The Veilguard’ Failure, Raises Questions About Bioware’s Future

If there’s a AAA game that bombs hard in the market, you can bet that Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier will eventually figure out why that happened. And now Schreier has just published his post-mortem on what went on with Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the 2024 release that only got half the players EA wanted, resulted in mass layoffs, and appears to have killed the IP altogether.

Some of this has been known to some extent, some is definitely new. I highly recommend you read the whole piece here.

One throughline is something we’ve heard about in bits and pieces before. Because development on Dragon Age: The Veilguard spanned 10 years, it got caught up in live service/multiplayer trend-chasing.

When the game was being conceived, of course, the idea was to make it another traditional single-player RPG. But as games like Destiny were starting to take off, multiplayer games rose in popularity. So, there was a pivot to that format. Then, later, when it wasn’t working, they had to pivot back to a regular RPG but without being able to start over, just hammering the multiplayer stuff to try to fit into the single-player mold again.

The result of that was a mish-mash of pieces that were pulled from both types of games. Other issues compounded this, like the change in tone to be more “snarky” than the series had been traditionally, and a lack of significant choices. Things like the big “which city to save” choice was jammed into the game late in production.

There are also segments about how BioWare brought in Mass Effect team members to try and salvage what had become a mess, but there was only so much they could do.

The end result of all this is harrowing. The piece ends with Cowen analyst Doug Creutz saying, “[I]f they shuttered the doors tomorrow I wouldn’t be totally surprised. It has been over a decade since they produced a hit.”

That’s true. It really has been since Dragon Age: Inquisition, given that Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda were in the middle. Now, The Veilguard is another miss. As big as Anthem? Perhaps not, but it did kill a brand that BioWare had worked on since 2009. If the next Mass Effect game does not land (which still does not have a release date), Cowen may be right, and there’s little reason to think that EA would want to keep the now miss-producing studio in operation.

Check out Jason’s full piece here, which has a lot more detail on the situation. I can’t say I’m surprised about any of this. Even if I personally liked the game more than most, it was easy to see the overall reception after release was poor, and clearly something had gone wrong in development. Many things, it turns out.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.