Dragon Age: The Veilguard was a mixed release for fans. Some enjoyed the direction the game took after Inquisition, but others felt like it lacked depth in favour of storytelling. A report from Bloomberg has detailed the messy development cycle that the project went through during its ridiculously long time in the oven.
It seems that Dragon Age: The Veilguard was always meant to be a multiplayer, live service game. Right from the start, EA had envisioned the project as a small-scale, conventional RPG but with the rise of live service back in 2017, the studio mandated the team to shift development to a different kind of game.
So in 2017, Dragon Age: The Veilguard was shifted to a multiplayer, class-based RPG in order to cash in on the genre at the time. However, EA was also dealing with its own crisis in the form of Anthem – the forgotten disaster live-service shooter that did some real damage back in 2020.
At the time, EA thought it was cooking up two massive cash cows live service games in both Anthem and Veilguard. But Anthem completely bombed at launch. As a result of Anthem’s failure, EA decided to shift development on Dragon Age: The Veilguard back to a single-player RPG, meaning the studio had to completely rework the game to fit a narrative-driven experience.
It took two years for EA to get Dragon Age: The Veilguard shifted away from multiplayer to single-player after the game was already a single-player project to begin with back in 2015. Unfortunately, in 2022, an early playtest of the game was met with incredibly negative feedback from testers.
According to these testers, the 2022 build of Veilguard still kept its replayable missions, Overwatch-like mechanics, and characters that couldn’t die in the story in order to ensure they were always playable in missions and content.
So essentially, Dragon Age: The Veilguard lacked all the great features and mechanics which you’d expect from a BioWare RPG. As a result of this, BioWare brought on some Mass Effect team members in order to help get Veilguard in the right direction. However, this all happened in 2023, just two years before the game’s release.
The report claims that these Mass Effect team members overhauled much of the game’s mechanics and even created an entirely new ending. The script was also rewritten to be “less snarky”.
The result of all of this was a game that missed the mark for both EA and the fans. While EA has not commented on the actual sales of the game, the company stated that Veilguard was 50% lower than its expectations. No doubt that Veilguard ended up being a massive loss for EA in the end.
Bloomberg’s Doug Creutz has warned that EA might end up closing down BioWare as a result of its recent failures. He notes that BioWare has not had a good game release in over ten years now.
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