Hot off of the announcement that developer BioWare is axing around 50 jobs at its studio of approximately 250 staff in order to become “a more agile and focused studio,” it’s been reported that development on its next big title – Dragon Age: Dreadwolf – has been hitting roadblocks and suffered multiple delays to its internally-projected launch window.
That’s according to Giant Bomb’s Jeff Grubb, at least, who made the claims while discussing the BioWare layoffs on the Game Mess Mornings podcast. Grubb told listeners that, according to his sources, the game was at one point slated to launch as early as next month in September 2023 but that the title’s release window continues to be pushed back internally.
According to Grubb’s reporting, the target was then moved to March 2024 but is now slated for “Winter” 2024 at the earliest. Naturally these aren’t public dates but (alleged) targets within the studio itself. Adding to that, Grubb claims that BioWare is pulling in talent from the Mass Effect team to assist in getting Dreadwolf across the line (no doubt due in part to those layoffs) which will naturally have an effect on that game’s release.
Obviously this is all coming from a third party with claims to sources within the studio and hasn’t been confirmed by BioWare itself. It wasn’t all that long ago that the studio published an official update saying that the game has been in a post-production state since September 2022 and was technically playable from start to finish as early as March 2023.
Of course, Dragon Age fans will wait as long as it takes for a new game if it means that it’ll be the best that it can be and not to the detriment to the team’s wellbeing, but given the reported delays amidst widespread layoffs it’s hard to picture the current state of the game’s development in a positive light.
