Peter Mandelson, the oleaginous right-hand of Tony Blair’s Labour Party in the late ’90s, once remarked to a colleague that the party had no need to focus on its traditional voter base, and could safely dedicate itself to chasing more affluent, middle-class, conservative voters. After all, said Mandelson, its base had “nowhere else to go”. Don’t worry, I promise we’ll get to Dragon Age.
14 years of Conservative Party rule later and you might think that kind of reasoning has been proven bankrupt, but only if you underestimate the powerful minds of the world’s corporate executive class. It’s not quite as consequential as the direction of British politics, but it turns out that EA had its own version of that thought process when it came to running BioWare in the 2010s: a notion that RPG fans would gobble up whatever you chucked their way so long as you could plausibly call it an RPG. Instead, they thought, BioWare should focus on making games that appeal to people who don’t usually play RPGs.
So says David Gaider, creator of the Dragon Age setting and BioWare veteran, in a recent chat with GamesRadar. Per Gaider, EA bosses used to refer to RPG stalwarts as living “in the cave.” That’d be the nerd cave, you see, where the nerds lived. “You made an RPG and the nerds in the cave would always show up for an RPG, because it was an RPG.”
With EA bosses convinced that the nerd cave would spill out its denizens to any game with BioWare on the box, their philosophy became that “You didn’t have to try and appeal to them. You had to worry about the people who weren’t in the cave, which was the audience we actually wanted, which was much larger.”
Which is how you ended up with the decidedly more “action-y and slick” cinematic focus of games like Mass Effect 2, 3, and Andromeda, as well as Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition (and, hey, probably Veilguard too). Gone were the crunchy stats and behind-the-scenes dicerolls from BioWare of yore—this was the era of spectacle. And, to be fair to the execs for just a second, some of those games were bangers. BioWare did thread the needle on at least a few of them.
But Gaider wasn’t thrilled as things were increasingly pushed in that direction and away from BioWare’s roots. “I was always trying to push it to our traditional mechanics,” he says, “and that wasn’t very welcome in the EA sphere.”
Gaider left BioWare in 2016, first heading to Beamdog (of Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition fame) and then to his own studio at Summerfall, currently working on an “unholy roguelite deckbuilder”. That meant he dodged the release of what might be the ultimate expression of EA’s action-obsessed executive philosophy: Anthem, which was not a good game. Not even the nerd cave turned out for that one.
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