We knew going in that this year's EA Play wasn't going to show any of Dragon Age 4 or the new Mass Effect game. Even so, BioWare executive producer Christian Dailey posted an apology on Twitter along with some new concept art, promising that "the team is heads down with a lot of momentum and making great progress," and said they'll share more when the time is right.
While fun, concept art is risky to speculate from—it's often used to establish a mood or an idea, particularly the more illustrative scenes that are shared publicly.
We do know that the Antivan crows—a guild of assassins—have popped up repeatedly in stories that have come out between Dragon Age: Inquisition and now. Dragon Age: Tevinter Nights, the collection of short stories from last year contained multiple stories about the assassins, including Courtney Woods's stakeout 'The Wigmaker Job'. Then, on Dragon Age day in December 2020, Mary Kirby published 'The Wake', an official short story featuring Woods' same crows. And this isn't the first piece of concept art to show us what looks to be a crow with its identifying mask and the feathered cape.
It seems fair to speculate that, whatever else, there will at least be crows in Dragon Age 4. Whether this art depicts a particular crow or just the idea of one is up in the air, as Dragon Age 4 is still in its early days.
Dragon Age 4 saw a significant pivot in its development earlier this year. It had previously been designed with "heavy multiplayer components," according to a report from Bloomberg. These elements were dropped in the wake of Anthem's disappointing performance and single-player Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order's success. This was after it had already been rebooted to be a "live" game in 2018.
With development of Dragon Age 4's vision going through so many changes, concept art can only tell us so much, even if it is fun. For more, read up on everything we do know about Dragon Age 4.
