Dragon Age: The Veilguard was supposed to be the game that brought back the iconic franchise to life. Unfortunately, due to a number of reasons, it failed to generate hype and couldn’t reach its financial expectations.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is considered one of the biggest flops of 2024. (Image via EA)
According to EA’s CEO Andrew Wilson, The Veilguard was a financial failure because it didn’t feature any kind of live-service components. However, if the company takes a look at Larian’s approach with Baldur’s Gate 3, it would’ve been a profitable single-player title.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard should have followed Baldur’s Gate 3
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While speaking in a recent BlueSky thread, the original writer and creator of Dragon Age, David Gaider, addressed EA’s quarterly earnings call, where the company stated that The Veilguard didn’t set in with the audience due to a lack of live-service elements that led to it missing sales expectations.
Gaider explores the idea that the RPG would’ve performed better if it was a live-service game. While admitting that he can see how EA’s top executives might come to see live services as an obvious trend to change, he doesn’t believe Dragon Age should head in that direction.
Gaider also advises EA to recognize the deep love fans have for one of the best IPs and focus on what made it so popular in the first place. According to him, EA must look at Larian Studio’s approach for Baldur’s Gate 3, as even though it wasn’t a live service slop, it broke records upon records in the industry.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the best RPGs we’ve seen in the last couple of decades. Even though it was released two years ago, it’s still going strong, and there’s a reason behind it. Larian’s developers wanted to make a game that they would themselves play. The studio wasn’t chasing market shares or looking to achieve target sales.
That’s not how things are with Dragon Age: The Veilguard. EA kept on interfering with adding and then removing live-service elements to chase trends and make profits. When the constant disturbance in development backfired, and the game failed to hit sales targets, the blame was passed on to BioWare.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard creators have left BioWare
The team behind the latest Dragon Age game has been fired. (Image via EA)
Due to the failure of the latest Dragon Age game, EA has decided to make massive changes within developer BioWare. Among the most shocking of these is the loss of the entire studio’s writing team for The Veilguard, including lead writer Patrick Weekes.
Weekes recently announced his departure from BioWare on BlueSky. It’s quite sad to see that developers behind the studio who gave some of the best games in the genre being treated like this by EA.
With all this chaos, one might think that the upcoming Mass Effect 5 would surely take a hit with all these losses. However, that won’t be the case according to BioWare executive producer Michael Gamble, who has assured gamers that his team is still working hard on the next chapter in the Mass Effect series.
Gamble hasn’t said much about the details of Mass Effect 5 or the studio itself right now but has confirmed that the title is in the pre-production stages. Only time will tell how these layoffs affect BioWare’s work on Mass Effect 5 in the long run.
With that said, do you think Dragon Age: The Veilguard should have been a live-service game? Let us know in the comments below.
