While former Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider won’t play The Veilguard, he knows enough to realise that the series ain’t looking too hot right now. He’s pretty sure it’s dead, at least under EA.
When we asked if he saw a future in the series he considers “his baby”, he wasn’t hopeful.
“From Electronic Arts? Unlikely. Throughout the entire time I was there, we were always one breath away from the project being shelved. The thing that happened is that we kept releasing games, and it would sell much better than they thought it should, and it kept surprising them.”
EA never seemed to understand Dragon Age, as evidenced by the Origins trailer that used a Marilyn Manson track and was filled with blood. Instead of a mature fantasy RPG, it was presented as some edgelord nonsense for teen boys. This misunderstanding continues to this very day. EA CEO Andrew Wilson, for instance, blamed The Veilguard’s failings on a lack of live service features. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.
Things were different with Mass Effect, EA’s favourite RPG.
“It was funny,” says Gaider, “because if Mass Effect releases didn’t sell as well, they got excuses, because it was an action-oriented game. They thought it should sell more. It was slicker.”
Gaider has nothing bad to say about the sci-fi RPG, and counts Mass Effect 2 as one of the “best RPGs of all time”, but the differences in the way Dragon Age and Mass Effect were treated by EA must have stung.
“The way EA looked at it was that Mass Effect was the slick, modern RPG that had action, and they could sell really easily. Whereas Dragon Age was old-fashioned and focused on story. Our action, ranging from Dragon Age: Origins, was a little bit on the slow, cumbersome side, and then was too fast. They never knew what to do with it. So whenever a Dragon Age game sold well, we got excuses on the opposite side. Basically that it was a fluke.”
It’s worth noting that Dragon Age: Inquisition beat EA’s sales expectations and became BioWare’s most successful game. But EA has always treated Dragon Age, as Gaider says, like “the redheaded stepchild”.
“They gave us a head of marketing at one point who literally talked about having to put lipstick on a pig in order to sell it. When you’re on a team and you’re hearing this, you’re like, ‘Alright, what am I supposed to do with this?’”
Despite all of this, Gaider is interested in working on Dragon Age again—albeit not with EA. Though this is a more recent development.
“If you’d asked me that in the past, I would have said absolutely not. That I’d done my time. I left the Dragon Age team before I left BioWare. After Inquisition came out, I went to Mike Laidlaw and I said, ‘I’ve told all the stories with mages and dragons and what have you that I have in me. And I could keep going, but if I keep working on this, it’s going to become rote, and I think that would be a disservice to the team. So I should step aside, let fresher voices rise’. I don’t know if that was the right decision, but it felt right at the time.”
If someone gave him the keys to Thedas now, though, he might be up for it.
“I do like a challenge,” he says. “So if, out of some weird alignment of the stars, somebody handed the Dragon Age franchise back to me and said, ‘Breathe the life back into this baby’, that’d be a tough one, but I think that’d be an interesting thing to do. To go back to the basics of what made Dragon Age appeal to so many people in the first place. And go somewhere dark and dangerous, and do things that will make people upset. I think that’s what I would want to do with it.”
If Richard Garriott can get his hands on Ultima again, who knows? Maybe there’s still hope for Dragon Age.
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