Bioware has confirmed that Dragon Age: The Veilguard has reverted from the open world of Dragon Age Inquisition, back to a mission based structure.
As reported in an IGN preview, Bioware game director Corinne Busche said:
“Yeah, so it is a mission-based game. Everything is hand-touched, hand-crafted, very highly curated. We believe that’s how we get the best narrative experience, the best moment-to-moment experience.
However, along the way, these levels that we go to do open up, some of them have more exploration than others. Alternate branching paths, mysteries, secrets, optional content you’re going to find and solve. So it does open up, but it is a mission-based, highly curated game.”
On paper, it sounds like Bioware would be an ideal studio to transition from making traditional action RPGs to making open world games with those action RPG elements. But there are a lot of fans who didn’t like how the studio implemented open world structure in Dragon Age Inquisition, and they may have a point.
While Dragon Age Inquisition is the title with the most sales in the franchise so far, critical reception has pointed out that there were a lot of things lacking in their open world. In particular, reviewers felt that a lot of the content in that open world was filler, and lacking in real substance.
We do want to emphasize that many reviewers felt that Bioware was able to overall build those open worlds in Dragon Age Inquisition effectively. But in spite of that, there were other aspects of open worlds that they were not able to execute on as well.
Bioware does have this uncanny ability to make their worlds feel massive, even when they were really still mission based, with hubs to go around in. That’s credit to the studio’s propensity for world building, and they were able to pull this off before they tried making open worlds.
What Busche described above are those elements that do make it feel like those worlds were massive. So players will still get to find alternate paths, find secrets and hidden missions, with rewards that you won’t find otherwise.
And it goes to show you, as popular and successful open world games are as a genre, they still aren’t the only way to make video games in 2024. It will be better for Bioware, and the industry in general, that they’ve gone back to what made them famous, and hopefully other studios are able to take Bioware’s successful game design as inspiration for their own games.
