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An industry insider is reporting that BioWare is continuing to push back Dragon Age: Dreadwolf's internal release targets, and that it's having a knock-on effect when it comes to development on Mass Effect 5.
"At one point, the date they were looking at was next month - September 2023 - but internally, Dragon Age 4 keeps getting pushed back," Giant Bomb's Jeff Grubb says in a podcast. "They moved the internal expectations to March 2024 a while ago. March 2024, that's pretty soon, right? Well, guess what, it's not coming out then, either. They pushed it back again. It is not coming out until summer 2024 at the earliest at this point. This is not them talking publicly, this is just from my reporting, so if it moves again, don't be surprised in any way. I think it's very likely it moves back even further."
Grubb speculates that Dreadwolf is likely to launch by the end of 2024, but suggests that EA's fiscal year would make it easy to delay the game even further. "Why launch at the end of next year when you can get it out before the end of fiscal in March 2025?"
Earlier this year, we got word that members of the Mass Effect 5 team were moving over to aid development on Dreadwolf. Today, Grubb makes the obvious implications of that news much more explicit. "The Mass Effect team is being drained a little bit so that more people can come work on Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. That naturally means that Mass Effect is getting pushed further down the line as well. So don't expect that anytime soon - most people weren't, but push it back even further in your heads, because Mass Effect is definitely being affected by this. It's going to come out later."
This report comes after BioWare itself revealed its plan to lay off 50 developers, a move the studio claims is actually going to improve its ability to deliver on quality for future releases like Dreadwolf. But with the loss of even some of the senior writers behind Dragon Age's most beloved characters, fans are not taking an optimistic view of the news.
If you're having a rough time keeping track of video game release dates, you can follow that link for some help.
