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.