Dragon Age Legends Message Board

According to a report on GamesRadar, BioWare San Francisco - the studio formerly known as EA2D and responsible for titles like Dragon Age Legends and Mirror's Edge 2D - has been closed by EA, leaving between 25 to 30 employees jobless. Citing a source inside the studio, the report suggests EA felt it was "too expensive" to make mobile games in Redwood Shores, CA.

Joystiq has followed up with EA to check the veracity of this claim. Dragon Age Legends' servers were shut off last year, but the developers at BioWare San Francisco were kind enough to make an offline version available for fans to continue to play.

Dragon Age Legends, as fans will tell you, was one of the more popular Facebook games EA has ever put together -- at least before its untimely death earlier this week. Such is the fate of a freemium promotional game for a much larger console and PC series.

But while most online games simply shut down and go gently into that good night, Dragon Age Legends is doing no such thing. As promised, the dev team has re-released the game as a single-player title, available as a free download right now. You won't be able to invite friends (or buy any microtransaction-based items), but you will be able to play the title offline and forever, regardless of EA's server status.

The game runs on Adobe Air, so you'll need to download and install that if you haven't yet. And while previous characters and accounts have been locked online for now, the team is working on a way to archive them offline, so they can be used in the single-player game as well. This could set a very nice precedent for popular Facebook titles, that would otherwise face oncoming oblivion thanks to server death.

Alec didn’t care for Dragon Age Legends too terribly much, and apparently, neither did most of you. As such, to be perfectly honest, it’s no great tragedy to hear that the Facebook-friend-unfriendly spin-off is headed for the big server farm in the sky. Unsurprisingly – especially given EA’s previous track record with these things – the legend of Legends has hit the end of the line because it “doesn’t make enough revenue to sustain itself.” So then, nothing to see here, worth a throwaway mention and little else, move along, etc, right? Not entirely. There are some potentially far-reaching ramifications here – many of which spring from an incoming single-player standalone version EA’s releasing to compensate.

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#dragonage EA hasn't been shy about blatantly saying that they're going to extend their big games across as many platforms as possible. The recent example Mass Effect Infiltrator on iOS—which links back to the console game via the mega-publisher's Origin online service—shows how EA probably wants this kind of thing to work in the future. An example of how they don't want things to work? Look no further than Dragon Age: Legends. More »

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. - BioWare, a division of Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS) today announced that Dragon Age Legends, EA's popular dark fantasy Play4Free RPG is now available on Google+. Developed by BioWare San Francisco (formerly EA 2D) Dragon Age Legends is available today and is the only gam...

#google Google's latest stab at building a social network, Google+, has (as expected) added games to its ever-growing list of services. And while it may boast many of the usual social games suspects, Google+ Games aims for more privacy and less pestering. More »

After early indications were discovered in Google Plus source code -- and after anyone ever looked at Google Plus and applied common sense -- we knew games would be available on the social network soon.

Today, Google began rolling out a small assortment of games, including the ubiquitous Angry Birds, EA2D's Dragon Age Legends, and sudoku. You know, Facebook stuff. A "Games" button at the top of your stream will take you to the available games, if the rollout has made it to your account. If it hasn't, Google says it will "soon."

Google's game implementation differs from Facebook in that game-related status updates are cordoned off into the "Games" page, so you can only see them when you are looking at game stuff. Unlike Facebook, you won't have to banish all your friends when they develop Zynga problems.

[Thanks, Dylan!]

#remix Dragon Age Legends developer EA2D turned over all of the assets to its Facebook strategy role-playing game to acclaimed Flash game developer Pixelante, and the action-packed Dragon Age Legends: Remix 01 is what they got back. More »

The animated spin-off to EA's epic franchise makes its debut!

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. - Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS) today announced that Dragon Age Legends, the ground-breaking Play4Free online RPG is now available to all Facebook users worldwide at http://apps.facebook.com/dragonagelegends. Dragon Age Legends, a collaboration between BioWare and EA's Pla...

At last, social game aficionados/haters have a new title to sink their teeth into/receive hundreds of unwanted Facebook invitations to: Dragon Age Legends. The network-connected strategy RPG lets players work together to complete quests, and earn equipment -- both in Legends and the recently released Dragon Age 2.

If you're feeling lost after loading up the game, you're not without options -- perhaps you could consult with one of the thousands of players who got in on the game's beta, which kicked off in January? We bet they know a thing or two about putting down Genlocks.

I’d heard decent things about EA’s Facebook-based Dragon Age side-project, Legends. I am scarcely free from cyncism about Facebook gaming in its current form – so uncomfortably dependent on building compulsive play then charging to continue immediately -but I by no means believe it won’t improve. I am always willing to look and see where it’s going.

A big license and the promise of deeper mechanics sounded like it might be taking the genre/platform somewhere newer. In a way, it does – but it’s also a large and frightening backwards step for roleplaying games. (more…)

Facebook games have quite the stigma they're not really games, they're boring, they're for moms who end up starving their children, etc. Dragon Age: Legends isn't like other Facebook titles because it's an actual game. You can catch up on the basics of Dragon Age: Legends here, but the gist ...

Participants in the Dragon Age Legends closed beta were promised special fancy exclusive armor once the game entered open beta. Let's have a look-see, shall we? Both sets of armor are usable across all three classes (warrior, rogue, mage); Jade Empire is usable at level 3, while the N7 armor requires level 7...

#facebook There are so many games on Facebook, and so few worth playing. But there's a new one based on the acclaimed Dragon Age universe. And it's made by a team led by Soren Johnson, who made a mighty fine version of Civilization (and is pretty good at solving the math problem of God). More »

Sci-fi hereo goes medieval.

We know the intention of this animated Dragon Age Legends trailer is to get us psyched up for the Facebook adaptation of BioWare's RPG franchise -- but instead, it just makes us super psyched for that Dragon Age anime that EA announced last year. Can we have that, please? Nowish?

The Dragon Age saga expands in this animated feature online.

#betawatch EA 2D's It's time to sign up for the closed beta for Dragon Age Legends, EA 2D's Facebook companion to Dragon Age II, where players can earn exclusive items for use in the console game. More »

A Facebook game made for gamers -- but will gamers accept it?

The franchise's second Facebook game aims to bring new depth.