Bloomberg Exposes Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s Shaky Development Process
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- Bloomberg provided details regarding Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s development trouble.
- Dialogue and narrative rewrites resulted in tonal inconsistencies.
- Leadership and directorial vision were conflicting throughout the development process.
Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier exposed Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s controversial development process. Dragon Age: The Veilguard was originally developed to be a live-service game – a decision EA forced onto BioWare’s developers. But after some time, EA decided to reverse their decision, opting for the traditional single-player RPG format.
EA’s lack of directive consistency caused major issues with the brand’s core identity, an issue exacerbated by dialogue rewrites, Jason Schreier reports.
“The team was asked to change the game’s fundamental structure and recast the entire story on the fly, according to people familiar with the new marching orders. They were given a year and a half to finish and told to aim for as wide a market as possible,” Bloomberg’s article reads.
The strict deadline became a recurring problem, directly affecting in-game choices after shifts in directive trajectory. One of the biggest criticisms during the game’s playtest before release was the lack of impactful and gut-wrenching decisions. The lack of freedom of choice was a result of BioWare developers being forced to create supporting multiplayer infrastructure.
EA merged the BioWare development team with Mass Effect’s development team in 2023 — the outside help was meant to facilitate the development process. Instead, the two developemnt teams butted heads, as their leadership and development processes were drastically different from one another.
“As the Mass Effect directors took control, they scoffed that the Dragon Age squad had been doing a shoddy job and began excluding their leaders from pivotal meetings, according to people familiar with the internal friction,” Bloomberg reports.
EA supposedly greenlit Mass Effect team’s drastic game decisions, but sidelined the previous Dragon Age leadership’s directorial choices, claiming there was not enough budget to handle drastic changes.
EA anticipated Dragon Age: The Veilguard would attract 3 million players, but the single-player RPG only reached 1.5 million, falling short of expectations by half.
