“Sorry for no EA Play news this year but please know that the team is heads down with a lot of momentum and making great progress,” says Christian Dailey, Dragon Age 4’s executive producer. “We are excited to share more when the time is right.” Shared with Dailey’s post is the concept art up above. The full version includes a symbol for the assassin group the Antivan Crows, in case there was any doubt which fancy murderers are on display here. I sure do hope I get to see that absolutely outlandish crow mask on a character in game. The Dragon Age series has always involved big world-changing disputes bewteen factions, though the Crows have typically been on the sidelines a bit, showing up mostly via Dragon Age: Origins party member Zevran who can leave the organisation to join the protagonist. BioWare have been calling up the Crows a decent bit recently in their tiny teasers for the next Dragon Age game. You can spot another sabre-wielding Crow in the reel of concept art that BioWare showed off during last summer’s Behind The Scenes video up above. They were also the subject of one of the short stories published on Dragon Age Day last year. Also—and I’m showing my hand here perhaps—they appeared in multiple stories from BioWare’s Tevinter Nights short story collection. My personal favorite of the book was a Clue-like murder mystery in which several of the highest-ranking members of the Crows get together, facing disastrous results. Look, you simply can’t put an assassin faction in a fantasy series and expect that they won’t be my favorite. BioWare have a track record for exploring characters and factions for upcoming Dragon Age games in their novels and comics and such, so it seems a fair bet that the Crows may be major players this time around. This newest bit of concept art seems to round out a set of recurring groups, between the returning Grey Wardens, that Minrathous mage, and what I’m pretty sure is a group of elves living in Arlathan Forest. We do know, without a doubt, that Dragon Age 4 is set in Tevinter, the advanced magical society of the series. Beyond that, it’s mostly been a lot of concept art and speculation so far. EA Play is actually going to be several days of marketing blasts, it turns out, though the main event is on July 22nd at 6pm BST (10am PDT). Tune in to catch plenty of other non-BioWare projects EA have to show off.
