Internet super-sleuth Supperannuation woke up this morning, ate some poor publisher’s PR department for breakfast, and then turned to BioWare for his elevenses. He was seen emerging from their Edmonton HQ less than half an hour later, smacking his lips.
“Gonna guess some new Dragon Age social RPG thing will be announced soon,” he burped.
The game appears to be the work of EA Capital Games – formerly Klicknation, and briefly known as BioWare Sacramento before the publisher thought better of its plans to spray the BioWare brand evenly across its studios.
EA registered a Heroes of Dragon Age domain name on Friday, and the game already has its own subforum alongside that of Supreme Heroes – Capital’s card-carrying Android RPG.
The game won’t be the first to hang from the cloak-tails of the Dragon Age series proper. EA2D made really quite good Flash-based turn-based RPG Dragon Age Journeys to accompany the release of Origins, and had plans for two paid-for sequels that never quite emerged.
Its eventual follow-up you’ll have probably heard of, however, for all the wrong reasons: Dragon Age Legends saw Journeys’ systems punctured by a punitive system of Facebook recommendations and microtransactions.
EA2D existed for a short while longer as BioWare San Francisco, before the studio was shut down during the same publisher-wide reorganisation that saw Capital rebranded.
Supperannuation notes that Capital were most recently spotted working on a 3D Unity mobile game – and notes that the studio’s stated aim is to develop the “next generation of core games on mobile”. Which probably accounts for Heroes of Dragon Age.
Still: that name makes it sound an awful lot like a MOBA, doesn’t it? I suppose EA’s Dawngate puts paid to that idea.