Summary
Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s commercial underperformance has had a substantial impact onBioWare, a studio which saw much of its staff laid off or permanently relocated in the wake of The Veilguard’s release.
Electronic Arts rather infamously forced the Dragon Age team to make the next instalment of Dragon Age into a live-service title. This project was codenamed Morrison. However, the high-profile failure of Anthem softened EA’s resolve, and the publisher allowed BioWare to pivot back to a single-player title: the game that would eventually become Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
However, the team was only given a year and a half to complete the project, meaning they would be forced to re-use a lot of the work that had been invested in the multiplayer iteration of Dragon Age.
The result was an RPG with very limited decision-making, as the core of the game was designed around replaying the same missions with the same characters, rather than progressing the story in any meaningful way.
Last Minute Additions
According to a report fromBloomberg, this resulted in a haphazard end product where the game’s major choices were shoehorned in at the last minute to make the game feel more BioWare-y. These additions came on the back of playtest feedback, where players complained that the RPG lacked meaningful decision-making and reactivity.
“The game’s biggest problem, early players agreed, was a lack of satisfying choices and consequences,” the report reads. “Previous BioWare titles had presented players with gut-wrenching decisions. Which allies to save? Which factions to spare? Which enemies to slay? Such dilemmas made fans feel like they were shaping the narrative — historically, a big draw for many BioWare games.”
“BioWare delayed the game’s release again while the team shoehorned in a few major decisions, such as which of two cities to save from a dragon attack,” the report continues. “But because most of the parameters were already well established, the designers struggled to pair the newly retrofitted choices for players with meaningful consequences downstream.”
I’d like to take this opportunity to reiterate my displeasure at the mighty Tevinter Imperium performing as poorly against a dragon attack as a defenceless merchant town without a standing army. I wish I could explain that to Neve, but she’s not returning my calls.
The rest of the report details how members of the Mass Effect team were recruited to try and fix some of the inherent problems with Dragon Age: The Veilguard, leading to more internal tension within BioWare.
BioWare is currently working on Mass Effect 5 with a smaller team of under thirty employees, while much of the Dragon Age team has been laid off or relocated to other EA-owned studios.
