According to this report, the next Dragon Age title (so far secretively referred to only as "The Next Thing") will feature an open world.

This follows months of fan feedback, during which one point which continued to emerge was that many players thought Dragon Age II was too small and isolated. BioWare developers have said that the next Dragon Age title will be on a larger scale than the second installment, and have also mentioned in the past that they are "aggressively" checking out Skyrim, the hugely successful open-world RPG.

Despite this, the report is unconfirmed and has little reliability, so should be taken with a (considerably large) pinch of salt.