Dragon Age: The Veilguard has been out on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S for a couple of weeks now and it is clear it has not performed that well for BioWare and EA. Based on Steam data, it is performing far worse than its fellow major RPGs of 2024. To this end, it is probably sitting near one million units sold and set to come absolutely nowhere near the 12 million units Dragon Age: Inquisition sold. In fact, it looks like it may not even make its money back.
When you factor in how long Dragon Age: The Veilguard was in development, the cost of running a AAA studio like BioWare, and the ambition of the game, it is easy to deduce the game was not cheap to make. Even if the game sells a few million copies, which seems unlikely at this point, it is unlikely to be enough to turn a profit for BioWare and EA. If the former gets the chance to release another game, the next Mass Effect, it has to avoid making the same mistakes as Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which are many.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard got sucked up into the virulent culture war in gaming that has had the industry by a chokehold throughout 2024. Meanwhile, controversial changes like the change in art direction and abandoning the world states players spent three games establishing did it no favors. The game’s biggest issue though is simply its writing.
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Video game writing is not good. It never has been. Yet some games still manage to stand out with especially bad writing. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is one of these special games. Not all of its writing is bad, but enough of it is. Its gameplay is decent, though a little derivative. BioWare still can’t animate faces, but other than that the presentation is also quite nice. The music? Pretty good. The writing though? Pretty bad! It is actually worse than pretty bad. Some of the writing in Dragon Age: The Veilguard is so bad it is embarrassing. The fact it is a game from BioWare, one of the best video game storytellers of yesteryear, makes some of the writing even more painful to watch actors puke onto the screen. Remember in Dragon Age: Origins when Daveth vomited everything but his soul onto the ground after chugging tainted Darkspawn blood in a ritual to join the Grey Wardens? Yeah, it is a bit like that.
There is no rule that says video games live and die by their writing, but BioWare games certainly do. If the next Mass Effect game is going to be a success it is not going to be on the back of excellent gameplay that renders every other quality of the game irrelevant. That is not in BioWare’s wheelhouse. It is also not going to be because the world design and the systems within are going to rival the likes of Red Dead Redemption 2 or Elden Ring. BioWare is never going to achieve something like this.
If the next Mass Effect game is going to be a success it is going to be on the back of good writing, and everything that comes from it. The same thing that tanks Dragon Age: The Veilguard — the story, the characters, the dialogue, etc. — is going to have to lift up the next Mass Effect game. If it doesn’t the game doesn’t have a prayer at giving BioWare the commercial and critical hit it has now been chasing for a decade.
It doesn’t matter if you wheel out old companions, name drop Commander Shepard or evoke the past at every turn, Dragon Age: The Veilguard does this with its own past often to little impact. The new Dragon Age proves that nostalgia can only piggyback bad writing so far.
Some good news is the next Mass Effect is going to have a more mature tone in comparison to Dragon Age: The Veilguard, according to director Michael Gamble. This is a promising sign, if not purely because it will be a contrast to the lighthearted, Marvel-esq quip marathon that is often Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which BioWare has demonstrated it can not pull off. It showed this not just with Dragon Age: The Veilguard, but with Mass Effect: Andromeda as well.
A more serious tone is not going to solve the problem entirely though. Even when Dragon Age: The Veilguard is not tripping over its trite banter, it is still is clumsy, stiff, and lifeless. More than anything Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s writing is so extremely sterile, which is amplified by the fact that player agency is often sidelined to maintain the game’s tone and commitment to being inoffensive.
To this end, Dragon Age: The Veilguard never feels like an RPG where you can play the character you want. It feels like you are playing a character, Rook, who you can lightly color through flimsy dialogue choices that veneer as meaningful character-building moments. As a result, Dragon Age: The Veilguard hardly even feels like a BioWare RPG at all.
If Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the product of the course BioWare is charting then it needs to reroute. If it doesn’t, then it will continue to free fall right into its grave.
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