Mark Darrah, a former BioWare producer, laid out a scenario where the cancelled Dragon Age pitch codenamed Joplin would have shipped in February 2019 – a rushed, smaller project that might have felt compromised but probably landed better with players than last year’s The Veilguard.
Darrah talked about Joplin during a Q&A video on his YouTube channel, answering a viewer who wanted to know what BioWare’s original Dragon Age 4 pitch could have looked like. He said, “I do think that Joplin’s gonna live as this mythological game in a lot of people’s memories.”
Here is the short he referenced:
He went on to explain his timeline idea: “In that world, that is a game developed on a pretty tight timeline. Not from the ship [date] of Inquisition – I suppose it’s more than four years, almost five. But still, pretty tight timeline.”
Darrah also said, “It takes Anthem’s spot. In that world, that is a game developed on a pretty tight timeline.” That line has people scratching their heads a bit – was he picturing Anthem getting delayed so Joplin could go out early, or something more drastic? Maybe that’s the idea. Wow.
Public details about Joplin mostly come from a 2019 Kotaku report that traced the pitch back to preproduction starting in 2015 after Inquisition’s Trespasser expansion. The report described Joplin as a smaller, reactive game focused on spies and heists set in Tevinter.
The Kotaku write-up is still worth a read for context: Kotaku report.
According to reporting, Joplin was paused in 2016 so staff could help with Mass Effect: Andromeda, then canceled in 2017 so those people could work on Anthem. Development later rebooted into a live service codename Morrison, and that project eventually pivoted back into the single-player Veilguard.
Darrah thinks the scrapped Joplin would have been “a compromised game,” but he still feels it probably would have landed better than The Veilguard. He also warned that fans love to mythologize what might have been: “We’ll never know, and it’s very easy to pretend like it definitely would be yes.”
There are layers here about priorities at EA in the late 2010s. Anthem was a big push, and single-player projects at BioWare got deprioritized. That reality shaped what teams worked on and when, and Joplin ended up on the cutting room floor.
