Dragon Age: The Veilguard was supposed to be BioWare’s big comeback, but instead, it landed (more like crashed) with a thud. While the game had some flashes of potential, it failed to live up to the deep storytelling and rich RPG roots that fans expected from the Dragon Age name.
Now that the dust has settled, the reasons are painfully clear. Surprise, surprise, it was EA. The publisher is notorious for ruining beloved franchises, pushing live-service trends, and jamming in microtransactions. It managed to kneecap Veilguard before it even had a fighting chance.
A decade of chaos sent BioWare’s vision into a tailspin
What should have been BioWare’s triumphant return to form with Dragon Age: The Veilguard instead became a development nightmare, thanks in large part to EA’s relentless push for trends over quality (via Bloomberg‘s Jason Schreier).
The game began life as a story-driven single-player RPG, just like its acclaimed predecessors. But EA, obsessed with chasing the live-service model (think Destiny or Overwatch), forced the team to pivot to a multiplayer format.
It was a poor fit for BioWare’s strengths, and internally, even the developers admitted they were ill-equipped for such a drastic shift. Then, after Anthem flopped spectacularly, EA reversed course and told BioWare to change Veilguard back to a single-player game.
But with almost no time or budget for proper pre-production, it created a jumbled design process, with major story decisions being made on the fly, limited branching choices, and rushed content. Developers worked under crushing deadlines, believing they had less than a year left at every stage, only to face delays anyway.
Leadership turnover, internal power struggles, and conflicting creative directions further dragged the project into chaos. BioWare’s storytellers were forced to rebuild RPG elements into a game that had been built for something else entirely, while EA sat above it all, demanding a blockbuster.
The game was flawed, but EA made sure it couldn’t be fixed
Let’s be clear: Dragon Age: The Veilguard wasn’t great. The combat was decent, but the world lacked depth, the tone was all over the place, and it simply didn’t live up to the rich, emotionally driven legacy of past Dragon Age titles.
Fans noticed and rightly criticized the awkward pacing and shallow narrative decisions. But now that the truth is out, we understand why it ended up this way. This wasn’t just a bad game; it was a game sabotaged by corporate shortsightedness.
We don’t even wanna talk about the awful marketing. Despite all that, there was still hope. BioWare had a track record of improving games post-launch. With time, patches, and story DLC, Veilguard could have grown into something worth playing if EA had let it.
Instead, in typical EA fashion, the response was to gut the studio. Massive layoffs, staff reassignments, and the effective dismantling of the Dragon Age team left no one around to support or evolve the game. Any potential lifeline was severed.
EA didn’t just mishandle the launch; it shut down any chance at redemption. So here we are again. Another beloved franchise left broken, bleeding, and discarded on the side of the road by a publisher too addicted to trends and quarterly profits to care.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
