The history of Dragon Age The Veilguard is long, complicated, and full of interference on multiple fronts. The biggest interference, as we would find out, was from Electronic Arts, who tried to change the beloved narrative-driven single-player title into a live-service game, following the trend that many other developers and publishers have done. Oh, and EA are “masters” of the microtransaction, so that didn’t help things. However, after certain live-service failures within Bioware, EA allowed them to shift back to their” original style,” just with a “few tweaks,” and the results were…divisive, to say the least. The game didn’t sell that well, and we still don’t know how well it sold overall.
Did that stop EA’s boss, Andrew Wilson, from saying that the game would’ve done better if it had live-service elements? Nope! That’s pretty much exactly what he said in a recent financial briefing, which got the ire of many gamers, and one former head of Bioware. That would be Mike Laidlaw, who’s currently with Yellow Brick Games, and he went onto Blue Sky to note just how flawed the logic of EA’s statement was:
“Look, I’m not a fancy CEO guy, but if someone said to me “the key to this successful single-player IP’s success is to make it purely a multiplayer game. No, not a spin off: fundamentally change the DNA of what people loved about the core game” to me, I’d probably, like, quit that job or something.”
Fans were absolutely behind him on Blue Sky, calling out what Electronic Arts said. Others from Bioware or were “in on the joke of his leaving Bioware” complimented him on his words.
The point here is that Dragon Age The Veilguard didn’t fail because it wasn’t a live-service title. It’d be rather easy to argue that if the game HAD been that, it would’ve failed even harder! Instead, the reason the RPG failed was because of various decisions within Bioware and EA about how the game should look and play, which changed it from how things were before. Bioware had the formula to keep improving the quality of the game, as the last entry was a “Game of the Year” winner! All they had to do was go back to that and build off it. Instead, to the chagrin of gamers, they went on a different path and made something that ignored much of the lore of previous games until the very end and didn’t play like things did before.
Thanks to all of this, it’s hard to see the franchise having a true future.
