Speaking on the commercial failure of Bioware’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard, EA CEO Andrew Wilson has stated that the 2024 Action RPG could not “resonate with a broad enough audience.” During an investor-centered financial call, Wilson stated that the role-playing games catering to the players of the current generation of Gaming needs “shared-world features and deeper engagement alongside high-quality narratives”.
“In order to break out beyond the core audience, games need to directly connect to the evolving demands of players who increasingly seek shared-world features and deeper engagement alongside high-quality narratives in this beloved category,” Wilson stated.
“Dragon Age had a high-quality launch and was well-reviewed by critics and those who played. However, it did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market.”
It definitely seems that according to him, if Dragon Age: The Veilguard had more ‘shared-world features’ along with ‘deeper engagement’ then it would’ve sold significantly better. But what’s interesting is that all of those features had been a staple of the Dragon Age series of games right up until The Veilguard, which completely removed the ‘World State’ aspect along with the option to load the savegames from your playthroughs of the earlier titles, as well as the immensely rich character narratives which have also been toned down drastically from the earlier games in the series.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard had attempted to be a ‘soft-reboot’ for the series, cutting off most of it’s narrative ties to the earlier games as well as removing several key characteristics that were a part of the core identity of the previous titles. And this was clearly met with disdain from a large part of the fan base which is likely the cause behind the lower-than-expected sales numbers of Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
But a large part of the fan base hold EA and the company’s range of control over Bioware as directly responsible for many of the aforementioned choices that helped shaped Dragon Age: The Veilguard. So it seems the game’s financial failure is, by a large part, actually more due to EA than Bioware.
In other news of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, developer Bioware is currently under 100 employees following many layoffs and Staff exits due to the ‘restructuring’ process that the studio went through which was driven by EA. While EA has stated that none of it will affect the next Mass Effect game which is currently in development, it does feel particularly poignant for the future of Dragon Age, and for all fans of the decade-long epic fantasy series of RPG’s.
