I love Dragon Age. Everyone who reads Seasoned Gaming content or watches the podcast I co-host, The X Button, knows that. So, the announcement of BioWare’s restructuring on January 29, 2025, the decision to lay off the vast majority of the creative minds (i.e., writers) who were not working on the next Mass Effect, and the relocation of the rest of the Dragon Age team to either Mass Effect or elsewhere within EA, for the ones that weren’t laid off, hit me really hard when I heard the news. I’ve seen a lot of the DA community blaming Electronic Arts, the series’ publisher and owner, for what happened, and I’m not here to argue EA didn’t play a major role in it. EA fired the gun, absolutely, but I’m not entirely convinced that EA bought the bullets or loaded the gun.
I believe that BioWare, itself, is at least partially culpable for the mess and for what happened to them, but how much more or less in comparison to EA, I cannot say for certain as I wasn’t on the inside. What I can say, as a longtime fan and, dare I say, expert of Dragon Age, after playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard, I’m not surprised by this outcome, despite my overall love of the game. And I need to be clear, I’m not talking about the nonsense hate that the game had before launch due to the ability to pick your pronouns or any of that; I’m speaking as someone who played and reviewed the game that was before me.
I mentioned in my review that there was a litany of mistakes made by the developers wherein I was primarily focused on the combat and how I never felt a throughline between Veilguard and any prior DA game. I stand by that: despite how enjoyable the combat could be and how new players who hadn’t enjoyed the gameplay of the prior entries may be swept into the game because of it, it was a mistake. It was an error to try the “mass appeal” action-heavy approach to combat instead of continuing the path of the more successful games: a tactical, or tactical/action-hybrid approach. The question becomes: why was this the decision? Was it EA’s call? Or BioWare’s? I would argue, both.
BioWare’s first version of Dragon Age 4, Joplin, was a single-player game, and it was scrapped pretty early in development by mandate of EA to make a live-service, multiplayer game. So, BioWare made Morrison, which was exactly what EA had demanded. Then, EA decided to allow BioWare to swap back to a single-player game. BioWare chose to use the remains of Morrison’s newly dead husk instead of going back to basics. I’m sure that BioWare was given a time and a budget and made this decision to try to accommodate that, but I believe that was a bad decision. “What was the alternative?” you may ask. The alternative was simple: back to basics with a smaller scale game, wherein you could redo the combat from the Morrison live-service from scratch but tell a smaller story in a smaller setting. Veilguard already did a lot of things reminiscent of Dragon Age 2, except for the setting. Reducing the scale to 3 or 4 handcrafted locations instead of the 10 or so in Veilguard could have re-balanced the resources to focus on the gameplay system to bring it in line with Inquisition.
However, that wouldn’t be the only benefit of that decision. Reducing the scale would also allow better integration of the companions into the story being told, allowing the interjections during cut-scenes that even DA2 had while allowing freedom to talk at will (which DA2 lacked). Allowing the player to speak to the companions, to get to know them, would have appealed to the fanbase of the game who care about the relationships between the party on a deeper level, rather than the surface-level interactions found in Veilguard. The choice to keep the skeleton of Morrison and twist it into Veilguard, necromancy-style, is found throughout, including the lack of 3 companions, lack of party control, and lack of distinct skill trees. And all of that was BioWare’s choice, not EA.
It was also BioWare’s choice to approach the writing in the way that it did. There’s a lot of criticism of the writing out there, but I think that the critics are missing the mark. The game is not badly written (most of the time), it’s narrowly written. There is nothing wrong with having a positive, upbeat Rook who loves everyone and is welcoming and kind; the issue was he was always that way, no matter the dialogue options you chose. Prior entries, which were written by mostly the same writing team, had a breadth of responses, of tones, of attitudes that the protagonist could take, that the companions could represent. Yes, there was always the goodie-two-shoes Alistair, but there was also the stern Sten, the brooding Fenris, the laissez-faire Iron Bull, and the witty Varric. Veilguard lacks that variety, which is not a commentary on the quality of the writing but the choices made in the writers’ room about what kind of people to make the cast of characters.
