A report has shed new light on Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s tumultuous development, and raised concerns about the future of BioWare.
In January, publisher EA said Dragon Age: The Veilguard had "underperformed" versus its expectations by around 50%, just days after the game's director Corrine Busche confirmed she was leaving the company. Meanwhile, other BioWare staff who worked on the game were laid off. In the same month, BioWare signalled it had released its final update for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, with no further content announced or expected.
IGN has reported on The Veilguard’s development before, detailing how it was rebooted from a single-player game into a live-service multiplayer game and back again. Now, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has revealed new insights into the goings on at BioWare during the making of The Veilguard, revealing exactly why it ended up disappointing some fans with a lack of meaningful choice and consequence — key qualities BioWare’s best games are best-known for.
Schreier revealed that many of The Veilguard’s issues were a hangover from the pivot from multiplayer back to single-player RPG, including its tone, dialogue, and lack of tough choices for the player. One tidbit stands out: BioWare was spooked by the failure of Square Enix’s Forspoken, worrying The Veilguard’s now out of fashion snarky tone would fuel a similar fate. So a “belated rewrite” of the game’s dialogue was ordered to “make it sound more serious.” This, in turn, resulted in tonal inconsistencies.
There were also internal concerns about how The Veilguard was being marketed (“an initial trailer made the next Dragon Age seem more like Fortnite than a dark fantasy role-playing game, triggering concerns that EA didn’t know how to market the game”).
EA declined to comment to Bloomberg on the piece.
The upshot of The Veilguard’s failure is that a small team is working on Mass Effect 5, but there are concerns about BioWare’s future. Dragon Age appears dead following the failure of The Veilguard, which when counting Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem is BioWare’s third flop in a row. Could EA close it down?
Bloomberg quoted TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz as saying that while EA needs more than sports to be successful, “if they shuttered the doors [of BioWare] tomorrow I wouldn’t be totally surprised. It has been over a decade since they produced a hit.”
Check out Bloomberg's piece for the full story.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
