To say that Dragon Age: The Veilguard is one of the most disappointing games in recent memory would be an understatement. What would have been an epic new entry into the beloved Dragon Age franchise ultimately turned out to be a mediocre game at best, marred by controversy past its disappointing sales numbers.
A lot of things can be attributed to Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s failures, but a surprising connection can be found to Square Enix’s Forspoken, as per a report from Jason Schreier in Bloomberg.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard had to take a shift in its tone after Forspoken’s failure
As detailed within a report from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, Electronic Arts’ Dragon Age: The Veilguard had a lot to attribute for its failures – including poor marketing decisions, an inflated budget, and a strange choice to reboot the game multiple times through its development.
All of this led to massive layoffs from Electronic Arts, including the reassignment of several BioWare staff throughout the company. The Dragon Age series is currently in limbo, and EA seems to have no desire to double down on failures of its own making.
Going back to Veilguard, (as per Jason Schreier’s exclusive) the game faced a lot of criticism regarding its snarky tone in its alphas, which is something that is a staple of the series. This was made worse by the grand failure of a Square Enix title, known as Forspoken.
Forspoken also came with similarly meme-able dialogue, which was considered as one of its weaker points here. It should be noted that snarky dialogue does not make a game bad by default – it’s all in the execution.
The failure and backlash toward Forspoken scared EA a little. BioWare was directed to rewrite a major part of the game’s dialogue to better suit modern tastes, opting for a more serious tone.
This ultimately resulted in a game with very janky and off-putting dialogue that caused more harm than good. Combined with the ongoing voice actors’ strike, existing writers were very limited in their ability to craft new conversations, at least ones that would be deemed presentable.
While BioWare still lives, its future remains uncertain, and Electronic Arts’ decisions may have pushed the studio towards oblivion.
There’s a lot more to attribute to Veilguard’s failures here
Of course, not everything can be traced back to the Forspoken ‘scare’ in regards to Veilguard’s failures here. While Veilguard is by no means a terrible game, it commits a far worse sin – by being bland and unmemorable.
Most of the dialogue and story in Veilguard lack any sort of hook, and coupled with the rather unlikable cast of characters, it makes for a spectacularly disappointing show from BioWare.
EA was also considering releasing the game as a multiplayer-focused title at first, but quickly backpedalled on that afterward. In fact, Veilguard underwent a change from single-player to multiplayer and back to single-player during its long development cycle.
This rather mediocre release was utterly disappointing to long-time fans of the series, which reflected in the form of poor sales.
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