BioWare Executive Producer Tests Waters for Dragon Age Tactics Game

While it’s hardly an official announcement or even a tease, the fact that BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah – a veteran who has worked at the company since the Baldur’s Gate days – has asked the Twitter audience whether they’d play a Dragon Age Tactics game is certainly at least worth a mention.

Darrah describes this hypothetical title as something in the mold of the Japanese strategy RPG series Fire Emblem or Firaxis’ recent XCOM titles, and likely including a romance/companionship system. The title would be positioned as a spin-off to the series, while main titles would presumably still continue the road paved by Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Interestingly, if this hypothetical title were to enter development, this wouldn’t be the first time BioWare’s original fantasy series received a spin-off. In 2009, EA and BioWare released Dragon Age: Journeys, a turn-based free-to-play Flash game that followed the exploits of a group of characters in the deep caverns of Orzammar. The title, which was developed by an internal EA studio, seems to have been forgotten rather quickly and its promised chapters 2 and 3 never materialized.

Three years ago, the companies attempted the spin-off road yet again, this time with Heroes of Dragon Age, a free-to-play mobile title for iOS and Android, which also didn’t receive particularly warm critiques and never really became part of the conversation surrounding the series.

That said, the inspirations mentioned by Darrah and the platforms listed in the poll (PC, handheld consoles and mobile) would suggest that, were such a title to enter production, the scope, quality and monetization method used would probably be more in line with the expectations of the fanbase of the series. That would be my hope, at least. Either way, it’s going to take a while until we learn whether this poll meant anything and what exactly it meant.