Over the weekend, EA developer BioWare celebrated Dragon Age Day, the annual celebration of the fantasy RPG series, with several online events and a small update on the series' next installment.

News about Dragon Age 4 has been rather thin since the game was confirmed with a flashy cinematic trailer during Games Awards 2020. However, in a blog post, the team at BioWare reassured fans that they are "working hard to build the next single-player focused experience for Dragon Age."

The post also confirmed that fans should expect to hear more details about the game, tentatively titled Dragon Age 4, at some point next year. Unfortunately, it is impossible for a new trailer to be shown at this year's game awards, but one can hope that new details will be released early in 2022.

The confirmation that the game will be a "single-player focused experience" seems to confirm a Bloomberg article from earlier this year. The article reported that series publisher EA has authorized BioWare to separate "Dragon Age 4" from the online-focused game and remove all planned multiplayer components.

This abrupt change in direction appears to be the result of BioWare's most recent project, 2019's "Anthem," which flopped pretty badly. While there was initially great interest in the online co-op loot shooter, Anthem experienced a tumultuous post-launch launch and a sharp drop in player numbers; EA confirmed earlier this year that Anthem was effectively dead and the game's ambitious post-launch roadmap was abandoned.

Dragon Age has a very passionate fanbase, in fact Dragon Age Day originally started as a community effort before being adopted by EA/BioWare, and the response to this latest scrap news has been overwhelmingly positive.

Unfortunately, it will be some time before fans can actually play Dragon Age 4. Last month it was confirmed that the game's creative director, Matt Goldman, has left BioWare. The developer acknowledged that such a significant departure would affect the game's development schedule, but to what extent is currently unknown.

While by no means a significant update, the official announcement that Dragon Age 4 will be a single-player focused title remains very exciting news. Fans had feared that EA would mandate that "Dragon Age" be an online-focused platform, just as Ubisoft was reportedly considering an overhaul of the "Assassin's Creed" series.

Instead, the lessons learned from the failure of "Anthem" became clear. Online-focused games are extremely popular, but difficult to tame. Not all franchises fit the multiplayer mold, and "Dragon Age" is definitely a series that feels at its best when it focuses on solo play.

Proof of this was the addition of multiplayer levels in 2014's Dragon Age: Inquisition. While these gauntlets seemed like a fun idea in theory, they never really connected with fans and were ultimately ignored by players who preferred single-player, the core of the game.

Nevertheless, Inquisition faced criticism for drawing inspiration from online games in other ways as well. Its quest design was strongly inspired by MMOs and was notorious for bland objections that forced players to be busy with video game-like activities such as collecting dozens of nondescript items and herding cows. Hopefully, "Dragon Age 4" will reduce the number of mindless quests and instead focus on quests that provide substantial narrative elements.

While we welcome the news that Dragon Age 4 will be designed as a single-player experience first, we should still be cautiously optimistic at this stage, hoping that when details are revealed in 2022, fears of a repeat of the "Inquisition" debacle will be allayed. I hope.