Dragon Age: The Veilguard has just been released and is already off to a great start. It’s been blowing up on social media and has received nonstop buzz online. At the moment, it has a Mostly Positive review rating on Steam. This game has been wanted by Dragon Age fans for a long time, as Dragon Age: Inquisition was released in 2014, making it a whopping 10-year wait for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. It’s been said that the climate was pretty dire when development first started out and trying to create a new game while trying to cope with a worldwide pandemic was incredibly difficult.
The latest game in the Dragon Age franchise had been in development for years by 2020 and was in deep water by that point. It had been rebooted from a single-player game into a live-service game with heavy multiplayer elements, a component often seen in recent EA games, including games like Anthem. It’s said that some employees within the company were referring to the next Dragon Age game as “Anthem with dragons,” which is never a good sign. Once Gary McKay took over in 2020, he was determined to make sure that the same mistakes were not made when creating Dragon Age: The Veilguard. In the coming months after he took over, he began to meet with some of the leadership in BioWare and EA and made the decision to take Dragon Age back to single-player.
This information comes from a report made by Jason Schreier over at Bloomberg, where Gary McKay’s thought process behind this game was explained in detail. For McKay, it made perfect sense to revert the game back to singleplayer, as games like Anthem didn’t succeed, but Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was a huge hit with fans of Star Wars and those who weren’t.
“Once we made that decision, a lot of things started to fall into place,” said McKay. As the development for Dragon Age: The Veilguard progressed, he scrapped games like an Anthem reboot and sold off the rights to Star Wars: The Old Republic. At this time, EA was reorganized, which split the company into divisions of EA Games and EA Sports, which allowed a heavier focus to be put on Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
Despite the huge successes during development, the game still ended up dealing with a lot of setbacks and obstacles. The pandemic was a huge one, as BioWare had to start hiring people remotely, which “made for cultural challenges,” said McKay. As a result of this, the game didn’t come out by its original target date; instead, it came out this week. Last summer, we also saw a layoff of 50 people at BioWare, which included some of the company’s top names. McKay said in the interview with Schreier that the industry “was all about focus at that time. When you have a really large team, you’re always compelled to keep everybody busy all the time. When you have a smaller team, you have the right people in the right roles at the right time; some incredible momentum is gained at that point.”
So far, Dragon Age: The Veilguard seems to be performing well, but neither EA nor BioWare have released any numbers at this point. It’s uncertain whether they will, but it’s currently topping charts on Steam. Maybe this is the boost both BioWare and EA need to start developing some great games in the future, too.
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