There remains very little concrete information onDragon Age 4, including its official title. Outside of concept art and other reported details, the only real news about it seems to be whenever a BioWare staff member leaves. Thedeparture ofDragon Ageseries’ creative director Mike Laidlawfrom the project and the company in 2017 was enough to make fans worried aboutDragon Age 4’s progress and now it has lost its second creative director.
In an email sent out to staff by BioWare general manager Gary McKay, it was announced that the current senior creative director of theDragon Ageseries, Matt Goldman, is leaving the company. The email provides no real reason for his departure, only saying that it was a mutual decision.
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Dragon Age 4losing not one but two creative director’s is naturally concerning, and McKay’s email admits that this will have an impact on development. However, he adds that BioWare and EA’s executive team are still confident that the final game will meet their vision and promises to not ship a sub-par product that fails to meet their standards of quality. An EA representative said more or less the same thing to Kotaku, as well as that Goldman is leaving the game in excellent hands.
Goldman originally joined BioWare in 1998 as an art director, where he worked on the likes ofJade Empireand theBaldur’s Gategames. He left in 2005 and went to work for Microsoft in 2006, specifically for Ensemble Studios, the studio behind the firstHalo Wars. He stayed with the studio for three years until it was shut down in 2009. Afterwards, he returned to BioWare as an art director on theDragon Ageseries, eventually being promoted to senior creative director in 2017.
Laidlaw and Goldman aren’t the only veteran staff to have left bothDragon Age 4and BioWare. A number of staff also departed the company along with Laidlaw, supposedly in response to the cancellation and subsequent rebooting oftheDragon AgeJoplin project. Then, in December 2020, executive producer Mark Darrah suddenly resigned as well, along with general manager Casey Hudson.
Reportedly,Dragon Age 4was meant to beanother live service title similar toAnthemwith multiplayer functionality.But in the wake ofAnthem’s own cancellation and the success ofStar Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, EA and BioWare opted to remove the multiplayer and live service elements and instead focus on releasingDragon Age 4as a purely single-player game.
