The wait for Bioware’s upcoming RPG is almost over, but whether it’ll be a success like past entries is a bit unclear. After all, what used to be called Dragon Age 4 is now “The Veilguard,” and it has a much different feeling than past entries did. One of the reasons for this is that Bioware spent years trying to make the game, and that led to several false starts, do-overs, and more. That isn’t just speculation, either; it’s words that come straight from the mouths of the Bioware team via a recent interview with IGN. In it, they revealed that one of the original versions of the 4th game was meant to be multiplayer-focused.
It’s true. Not only that, but this game would’ve focused less on a narrative just so people could do things like “repeatable quests.” There was still “a story” in the game, but as one of the team noted, it wasn’t the “pressure” that they felt they needed to live up to:
“Even when we were still more multiplayer-focused, we did still want to tell a story about Solas,” creative director John Epler revealed. “It just became a lot more challenging because, again, multiplayer games and single-player games have different pressures, have different needs as a project, as a story. And once you add other people’s perspectives into it, it becomes even more challenging.”
So, what led to the shift back to a single-player narrative-focused tale? Ironically, it was the global pandemic, which was a bit sad for some at Bioware for the simple reason that they had put some serious work and effort into the multiplayer title, only to have to start from scratch again—or, at least, mostly from scratch. The failed attempt led to some experience with the Frostbite Engine, and some “foundations” were kept for the new game.
Even with that reassurance, it does highlight how Dragon Age 4 almost became yet another franchise that steered away from its narrative roots to become a live-service title. One could easily guess that EA had a hand in attempting to make that happen, which could’ve resulted in yet another Bioware failure and fan outcry.
Bioware is aware of how fans feel about such live-service titles, which is why they enforced that this upcoming title isn’t anything like that:
“[The Veilguard is] not a multiplayer game, it’s not microtransactions, it’s an offline game,” general manager Gary McKay made clear. “These are all the things that we really wanted to return to what we feel would be a successful game.”
