition. BioWare has not officially announced a fourth title in the series. Its parent company, Electronic Arts, has only discussed a separate project from BioWare — a new intellectual property that company executives have described as an “action-adventure” title that is “built around a live service” with a “disruptive new social design.”