I took a lot of issue when I first heard the analogy that “Veilguard feels as though it was written with HR in the room” because it was coupled with criticism of bad writing. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it’s actually fairly accurate, once I decoupled it from saying the writing was bad and replaced it with my criticism that the writing is narrow. It does feel that way because it feels like someone sat there and said, “You can only write positive things that make everyone feel good about themselves.” They wrote a bunch of good (and some bad) lines that fit that category, but on the spectrum of personalities, that leaves out a lot of variety and makes characters feel dull.
Even characters that should be inherently interesting, like Taash, feel dull because the writers chose to make the fire-breathing horned humanoid’s main story about the character’s gender identity instead of, you know, the whole fire-breathing thing. And that’s not to say the story doesn’t deserve to exist, but how do you make a gender identity story more interesting? Maybe you let Rook be a jerk about it, and you allow Taash to feel bad, and then you have another character chime in and call Rook out, causing team-wide strife. Maybe Rook is confused when Taash is talking about it and makes jokes, angering Taash, and there’s a dispute. If you insist on making a story about a topic the public at large would deem controversial, approach it from all angles so when you finally send the message, it feels natural. BioWare knows how to do this; they did it with Dorian in Inquisition, giving the Inquisitor a chance to ask questions, to be confused, and the like. If it’s going to be done, do it like that instead of ham-fisted with only one path, even if you’re going to require a certain outcome. And maybe focus more on the fire-breathing.
It was BioWare’s decision to approach the writing like that, to remove even the illusion of choice from the conversations (and it could be argued that maybe the outcomes don’t all need to be the same, positive ending), where you can tell that it didn’t matter what you selected; Rook was going to be upbeat. And so, you’re going to anger the fans who like to see those negative outcomes, the “renegade” route, even if it’s just in Let’s Play form because most people don’t choose the bad options. You’re going to make the game feel shallow, hollow, when you’re not watching the big set pieces and experiencing the lore dumps.
Finally, BioWare chose the art style, they chose to smooth out the Qunari’s faces, they chose the plastic doll look, the cartoony appearance of the Darkspawn and demons. They made a beautiful world, and the environments are gorgeous, but that is the background, not the foreground. Players are looking at closeups of characters and focusing on enemies, not examining the environments most of the time, so the beauty of the locations is going to be overshadowed. From the beginning of the marketing, people had expressed concerns, but some, like myself, could wave it off, deciding that just because it looked bad in the initial marketing, it could still look incredible in the end. I was wrong, in part, and I can admit that.
Somehow, BioWare managed to take just about every misstep and make just about every bad choice they could make. The lore nerd fans and the Solavellans got their solace in a satisfying ending for Solas and the huge reveals, myself included as a lore nerd. But to the casual fan, the one who’s not watching lore videos or who has played the franchise multiple times, BioWare’s choices turned those people off. Those people, the ones who made the prior entry sell 12 million copies, are the reason why EA had a reasonable expectation of 3 million and sold (or “interacted with”) 1.5 million by the end of the fiscal quarter. EA set its expectations around the pedigree of the studio with the precedent of prior releases.
So, yes, Electronic Arts is the one who laid off the team members and who shifted people around the company as best they could. And yes, EA was responsible for the abandonment of Joplin and the bones of Morrison used to make Veilguard, and EA set its sales expectations. But EA didn’t choose a scale that was ill-suited for the budget, forcing the game to use those Morrison bones. EA didn’t force the writers to write narrow characters with only one worldview, despite the horrors going on around them, leading to characters whose potential was untapped. EA didn’t select the art style that would scare off people from the outset or set sales expectations that were unjustifiable. BioWare made those choices, and BioWare’s choices led to those results. EA may have pulled the trigger, but BioWare loaded the gun.
Veilguard had different writing team original lead gone most of old writers gone so it is impossible to replicate the old writing
It was the loss of talented and experienced writers like David Gaider and Mary Kirby that really ruined dragon age, the new writers were too inexperienced and politically biased and clearly had no respect for source material, the character design artists were also terrible as every character looked ugly , especially the qunari, and even the UI was designed badly, too purple and shiny, like a pride parade or some shit. Whole game was a mess. Bioware proved it has no idea how to make a successful game anymore, they might as well change the name because all the talent clearly vacated the studio years ago.