A new report from Bloomberg's Jason Schreier digs into the issues that Dragon Age: The Veilguard had across its development, and details how the attempt to turn BioWare into a live-service-focused studio from EA's top brass consistently got in the way of The Veilguard being the best it could have been.
When Dragon Age: The Veilguard finally arrived on October 31, 2024, it wasn't entirely the grand return for the series after a decade-long hiatus that players might've expected. There are players who love what BioWare was able to put out, including Wccftech's Alessio Palumbo, who reviewed the game very highly at launch. But plenty of others left The Veilguard disappointed with what they played, and most significantly, for a game from a studio renowned for its storytelling, disappointed with the story.
Even though The Veilguard was breaking records for EA single-player games out of the gate, EA and its executives said the game missed expectations by 50%, only reaching 1.5 million players by January of this year. Before January was done, EA laid off several developers at BioWare.
Schreier lays all this out before diving into what led to Dragon Age: The Veilguard releasing the way it did, even expressing that "it was a miracle that anything came out at all," after all the issues The Veilguard had. What it comes down to, and what those who Schreier spoke to point to as the root of The Veilguard's problems, is how the game flip-flopped from starting development as a live-service, multiplayer-focused project, and shifting to a single-player game in its final years of development.
The report also points to how EA's demand that BioWare make the next Dragon Age a live-service game directly pushed out Mike Laidlaw, the creative director on the Dragon Age series and one of BioWare's key creatives since he joined the studio in 2003. And while the switch from a multiplayer game back to a single-player game was, as current studio head Gary McKay put it, getting the studio "back to what we're really great at," EA only gave BioWare a year to entirely re-do a game that had been built as a multiplayer adventure for years by the time this switch came in 2021.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard would end up being delayed, as we know, but decisions made while BioWare thought it was under a year-long time crunch were irreversible even with the added development time the delays granted. Other elements of The Veilguard's multiplayer origins, like its reportedly very snarky dialogue tone, were changed in a rush state, specifically in response to the negative reception Forspoken got for its dialogue.
The few major narrative choices players get to make in The Veilguard had to be "shoehorned" in, because for years BioWare had been making a multiplayer game that's not meant to have the kinds of decisions that can drastically change one person's experience from another's.
In July 2024, months before Dragon Age: The Veilguard was released, BioWare claimed that the game had taken as long as it did because the studio "wanted to get it right." It's apparent from this report that while no one questions the team at BioWare wanting to 'get it right,' it took as long as it did for The Veilguard to release because they spent years trying to get a completely different kind of game 'right.'
The report ended on a depressing note, with TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz admitting for everything BioWare has had to deal with, and the fact that EA needs the kind of strong, single-player games BioWare makes to achieve the growth it aspires to, he wouldn't be surprised if EA decided to shut down BioWare.
"If they shuttered the doors tomorrow I wouldn't be totally surprised," Cruetz said. "It has been over a decade since they produced a hit."
All together, what happened with The Veilguard is another example of executives falling head-over-heels for live service games, and the dream of having their own Fortnite-sized money-making machine. There was plenty to like and dislike about the final version of The Veilguard that we got, but it's worth imagining what the game would have been like, if EA had never tried to force BioWare to make a multiplayer Dragon Age game in the first place.
About the author: David has been writing about videogames, technology, and culture since 2020, with a focus on reporting daily news across multiple publications, including GameDaily.Biz, GameSkinny, and PlayStation Universe before joining Wccftech in 2025. David started contributing as Canada/US reporter for Wccftech's gaming section in 2025. Besides being up-to-date on the industry's movements, he loves interviewing developers, reviewing games, and writing intricate essays about the symbolism and layered meanings to be found in rich narratives as he's done for publications like GamesIndustry.Biz, LostInCult, and others. Outside of games he loves movies, music, theatre, his hometown, and his family, though not necessarily in that order.
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