Is this the end of Dragon Age? Veilguard was good, but BioWare needed an all-timer, and I’m nervous about what’s next

Dragon Age: The Veilguard did not sell well. At least not well enough for publisher Electronic Arts. Three months out from launch, The Veilguard missed its sales target by “nearly 50%,” 1.5 million players versus a projected 3 million. The Veilguard reviewed well (well enough, in our case), but has sold worse than BioWare’s notorious live service flop, Anthem. Now the future of a studio that was once synonymous with triple-A RPGs is more in doubt than at any point in its post-Inquisition wilderness era.

I find myself inclined to make excuses for a developer I have a lot of fondness for, one that had to release an embattled, twice-rebooted sequel that had long since gone from “eagerly anticipated” to “annoyingly MIA.” Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a good game despite its winding, arduous road to our PCs, but that just hasn’t cut it. With EA marking it down as a flop, I’m now wondering if this is it for Dragon Age, and whether the big BioWare comeback we’ve been hoping for is even possible as it moves onto the next Mass Effect.

3 million players engaged

One of my immediate thoughts was that 3 million sales was somehow an unattainable figure for The Veilguard to hit⁠—the damn suits moving the goalposts on honest artists once again! On Bluesky, industry analyst Mat Piscatela wrote that “sometimes sales targets are adjusted to account for longer or more expensive development than were originally planned for, even if everyone involved in the adjusting know that the resulting target is outlier/unreasonable.”

But forget about recent megahits like Cyberpunk, Baldur’s Gate, or Elden Ring: Looking at EA and BioWare’s history of singleplayer games, The Veilguard’s performance strikes me as pretty dire. A particularly damning comparison is Anthem, which undersold a 6 million unit target with 5 million copies moved by the end of its first month and a half after launch. Jedi: Fallen Order, the game that convinced EA to give singleplayer another chance after its dalliance with live service, sold 8 million units in three months. The reason for the season, Dragon Age: Origins, hit 3.2 million in four months back in the day.

The Veilguard underperformed compared to prior Dragon Age games⁠—BioWare’s best-selling series, with Inquisition racking up 11 million players according to former studio producer Mark Darrah⁠—as well as EA’s other recent big swing singleplayer games, despite positive reviews and being attached to an established, popular series. There are a few factors I think we can point to that really hurt the game.

Low approval

One I’m worried will get overblown in the coming days by both triumphal right-wingers and self-conscious liberal gamers is some kind of tedious “go woke go broke” parable based on The Veilguard’s much-publicized trans and nonbinary representation. My personal politics aside, I don’t think that’s a critical part of this story, YouTube videos titled something like “Dragon Age: The Veilguard: A Woke Nightmare?” clogging my search results when I’m looking for Nightmare-difficulty gameplay videos notwithstanding.

BioWare has always been the socially progressive RPG studio. Mass Effect’s Bush-era fashy militarism aside, BioWare has prioritized LGBTQ representation in particular for more than 20 years, with a furtive stab at a lesbian romance in 2003’s Knights of the Old Republic quietly vetoed by LucasArts.

I’m old enough to remember people freaking out about Anders hitting on them in Dragon Age 2, which still sold, as well as Inquisition’s major trans character and a conversion therapy plotline. The Veilguard struck me as awkward and polemical by comparison, but I think that’s more an indictment of its general writing quality than any political agenda. Meanwhile, in terms of identity politics and representation, the ideological Venn diagram of The Veilguard and beloved megahit RPG Baldur’s Gate 3 is basically a circle.

The culture war rage is just one facet of an overall inauspicious narrative surrounding the game. The Veilguard was rebooted twice in development, renamed once, saw the departure of multiple big-name developers closely associated with the inception of the franchise, and arrived almost 10 years to the date after the prior entry in the series. The Veilguard needed to be an unambiguous all-timer to transcend BioWare’s bruised reputation. It turned out fine⁠ in the critical consensus—pretty good overall, I’d argue⁠—but not a return to the glory days.

Who is this for?

In a lot of ways, The Veilguard feels like a soft reboot for the series: Fewer returning characters than in Dragon Age 2 or Inquisition, minimal choices carried over, and a fresh cast in a new corner of the world. This was a bet on attracting new players, with an assumption that series fans would still be along for the ride.

That’s not necessarily a mistake or a failing in a vacuum⁠—Baldur’s Gate 3 wasn’t harmed by a lack of grounding in the Bhaalspawn Saga or some kind of interoperability with the goddamn Infinity Engine⁠—but Veilguard inhabits a far more awkward middle ground. That didn’t hamper prior BioWare games like Inquisition or Mass Effect 3 that were mired in series lore, but Veilguard clearly wasn’t able to attract a substantial new audience.

As for Dragon Age faithful, I can only speak anecdotally, but everyone in my life has been circumspect of or outright hostile to The Veilguard: PC Gamer’s own Dragon Age likers have been put off by its art style, its combat, its storytelling, and its breaking of the chain of choices between Origins, Dragon Age 2, and Inquisition. My friends and loved ones have similarly expressed that Veilguard felt removed from the games that got them into the series, resolving them to an “I’ll get it on sale” attitude.

The Veilguard managed to be the worst of both worlds, failing to bring back series fans while also not capturing any significant new audience with its compromises in approachability. I think there’s a huge appetite for RPGs in the BioWare or CD Projekt mold, but the genre’s also come a long way in the past ten years. Strong overall reviews failed to overcome a general perception of a cursed development, “sick man” status for BioWare, and a marketing cycle that broke the relative silence of years of tedious, cryptic teasers with a less than inspiring first trailer.

BioWashed?

BioWare was an industry juggernaut, and its run from 2007 to 2014 in particular is insane to look back on: The entirety of the mainline Dragon Age and Mass Effect trilogies, all out in seven years. Oh, and The Old Republic MMO too, just for good measure. We’re in a very different industry now, and the studio’s internal difficulties with a “BioWare Magic“-touting crunch culture and confused development on Mass Effect: Andromeda are well-documented.

Still, I don’t think things had to turn out as bad as they did: I find myself contemplating the cancellation of “Joplin,” the original pitch for Dragon Age 4, as a major turning point. It was scrapped in favor of a live service-oriented Dragon Age that would then be retooled into The Veilguard when EA realized that maybe live service-ifying everything wasn’t a good idea. Even if Andromeda and Anthem still turned out the same in this timeline, I think the studio would be in a much healthier place now if it had managed to release a singleplayer Dragon Age game boasting more of the series’ original talent around 2019 to 2020.

Former BioWare producer Mark Darrah reckons that BioWare is now a one active project at a time studio, meaning that many of the Veilguard’s developers may find themselves in an awkward holding pattern until the next Mass Effect enters full production, if it hasn’t already. That carries the risk of layoffs given EA’s doldrums writ large and the general climate of wanton disregard for the value of experienced developers in the industry right now⁠—Darrah points to a number of BioWare employees who already seem to have been shuffled elsewhere in EA.

In the best case scenario, Mass Effect 5 is three years away at a bare minimum, so any Dragon Age follow-up is a proposition for the 2030s. Where does the series even go at that point? What choices carried over from The Veilguard will be worth accounting for by the time we hit the Mr. Beast presidential administration⁠—first or second term?

What I know for sure is that things look worse than ever for one of my favorite studios, the one that got me into RPGs and PC gaming in the first place. It didn’t have to be this way, but very clear, unforced errors in direction and management have left it with one more shot to turn things around⁠—if that.