Bloomberg’s Jason Schreir has shared new insights on the internal struggles during Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s development period, while indicating that many of the divisive elements in the action RPG was largely the result of EA’s decisions rather than Bioware. According to the report, a lot of Dragon Age: Veilguard’s issues actually come from the game being shifted into a single player RPG after it was in development for years as a multiplayer-only, live service title, courtesy of EA. This jarring transition of Veilguard is the single most glaring reason of nearly all of the game’s problems, ranging from poorly written dialogues to many of it’s narrative beats.
After three entire games made in the span of nearly a decade, the decision to make the fourth entry of Dragon Age as an online live service title shows a shocking lack of understanding from EA, towards both the long running RPG series to it’s player base. And Dragon Age: Veilguard suffered for this in many ways and had it been true to it’s roots, both the game and the studio’s fate could have been severely different from what they are now.
Schreier also revealed the highly inconsistent and often poorly executed dialogue in Dragon Age: Veilguard is the result of a complete rewrite that happened late in the game’s development after Bioware got nervous with the failure of Square Enix’s Forspoken, and thought the snarky tone of the game would feel out of fashion in the current era of gaming. And thus, a “belated rewrite” was done in order to “make it sound more serious”, which is the reason behind the tonal inconsistencies that show up in the game’s dialogue at many instances.
Dragon Age fans or a part of the fanbase has also apologized to Bioware online after the new Bloomberg report, as now it’s clear to see that it wasn’t Bioware but EA who has influenced Veilguard into what it is today.
Dragon Age: Veilguard came out on 31 October 2024 for the Playstation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC.
