Bioware has managed to pull off quite a coup for Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
They made this announcement on the official Dragon Age Twitter account:
“We’re making great progress towards our fall launch date, and can confirm early that #DragonAge: The Veilguard is going all-in on @Steam features!
We’re verified on Steam Deck.
We’ll be Steam native – meaning the EA App will not be required to play the game.”
The Steam page for Dragon Age: The Veilguard shows that it will still require that you agree to a custom end user license agreement for the game. This may still not satisfy some fans on how much ownership they have for the game. But based on what Bioware have stated, the EULA should not be an impediment to it being playable on the Steam Deck.
It certainly makes one wonder why Bioware’s parent company EA agreed to this arrangement. Did they feel that they had to waive it for this title to better Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s chances of success? Or is this more about Bioware convincing EA that this was the right thing to do?
Maybe getting Steam Deck verification was a factor in this decision. Thus far, many major titles on Steam are not compatible on Steam Deck, because of various DRM applied to the games.
Now, contrary to what some Steam Deck fans may think, that isn’t the only reason some games can’t run on the Deck. For example, Bioware’s very own Dragon Age: Inquisition can’t run on the platform, and as the modding community found out, this is actually because the game doesn’t have controller support on Steam.
Fans had to figure out how to map controller support, and then set up Dragon Age: Inquisition so that it can load up on a Steam Deck completely, including EA logins. If you are curious about how this turned out, you can read a guide here.
This could be a hopeful sign for future EA published games to come to the Steam Deck, but it also could be a signal other developers take to also put the extra work in to get their games Steam Deck Verified. We don’t know if the Steam Deck will become the dominant platform for Steam games in the future, but developers should work on it to make their fans happy anyway.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is coming this year to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows, with standalone versions coming to both Steam and the EA App.
