Summary
Dragon Age: The Veilguardwas not the hit sequel EA wanted. From its very first CGI trailer, the writing was on the walls. Ten years of waiting was about to be met with a resounding ‘eh’ as it fell 50 percent below expectations, reaching just 1.5 million players.
A lot went wrong, as the crowd-pleaser aimed at everyone struggled to satisfy anyone. YetEA CEO Andrew Wilson believes the problem was the lack of live-service elements, not the studio interference or everything else that people have endlessly complained about since launch. Former writer David Gaider, who is credited with creating much of the series' lore, and some of its most iconic characters, is one of many onlookers poking holes in Wilson’s comments.
“There are certainly all sorts of lessons a company could learn from a game like Veilguard (I still haven’t played it, so I’m going off what other people have said), but ‘maybe it should have been live service’ being the takeaway seems a bit short-sighted and self-serving,” Gaider posted on Bluesky. “Not that there’s any shortage of that, when it comes to deciding why a game doesn’t do well.”
Gaider has some advice for EA, and it’s a far cry from what Wilson is suggesting: “You have an IP that a lot of people love. Deeply. At its height, it sold well enough to make you happy, right? Look at what it did best at the point where it sold the most. Follow Larian’s lead and double down on that. The audience is still there. And waiting.”
Baldur’s Gate 3 Set The Stage
Baldur’s Gate 3was always going to be a tough act to follow. Heralded as one of the best cRPGs of all time, it’s still going strong two years later. We can wax lyrical about why that is, from its charismatic cast of incredibly well-written characters to its rich breadth of roleplaying opportunities. But Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke put it best at The Game Awards 2024.
Speaking about what makes a ‘Game of the Year’, he said that it was “stupidly simple” — “The studio made their game because they wanted to make a game that they wanted to play themselves. They didn’t make it to increase market shares. They didn’t make it to serve a brand. They didn’t have to meet arbitrary sales targets, or fear being laid off if they didn’t meet those targets.
“Furthermore, the people in charge forbade them from cramming the game with anything whose only purpose was to increase revenue, and didn’t serve the game design.”
We can look at that quote and directly apply it to The Veilguard. EA interfered to add and then remove live-service elements in a desperate bid to chase trends to increase revenue. When the constant meddling in development backfired and The Veilguard didn’t meet arbitrary sales targets, management passed the buck to BioWare,which is now facing historic lay-offs. The Veilguard is the direct antithesis of Vincke’s statement.
