Dragon Age 4 was very close to becoming a multiplayer game. But After a lot of back-and-forth (and probably some late-night, caffeine-fueled decisions), they scrapped it. And honestly? It think it was the right call.
It’s been ten years since we ventured into Thedas, and while we’ve been twiddling our thumbs waiting it turns out, BioWare spent a lot of that time trying to make a multiplayer version of the game.
They even gave it a name: Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
But after some serious reconsideration, they decided to go back to what they know fans love—single-player storytelling.
According to an interview with IGN, the original multiplayer version had all the bells and whistles of a live-service game: “repeatable quests, a tech base, and a loose story outline.” Sounds a bit like they were heading down a Destiny-like route, but with dragons instead of aliens.
While this sound cool—one of the best parts of Dragon Age is how your choices shape the world.
John Epler, the creative director, even admitted that they still wanted to tell the story of Solas (you know, our favorite brooding elf), but with multiplayer mechanics in play, it got tricky.
Multiplayer games need a completely different structure than single-player ones, and trying to merge those two ideas was like squeezing a square peg into a round hole. It simply wasn’t working.
Then 2020 happened, and the pandemic threw everything off track.
But in a twist of fate, it actually gave BioWare the opportunity to rethink the whole thing.
That’s when they ditched the multiplayer idea and went all-in on single-player again.
Of course, this meant they had to completely overhaul the combat system because it was originally designed for multiplayer game.
According to Corinne Busche and Gary McKay, the foundation of the multiplayer version is still there, but they’ve adapted it to a single-player game.
So, while they scrapped the live-service aspect, the time they spent developing that version wasn’t completely wasted.
They got comfortable with the notoriously difficult Frostbite engine, and some characters and story elements survived the cut.
But in the end BioWare is committed to making The Veilguard a pure, offline single-player experience. No multiplayer, no microtransactions, no live-service shenanigans.
Just the kind of immersive RPG we’ve come to expect from them. McKay even said, “It’s an offline game, and that’s what we wanted to come back to—something we know fans will love.”