Dragon Age: Veilguard development struggled after EA forced, then reversed live-service shift

[midian182]

In brief: Dragon Age: The Veilguard's legacy will likely be as the game that ended the once-beloved franchise. While it wasn't a disaster, Veilguard attracted around half the number of players EA expected, leading to mass layoffs and the company's share price falling. Now, a report has shed some light on what happened: Veilguard became a money-making live-service game during development before pivoting back to a single-player title.

According to a report by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, Veilguard started out as an epic, single-player RPG, just like the previous Dragon Age titles, in 2015.

But in 2017, EA's leadership saw the popularity of live-service multiplayer games like Destiny and thought "more money" (probably), so the decision was made in 2017 to turn Veilguard into a live service title – BioWare was already working on Anthem at the time.

Anthem, which also had a troubled development, had a terrible launch in 2019, leading to BioWare canceling plans to release new content. This, along with the problems the devs were having trying to turn Veilguard into a live-service game, led to a switch back to a single-player game in 2020.

According to Schreier's sources, EA didn't give the Dragon Age team enough time to manage this transition, allowing them a year and a half to turn the game back into a single-player experience.

The lack of preproduction, short development time, and the fact that the multiplayer-focused elements had been put in place meant the developers' ability to create new stories, quests, and branching narratives was "limited."

Following an alpha test of Veilguard in 2022, developers from BioWare's Mass Effect team were brought in to help address some of the game's issues and help finish it. But the two groups reportedly clashed over internal politics. With layoffs and the SAG-AFTRA strike exacerbating the problems, Veilguard certainly had what you would call a difficult development.

The Veilguard might have received mostly positive reviews from critics upon launch, but many players weren't as enamored – as illustrated by its Metacritic and Steam user ratings.

In January, EA revealed that Veilguard had 1.5 million players, not unit sales, in its first two months – half what the company was expecting. The numbers played a part in EA's shares falling 20% at the time.

Last month, Alix Wilton Regan, who played the female Inquisitor in both Dragon Age: Inquisition and Dragon Age: The Veilguard, said hate for the latter came from those people who only wanted to see the game, or developer BioWare, fail.

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Dragon Age: Veilguard development struggled after EA forced, then reversed live-service shift

 

[Cocojambo13]

"Alix Wilton Regan, who played the female Inquisitor in both Dragon Age: Inquisition and Dragon Age: The Veilguard, said hate for the latter came from those people who only wanted to see the game, or developer BioWare, fail."

yea, that's a BS excuse.

 

[bviktor]

Added managerial value.

 

[m4a4]

Naw, a convenient half-truth at best. It was clearly mismanagement and poor hires (especially at the top) since before the game went into production. The writing was on the wall since the end of ME3.

Even if they had more time to make the game work, it was never going to be a proper DA game with the directions they went (it's still laughable how cartoony it is). The leadership who made it feel like DA left long ago, replaced by less talented people; the types of people who would blame the customer instead of doing some introspection.

As I said before, the old Bioware is long gone.

 

[AnilD]

It’s honestly impressive the devs managed to ship anything coherent after two full design pivots and a year and a half to undo live-service baggage. Leadership decisions sunk this one long before it hit shelves.

 

[fadingfool]

As a former Bioware and Dragon age fan (my games library includes all the classics) - nope I did not want Veilguard to fail. I wanted it to be a good dark fantasy game carrying on the tradition of Origins. The first trailer that came out showed it to be a Marvel Heist movie with outdated intro tropes that wouldn't look out of place in borderlands 3. Latter reveals showed more shallow nonsense with caricatures instead of characters and a plot line that abandoned all the previous law and impactful decisions. It was a mobile game with a dragon age skin. I didn't even bother to add it to my Playstation Essentials collection.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

It’s honestly impressive the devs managed to ship anything coherent after two full design pivots and a year and a half to undo live-service baggage. Leadership decisions sunk this one long before it hit shelves.

-This seems to be the unfortunate trend with Bioware (and EA as a whole). All of their games from the last 10-15 years all seem to go through a development hell with multiple pivots in not only things like plot but whole *** gameplay systems and genres.

On one hand it's impressive that anything gets shipped at all in a playable state, on the other hand just accept that Bioware is a AA RPG dev and let them cook.

The fact that EA had the god damn Star Wars license as an exclusive for 11 years and we never got a KOTOR 3 (or equivalent) despite them owning Bioware as well really goes to show how out of touch they are.

 

[Eldrach]

The graphics style in Veilguard never bothered me - it was the complete pivot from a deep rpg to what you can only call «juvenile fantasy» that bothered me the most during my playthrough.
They basically dropped all the rich lore and character development in favor of writing that felt like it was meant to be enjoyed by a 13 year old that didn’t like reading books.

 

[Gezzer]

I stopped buying EA games after the SIMcity reboot.

I just got so tired of trying to play games designed by committee with no intention of being a good fun game. Sorry I lied, a buddy at work convinced me that an upcoming game was going to be good because EA/Bioware knew they'd screwed up and this game was going to be different. The game? Anthem...

IMHO part of the problem especially with large studio/developers/publishers is too many people with the power to make important decisions don't play games. Any games. They think that pumping out products should make them tons of money, simply because it's a game and we're "gamers".

Every great game made in the last 5-10 years were made by people that love video games. BG3 and Expedition 33 are perfect examples. Same with movie/series adaptations. Borderlands movie sucked and the Fallout series was great. Why? Because one was made by people with no connection to games the other by people who knew the game.

Is it really that hard to figure that out? Really?!?