Dragon Age 4 - Writing the Next Dragon Age

Eurogamer chats with the Sunless Sea creator Alexis Kennedy and ask how things are going on Dragon Age 4.

His appointment was notable for a couple of reasons. Sure, it was tacit confirmation the Dragon Age team was beginning to staff up. But Kennedy himself had secured a unique position. BioWare is a Canadian company, headquartered in Edmonton. He is British, based in Greenwich, and has not relocated for the job. BioWare does not often employ remote workers, and almost never remote writers: the people who lay down the earliest brushstrokes of a game's world and its characters during the earliest and most formative of its stages.

All the better for us, though, that we could catch up with Kennedy and see how things were going. It has, to address the elephant in the room, been a trying period for his new employer. BioWare is still licking its wounds from the recent, bruising reaction to Mass Effect Andromeda. The company's next project to release will be its recently-delayed and untested new IP, codenamed Dylan. Meanwhile, Dragon Age is still in its early stages. How was he fitting in?

"It's an unusual arrangement," Kennedy admits, chatting via video call from his London home. As a (very) remote worker, Skype is something of a necessity for him - although with different divisions dotted across North America, it's not unusual for BioWare to communicate with its staff from afar. "It's a multi-studio company spread across Edmonton, Montreal [which developed Mass Effect Andromeda] and Austin [home to Star Wars: The Old Republic]," he continues, "though yes - it doesn't have guest writers, as a rule."

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