As fans reel from EA’s recent closure of BioWare, a former studio veteran revealed part of the internal pitch for a Dragon Age game that never came to be. Game developer Mark Darrah, who worked at BioWare from 1997 to 2021, shared part of a pitch book meant to “remain relevant” with the publisher.

“There’s always a fear, and I think a legitimate fear, within a big publishing organization that you will get canceled or, in the case of EA, you will simply be allowed to remain on a starvation diet to the point where you cannot continue,” Darrah said in a video on his YouTube channel. Reading between the lines, Darrah may be referencing what arguably happened to BioWare when EA whittled away at the studio’s staff over the years.

“So we’re trying to establish ourselves in the corporate culture and in the public’s eye as loudly as we can, simply to remain relevant,” Darrah continued. “And this is where ultimately this book comes into being. This was made in mid-2016 to be something that I could give to the team, but also something I could give senior people within the EA organization to say, ‘Look, we’re doing a Dragon Age. Don’t forget that Dragon Age: Inquisition was a super great game that sold super well, so you want another one, right?’”

Darrah lays out the vision for what was internally referred to as Joplin, the original plan for Dragon Age 4 that EA scrapped in favor of a live service project — which was also eventually shelved — with leftover parts of both projects becoming 2024’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard .

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