It appears that Electronic Arts has no one but itself to blame for the “underperformance” of BioWare’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard. A new report from Bloomberg News detailing the game’s tumultuous development alleges that for the last decade, BioWare’s storied Dragon Age development team was subject to major development pivots that doomed the game after a failed stint at turning the series into a live service multiplayer franchise.
According to the report, The Veilguard began life as a single-player follow-up to Dragon Age: Inquisition in 2015, was converted into a live-service game in 2017, then turned back into a single-player game in 2020, leading to a nearly 10-year development cycle that astronomically inflated the game’s budget. The pivot away from live service wasn’t an inherent death knell for the game—but sources speaking to Bloomberg said EA didn’t give the Dragon Age development team time to manage the transition.
The team was only given “a year and a half” to convert the fourth Dragon Age game back into a single-player story-driven game—a hellacious feat that normally would have required a proper period of preproduction to lay out a new “vision” for development. Developers reportedly worried the short runway and the multiplayer framework—which limited the scope of the series’ trademark branching narrative choices—”limited” their ability to cook up new stories and quests.
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Feedback from a 2022 alpha test of The Veilguard verified those fears. In 2023, developers from BioWare’s Mass Effect series were brought in to haul the game over the finish line—a process hampered by culture clashes between the two teams.
Mass layoffs and the SAG-AFTRA strike further bound BioWare’s hands. All these constraints make it impressive that The Veilguard debuted to an impressive CCU count on Steam and “generally favorable” scores from players and reviewers.
EA’s Dragon Age debacle seems entirely driven by reactions to other video games
From start to finish, Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s development seems to have been shaped by how EA and BioWare leadership reacted to the performance of other games.
After Inquisition, then-executive producer Mark Darrah and creative director Mike Laidlaw began work on a “smaller-scale” single-player Dragon Age game, but EA executives press-ganged the studio (which was not experienced in making these kind of games) into becoming a live service multiplayer developer to chase recurring revenue like the kind generated by Overwatch and Destiny 2, eventually leading to the disastrous release of Anthem in 2019. Anthem ‘s poor sales and revenue eventually led to BioWare repeatedly canceling plans to add new content to the game.
This, and ongoing turbulence in developing a live service Dragon Age game, drove the pivot back to single-player.
After the Mass Effect development team joined the project, leads from that series joined alpha testers in complaining about The Veilguard’s “snarky” dialogue, comparing it to the Square Enix third-person action game Forspoken, which was panned in part for its banter-heavy dialogue. BioWare leadership then apparently ordered a massive rewrite of The Veilguard’s dialogue to remove content written in mind for the live service vision of Dragon Age.
Ultimately developers on Dragon Age seem to have suffered under leadership that wouldn’t—or couldn’t—settle on a clear vision for what a Dragon Age game should be. Many of those developers were unceremoniously laid off or shifted to other studios at EA three months after The Veilguard’s release.