Dragon Age: The Veilguard is seemingly doing well for itself so far. It had already broken Steam concurrency records for a BioWare and EA single-player premium game yesterday, and the numbers have improved since, with a new peak of 77.4K registered twelve hours ago.
However, for the time being, there are no plans to make any story DLCs for it. That’s what Rolling Stone reports as part of an interview with Dragon Age: The Veilguard Creative Director John Epler. The reason is fairly straightforward: BioWare isn’t a large team nowadays, and they are currently focused on making the next Mass Effect game, which Executive Producer Mike Gamble recently confirmed will stick to the photorealistic art style and mature tone.
Of course, this interview was conducted when the game had only just released. If Dragon Age: The Veilguard turns out to surpass EA’s sales estimates (CEO Andrew Wilson recently told investors it has breakout potential), there’s a chance those plans might change. Still, from a narrative standpoint, Veilguard does close up nicely (unlike Inquisition, which very much needed the DLCs to really bring the story to a proper conclusion).
In the Rolling Stone interview, John Epler went into the feedback that BioWare absorbed from its fans to make Dragon Age: The Veilguard a better game. From Mass Effect Andromeda, the studio learned that the polish wasn’t enough and that the open world design was lacking:
I do think Andromeda was a better game than its reception suggested, but on the flip side, I don’t think the reception was unfair. At the time of launch, there were technical issues and things that didn’t work.
We had been doing Dragon Age pre-production on versions of Dragon Age 4, and we did have a version that was a lot more open-world. But again, we ran into the same problem of how do you make it compelling or narratively interesting? The reception to Andromeda definitely solidified that.
From Anthem, of course, they understood that the multiplayer focus was not working:
We’re a studio built to make single-player RPGs. And more importantly, I think a lot of people have come here to build single-player, story based RPGs. So, it just kind of ended up making more sense to make this game the way it is versus a multiplayer game.
We were alienating parts of our fan base that had been with us for a long time, and not successfully bringing in anyone else through the multiplayer side of things. The reception to Anthem was very clear in that we needed to get back to those aspects that we did well, and multiplayer became an obstacle in the way of doing just that.
With that said, Epler did not entirely close the door to doing another multiplayer game in the future:
It’s possible to tell a strong story in a multiplayer game. Final Fantasy XIV does an excellent job. Multiplayer also introduces some complications around world states. I make a giant choice in my world and the world changes.
Lastly, Epler said Inquisition players felt there wasn’t enough companion banter, which was also fixed in Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
