EA course-corrects, will allow new Dragon Age sequel to be a solo RPG... just like all the other Dragon Age games

You know that the bar is really fucking low when this counts as a good thing.

As reported by Jason Schreier at Bloomberg:

Video game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. has made a major pivot on the next game in the popular Dragon Age series, allowing the developers to remove all planned multiplayer components from the game, according to people familiar with the matter.

Dragon Age is a series of fantasy games from the EA-owned developer BioWare. The next Dragon Age, which doesn’t yet have an official title or release date, had previously been designed with a heavy multiplayer component, said the people, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak to the press. In recent months, it has transformed into a single-player-only game after EA was stung by a recent multiplayer flop.

That "recent multiplayer flop" was, of course, Anthem, further development on which was stopped by EA earlier this week. Up until that point, EA had been all in on loot-box-laden "live service" games, with their corporate strategy depending heavily on developing and publishing only "live service" multiplayer games going forward, but after lukewarm reception for Star Wars Battlefront, the PR disaster that was SW:BF2's planned loot box system, and the utter embarrassment that was Anthem's release, it would seem that they're rethinking that strategy.

And, yes, this is a good thing. Here's hoping that other AAA developers follow suit, giving up on forcing free-to-play monetization into full-price games, and return to just making good, feature-complete, finished games again.